Donna
November 5th, 2007, 05:56 PM
Several veteran Honors directors gave their vision for what Honors will look like in 2025. This open forum included ideas from five presenters and then questions from the large audience.
Craig Cobane, Western Kentucky University (http://www.wku.edu/Honors/)
Fewer Honors Programs will exist, and more Honors Colleges will exist.
Accreditation for Honors Colleges will hold these institutions to standards for using this terminology. There will several accrediting regional agencies, just as there are for institutions as a whole.
Honors Colleges will increasingly develop their own parallel structures to the university they are in -- small liberal arts school within a larger university. Development officers, study abroad agreements, recruiting and admissions process, etc.
More Honors Colleges with their own faculty -- currently about a dozen with this "departmental model."
Rosalie Otero, University of New Mexico (http://www.unm.edu/~honors/)
Honors will change because of pressure from students: use of technology; multitasking; response to interactive, collaborative, project-based learning; service-based learning.
Honors learning environment will include flexible, technically advanced classrooms and virtual spaces.
Information delivery will be different and will need to include training on how to filter, assess, process, and produce meaning out of information that flows through this media.
Focus on problems that are context-dependent, protean, evolutionary, messy, and hands-on.
[B]Rick Scott, University of Central Arkansas (http://www.uca.edu/divisions/academic/honors/)
[B]Mission: Honors Colleges will move away from specific problems or class types, and toward collaborative, project-based classes. This de-centers the faculty member and emphasizes creative solutions to real-world problems produced by students. The goal is to produce citizen-scholars.
Curriculum: This will come to resemble an integrated approach rather than the distributive approach centered in departments. There will be strategies, structures, and technologies of disintermediation that connect students to students and present them with new tests rather than practice on old problems.
Service learning and extramural evaluation; students will need training and then experience in being project managers and evaluators
Faculty developing pedagogies that de-emphasize their centrality.
To develop and sustain faculty with these skills and interests, core faculty in Honors are necessary.
Scholarship will be in a group of peers, and will focus on skills transferable to multiple contexts; evaluation will be a challenge. Scholarly values of unlimited inquiry, transparency of method, and openness to evaluation must guide this evolution.
Accreditation: The move from program to colleges must be accompanied by substance. There has been an accelerating trend of new Honors Colleges.
Recruiting: Labor-intensive forms of review including essays, on-campus visits, recommendations, and observations of performance on site. A culture of service can be emphasized in this recruiting process, countering claims of elitism and initiating new students into an academic gift economy.
[B]Phil Frana, University of Central Arkansas (http://www.uca.edu/divisions/academic/honors/)
Technologies that exist on campus make it possible to think in new ways about teaching and learning.
The lecture may persist to deliver expert testimony or personal witness, but it will wither as a content delivery device.
Projects that may span many people, many courses, even many cohorts will become the chief products of the curriculum.
Disintermediation: removal of the traditional filters can sometimes result in crumbling standards, but can involve retraining teachers as troubleshooters rather than animated textbooks. The information is given away for free; but I am compensated for my service, availability, facilitation, and skills.
Overcoming social exclusion through virtual communities that give many groups and individuals a voice and a responsibility to others.
Real-world scholarship; learning by doing; taking risks in an environment that is protective and nurturing.
Bringing in unconventional conversation partners through virtual guest experts.
Faculty members as consultants; students the locus of complex sustained productions that stimulate academic debate.
Archived and living traditions that form the institution's personality and content.
Narrowing the gap between producer and user; removing inefficient middlemen.
Facilitating transparency, knowing what is happening at each level of your organization, unlocking the box of ideas and content.
Just-in-time production and storage.
Interdisciplinarity in groups of one -- "flat people" for a flat world
Pitfalls: shallowness, a race to the bottom, a periphery of inanimates
It's unlikely that the Honors vision will ever encompass thousands of folks in Second Life.
We don't need no stinkin' badges! We must empower students right off the bat.
[B]Bonnie Irwin, Eastern Illinois University (http://www.eiu.edu/~honprog/)
Increased demand for assessments
Challenges from AP and IP credits, perhaps concurrent credit
Demand for experiential options
Changes in communication technologies
Rising to the challenges that the future presents
Honors folk are best equipped to deal with change and to initiate change
Continuing thriving in Honors programs
This means that Honors will not be extended to all students, thus disappearing as a special subset of education.
Student goals, talents, and aspiration will continue to amaze us.
Craig Cobane, Western Kentucky University (http://www.wku.edu/Honors/)
Fewer Honors Programs will exist, and more Honors Colleges will exist.
Accreditation for Honors Colleges will hold these institutions to standards for using this terminology. There will several accrediting regional agencies, just as there are for institutions as a whole.
Honors Colleges will increasingly develop their own parallel structures to the university they are in -- small liberal arts school within a larger university. Development officers, study abroad agreements, recruiting and admissions process, etc.
More Honors Colleges with their own faculty -- currently about a dozen with this "departmental model."
Rosalie Otero, University of New Mexico (http://www.unm.edu/~honors/)
Honors will change because of pressure from students: use of technology; multitasking; response to interactive, collaborative, project-based learning; service-based learning.
Honors learning environment will include flexible, technically advanced classrooms and virtual spaces.
Information delivery will be different and will need to include training on how to filter, assess, process, and produce meaning out of information that flows through this media.
Focus on problems that are context-dependent, protean, evolutionary, messy, and hands-on.
[B]Rick Scott, University of Central Arkansas (http://www.uca.edu/divisions/academic/honors/)
[B]Mission: Honors Colleges will move away from specific problems or class types, and toward collaborative, project-based classes. This de-centers the faculty member and emphasizes creative solutions to real-world problems produced by students. The goal is to produce citizen-scholars.
Curriculum: This will come to resemble an integrated approach rather than the distributive approach centered in departments. There will be strategies, structures, and technologies of disintermediation that connect students to students and present them with new tests rather than practice on old problems.
Service learning and extramural evaluation; students will need training and then experience in being project managers and evaluators
Faculty developing pedagogies that de-emphasize their centrality.
To develop and sustain faculty with these skills and interests, core faculty in Honors are necessary.
Scholarship will be in a group of peers, and will focus on skills transferable to multiple contexts; evaluation will be a challenge. Scholarly values of unlimited inquiry, transparency of method, and openness to evaluation must guide this evolution.
Accreditation: The move from program to colleges must be accompanied by substance. There has been an accelerating trend of new Honors Colleges.
Recruiting: Labor-intensive forms of review including essays, on-campus visits, recommendations, and observations of performance on site. A culture of service can be emphasized in this recruiting process, countering claims of elitism and initiating new students into an academic gift economy.
[B]Phil Frana, University of Central Arkansas (http://www.uca.edu/divisions/academic/honors/)
Technologies that exist on campus make it possible to think in new ways about teaching and learning.
The lecture may persist to deliver expert testimony or personal witness, but it will wither as a content delivery device.
Projects that may span many people, many courses, even many cohorts will become the chief products of the curriculum.
Disintermediation: removal of the traditional filters can sometimes result in crumbling standards, but can involve retraining teachers as troubleshooters rather than animated textbooks. The information is given away for free; but I am compensated for my service, availability, facilitation, and skills.
Overcoming social exclusion through virtual communities that give many groups and individuals a voice and a responsibility to others.
Real-world scholarship; learning by doing; taking risks in an environment that is protective and nurturing.
Bringing in unconventional conversation partners through virtual guest experts.
Faculty members as consultants; students the locus of complex sustained productions that stimulate academic debate.
Archived and living traditions that form the institution's personality and content.
Narrowing the gap between producer and user; removing inefficient middlemen.
Facilitating transparency, knowing what is happening at each level of your organization, unlocking the box of ideas and content.
Just-in-time production and storage.
Interdisciplinarity in groups of one -- "flat people" for a flat world
Pitfalls: shallowness, a race to the bottom, a periphery of inanimates
It's unlikely that the Honors vision will ever encompass thousands of folks in Second Life.
We don't need no stinkin' badges! We must empower students right off the bat.
[B]Bonnie Irwin, Eastern Illinois University (http://www.eiu.edu/~honprog/)
Increased demand for assessments
Challenges from AP and IP credits, perhaps concurrent credit
Demand for experiential options
Changes in communication technologies
Rising to the challenges that the future presents
Honors folk are best equipped to deal with change and to initiate change
Continuing thriving in Honors programs
This means that Honors will not be extended to all students, thus disappearing as a special subset of education.
Student goals, talents, and aspiration will continue to amaze us.