Serendipity35

New Jersey Institute of Technology (DISCLAIMER: It is where I work) is not immune from the economic taint that has infected public and private enterprises since the near global collapse last September 18th.  Though our undergraduate applications have increased more than any other state school in New Jersey, it is unclear if the prospective incoming students will be able to afford the discounted tuition that is available to in-state residents.

NJIT has a long history of academic excellence.  We graduate top-notch engineers, architects, programmers and information management professionals, but because of our narrow geographic recruitment area, many potential students don't even know who we are.

That changed yesterday.

NJIT is taking its fundamental strengths and areas of expertise --excellent academic instruction and distance learning-- and we are offering them to the world.

Online.njit.edu was launched, yesterday, as a comprehensive recruiting tool to attract master level and graduate certificate candidates across the country.  Available online, this new initiative offers the expertise and excellence of NJIT's graduate programs to students all across the country.  From the web site's main page:

"If you’re searching for an online master’s program or a “hot topic” graduate certificate, you should know this about NJIT:the university pioneered distance learning. Working in the late 1970s,two NJIT professors created the software, and the teaching methods, used to support some of the first distance-learning classes. In fact,the phrase, Virtual Classroom® was coined and registered as a trademark at NJIT"

Tuition and fees for out-of-staters have historically been a major impediment to cross-country recruiting for any of the NJIT programs, but that is expected to change, too:

"Know, also, that NJIT has affordable tuition. This year, the Princeton Review named NJIT one of the nation’s Best Value Colleges. And this spring, NJIT is introducing an online tuition rate that,pending approval in April by the NJIT Board of Trustees, will help online students who live outside New Jersey save on tuition.  So if you’re considering an online master’s program or a graduate certificate, know this:  NJIT will give you the skills you’ll need to work successfully in the 21st century global marketplace."

The University Vice President and visionary for this new initiative, Dr Gale Tenen Spak, has emphasized programs which lead directly to jobs in the unsettled marketplace:

"We offer short term, graduate level certificate programs and fully accredited, fully online master degree programs that can make you more employable and help you advance your career and give you a leg-up on your competition"

The entire thrust of this new initiative is to target areas of study which lead directly to existing, high-paying jobs all across the country.  While funding for professional studies has become harder to obtain, the proposed reduced tuition rates will make those training dollars spend further towards an advanced degree.  More from the web site:

"The majors that NJIT offers -- majors in engineering and science, technology and management -- are those most sought after by employers. Every year, the National Association of Colleges and Employers publishes a list of majors that attract the highest salaries. And every year the majors offered at NJIT top that list. "

Does this mean that the trend in graduate education will pave a new road to advanced degrees and professional excellence? No one wil know the outcome of this initiative until the Fall, 2009 semester begins.  Does this impact the undergraduate applicants ability to afford the tuition required to attend NJIT? No, that is a problem to be solved in some other way. But to the swarm of new applicants that hope to attend NJIT as undergraduates in the Fall, the prospect of enrolling in a school in which they can affordably continue their education through their bachelor degree while receiving the excellent support that their graduate studies might require, the innovative environment that the university provides at all levels, is a fundamental reason to enroll.

 

When the Employme! training program at NJIT officially ended in January, the job search for its graduates began in full swing. Though included in parts of the soft-skills curriculum segments each week during their training, the number of the program's yet-to-be-employed graduates called for a shift into more intense post-skillset instruction in how to find (and actually achieve) full gainful employment.

The employment backgrounds of the students were diverse. Some students were trying to reenter the workforce after catastrophic injuries ended their former occupations. Some students were disabled from birth and had never held down a real paying job. When paid internship opportunities were offered to the remaining unemployed students, a curious pattern began to emerge: students who had been employed were eager to interview for (and get) an internship; students who had never been employed, while at first excited by the prospect of the opportunity, began to express concerns about why they couldn't take one of the intern positions.

One student began to have misgivings about the commute from home to work (he was a student who showed up for classes so often that he was likely to be inhabiting one of our labs on days when class wasn't scheduled). Another student, one who graduated 2 complete programs in the Employme! curriculum, declined an interview --even after he was assured he'd have full access to the adaptive technologies he used in the classroom-- because he thought vision difficulties might make him too slow to do any actual work.

There was more than self-confidence (or its lack) in play, here.  When questioned about their general interest in an internship, students disabled from birth listed reasons why the internship wasn't a proper fit; students recovering from disabling injuries listed the reasons why they would be an asset to their potential boss.  To those students who had been separated from their jobs due to injury, employment opportunity offered then a chance to climb back in the saddle, again.  Those students who had grown up never expecting  the possibility of employment, had never even seen the horse.  Not participating in the work environment, despite their skills training at NJIT, was something that their life experiences outside the classroom reinforced every day.

The available internships at NJIT are to provide assistance to the instructional designers to support NJIT's course catalog transition from WebCT/Blackboard to Moodle.  Interns will be expected to provide support directly to the instructional designers and faculty as course materials are migrated to the new environment.  The intern's tasks will include editing course summaries, reformatting existing content and assisting faculty solve incompatibilities between the retiring LMS and Moodle.  In order to reconcile the disconnect between students who have general concerns about their abilities to perform the duties of real employment and the needs of the instructional designers to have productive interns complete assigned work, the decision was made to use Moodle to teach Moodle.

I created an instance of Moodle that will solely be used to have students practice support tasks with Moodle.  Each student, regardless of their expressed interest in an internship, has been provided an empty  practice course in which to learn the basic tasks of course creation and modification.  They will be given tasks to perform involving course material editing within their own course to practice the types of tasks a Moodle support person might be required to perform.  They will be trained in course resource creation and editing and other tyical tasks that fall within the job description of the internship.  The students who are eager to return to the workplace will have a chance to learn marketable skills, the students who are hesitant to pursue the internship opportunity will be directly exposed to the tasks they would be required to perform as if they were already working as an intern.

The challenge the students will face is not so much how to configure Moodle and edit course materials,  but it will be to demonstrate to themselves that they can perform in a workplace enviromment as well as anyone and through their  accomplishments realize that they can be gainfully employed.  Once they recognize the horse, the hope is that they will try and climb into the saddle for the very first time.

 

Beginning this week, the Adult Education initiative at NJIT will supply undergraduate and graduate class information and course offerings using text messaging to cell phones and SMS capable devices.  Need to burnish that resume in this chaotic economic climate?  Need to find a program that will let you finish an undergraduate degree that is tailored for working adults?  Need to enhance some graduate classes by organizing them into a graduate certificate?  Don't spend hours that you don't have searching through schools and programs looking for that combination of instruction that will broaden your learning horizon.  Simply send  message to 35350 (a  number to be listed on the adultlearner.njit.edu website) and you can get a phone call from a customer service representative armed with the answers to the questions you might have.

Don't have time for yet-another-phone-call?  Simply browse to the adultlearner mobile page, enter your phone number, check off the programs (present or future) that interest you, and details of those programs will be sent via text to your phone or e-mailed to you so you can consider them during your ever-diminishing leisure time.  If you decide that the track is not for you, text QUIT to the service, and your SMS door will not be darkened again.

Once you sign up and as the programs offered change, you can be notified immediately of  updates, changes and enhancements to the offered programs.  If you register for one of the offered courses, you can even study the class materials in the micro online environment.  Classes (and  entire graduate certificate programs), offered in Moodle will require only a mobile browser (and the usual hard work and study) to complete the entire curriculum.  If eye-strain isn't a concern or problem, the mobile nature of the information and courses allow complete portability of the learning environment and the virtual classroom merges into our personal living space wherever we define it.

One of the first class exercises in the iPhone Development course I teach was the development of a web app that accessed this blog in a mobile device format, so if the information you seek isn't inside of a degree-oriented curriculum, you can still read Serendipity35.

And, who knows, once in a while, you might even make a telephone call.

A few weeks ago I was catching up on a PBS television show I particularly enjoy: Nova. I had missed the original airing of this particular show in November, 2007 but I settled in for 50 minutes of enlightenment to watch: Judgment Day Intelligent Design on Trial.  What I discovered was that education, once wholly a subset of enlightenment, had become barely an intersecting form. From the Nova program description:

"In 2004, the Dover school board ordered science teachers to read a statement to high school biology students suggesting that there is an alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution called intelligent design—the idea that life is too complex to have evolved naturally and therefore must have been designed by an intelligent agent. The teachers refused to comply. (For more on this, see Board vs. Teachers.) Later, parents opposed to intelligent design filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing the school board of violating the constitutional separation of church and state."

As the program progressed, the arguments and positions of the main characters were examined in detail: Bill Buckingham, an advocate and contributor to the Intelligent Design approach and in charge of the school board's curriculum committee: the plaintiff's lawyers for Tammy Kitzmiller et al (school district parents), and the presiding Judge, John Jones, III.  After much testimony and lawyering, the case was decided in favor of the plaintiffs with the judge  finding that Intelligent Design ""cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents."  The implication of the decision was that Intelligent Design was a backdoor method to have Creationism, disguised as science,  taught in the classroom.

The trial, itself, was conducted in 2005 and the result is well known.  I wasn't impressed by the pro and con arguments or the merits of the case, but  I was shocked at the ignorance of the entire undertaking.

Is it too much to ask that education establish that Science as a discipline is a system of explanation and not a system of belief or faith?  Those with a grounding in science have no more standing to disparage Creationism than creationists have standing to declaim science (and Natural Selection) as atheistic. Biblical creation, the Orphic creation myths, Hesiod's Theogony, the Upanishads (and many more), belong in the realm of Religion and Philosophy.  While science has had some standing in philosophy --Aristotle was a Natural Philosopher--  since late 5th/early 4th century Greece, science has been refined as a systematic approach to the explanation of phenomena in the natural world.  There is no default disconnect for a person who believes in Creationism, but understands the scientific explanation of natural selection just as there is no default disconnect for a person who doesn't believe in Creationism  but accepts the explanations of evolution.

The persons who claim to believe in evolution demonstrate their ignorance; you can't believe in a system of explanation. The persons who claims to accept creationism and use science to support their belief are equally ignorant (see this search).  Belief and Explanation are 2 separate  paradigms; they do not merge, they do not offer support to each other: and they have been, and always will be, apart.

The underlying failure in Kitzmiller v. Dover was not the argument for or against the petitioners.  The failure was the lack of recognition of the empirical difference between belief and explanation, and that is the fundamental failure of their education.