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Eight Career Readiness Competencies

Consider integrating activities and assignments into your curriculum that will teach students eight Career Readiness Competencies. These could also be incorporated into other communications or major activities outside of the classroom, e.g. business club, social work club, etc… Critical Thinking/Problem Solving: Exercise sound reasoning to analyze issues, make decisions, and overcome problems. The individual is […]
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Leveraging Existing Areas of Innovation

 For a couple of decades, the Honors Program languished as an underfunded afterthought to Northwestern’s academic mission, despite the yeoman work of several past faculty directors. In Spring 2016, this changed when the faculty unanimously passed a major overhaul to the honors curriculum.  Among the numerous changes, two aspects of this overhaul were significant:  […]
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Increased External Learning for All Programs

 NWC must continue to establish strong, enduring, and multifaceted relationships with regional businesses and organizations.  These relationships can take many forms such as responding to a local educational or research need; collaborating to reinvigorate civic culture; partnering to create mutually beneficial programs; and developing experiential learning opportunities.  Increasing these relationships will enhance students’ educational experience and offer needed assistance to […]
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Curricular Malleability

 Not all aspects of higher education are inherently flexible.  Accrediting bodies place stringent demands on certain departments; proposals for new or modified majors require a rationale, an assessment plan, and supporting documents—including syllabi for courses that may not yet exist; college-wide programs, such as NWCore, may require a faculty vote before changes can be made; […]
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Problem and Experience Based Learning

 It was less than 25 years ago that the shift in emphasis from teaching to learning was dubbed “a new paradigm” for higher education by Barr and Tagg in Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning.  Yet the paradigm shift did not merely codify a new normal.  Instead, learning-centered models have served as fertile ground in the development […]
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Core Structure

 Today’s young people will have ‘episodic careers,’rather than one life-long career. Post-graduation, young people will have an estimated four jobs before they even turn 32, often switching into “entirely different industries”, according to a LinkedIn study. Indranil Roy, the head of the Deloitte-backed Future of Work Centre of Excellence, says,“A generation ago, the half-life of a […]
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Split / Hybrid / Online Classes

Not only can enrollment be increased through transfer students, perceptions regarding online education are changing.  According to the 2019 Online Education Trends Report, 99% of administrators found that demand for online education has increased or stayed the same over the past few years. In 2018, 73% of schools made a decision to offer online programs based […]
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Hybrid/Online Course Resources

As the demand for online education increases, schools are responding by offering new degree programs every year. The online education space has grown rapidly in recent years, and the variety of programmatic options available can be overwhelming to prospective students. The third annual Online Education Trends report provides the latest look at online learner demographics, […]
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Hybrid/Online Course Resources

This report outlines distance education trends across the US for 2018. Online enrollments have grown nationally for the fourteenth straight year, specifically for public and not-for-profit institutions. Seaman, J.E., Allen, I.E., & Seaman, J. (2018). Grade increase: Tracking distance education in the United States. [Annual Report]. Retrieved from  https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED580852.pdf