Publications

I. Introduction In this report, we recommend a set of policies regarding governance, conflicts of interest, conflicts of commitment, and intellectual property to guide academic institutions in developing ways to create and promote technologically-mediated content. These policies are intended to encourage innovation in the development of new educational technologies by creating incentives for both institutions and their faculty to produce new scholarly materials in support of teaching and learning. We address these policies in the context of three…

Sometimes, large lessons can be learned from the travails of small institutions. This is, we believe, true of the dramatic sagas of two very different private educational institutions: Sweet Briar College in Virginia and The Cooper Union in New York. The near-demise of Sweet Briar (now attempting to renew itself, but with uncertain prospects) and the struggles of Cooper Union (with big issues of both policy and governance) have much to teach us about the challenges facing both many small…

Last year the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) released a statement on the freedom to teach which asserts several rights for faculty, including the right to determine the texts and assessments within their courses. While recognizing that “common course syllabi and examinations are… typical,” the statement emphasizes that these “should not be imposed by departmental or administrative fiat.” This issue brief, “Exploring the Contours of the Freedom to Teach,” considers the potential impact of AAUP's statement on the academy. Authors Lawrence…

This Ithaka S+R report is a landscape review of important developments in online learning today. It is the first in a series that will provide leaders in higher education with lessons learned from existing online learning efforts to help accelerate productive use of these systems in the future. The goal of this research was to understand what benefits colleges and universities expect from online learning technologies, what barriers they face in implementing them, and how these technologies might be best…