What are some possible visions, ideas, and directions that could positively and powerfully affect Calvin College?

What are some important questions to ask?

NOTE: These items may or may not involve CIT's Teaching & Learning Group, but are meant to offer potentially useful ideas throughout the college.

Vehicle: "The One Minute Word" website*
Involving: Various academic departments within Calvin -- and benefiting Calvin College as a whole

• Create a web site that hosts a database of searchable, brief, biblically-sound, multimedia-based illustrations and modern-day applications of scripture (without attempting to picture/illustrate the LORD)
• The materials could be used -- royalty-free and license free -- by pastors, youth group leaders, youth groups, small groups, individuals, and churches throughout the world



• The site would:
  • Glorify God
  • Be lead by the Holy Spirit -- as I believe it is the Lord's idea -- to help us all grow closer in our relationships with Christ and with each other
  • Spread the wonderful light and salt emanating from Calvin College
  • Capture and display the creative, powerful stream of wonderful content already being produced by various departments within Calvin -- Music, Art, Threatre, CAS, Religion, English Departments and more (with so many languages taught here, we could offer the content in multiple languages as well)
  • Solicit contributions from Calvin's student body, encouraging our students' spiritual journeys
  • Form a new One Minute Word group on campus whose goal would be to consider, debate and create items for this site
• Help people move forward in their spiritual journeys, especially younger people who will increasingly be looking for ways to engage in and participate in all of the learning that they do
• Potentially usher in a new, powerful method of worship and Bible study -- as younger people would be able to contribute their own multimedia-based illustrations to the site (i.e. think YouTube, MySpace, etc.)
• Greatly increase Calvin College's presence and contribution on the web, as the body of Christ worldwide could use these engaging materials -- free of charge and license free
• Offer an RSS feed so people could subscribe to this stream of content; perhaps we could supply the code to integrate our pieces directly within other websites...

"Tell me and I'll forget. Teach me and I'll remember. Involve me and I'll learn."

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Vehicle: "The Proof’s in the Podcast"
Involving: Marketing, Alumni Relations, Calvin College Faculty

• A regularly-offered podcast that would capture and present various lectures from within all of Calvin's academic programs
• The podcast would provide proof of the excellence that our faculty members consistently deliver



• By freely contributing the content on the net, Calvin would be seen as a helpful, contributing resource that would help people grow
• The podcast could be used to get prospective students onboard, perhaps getting them interested in a topic, then an entire program
• The content could be drawn from a larger podcasting architecture
• Alongside and or using a tool like Tegrity, prospective students could get an excellent idea of the top-quality education they would receive here at Calvin.
  
  
  

Vision:
Create a large marketing buzz from introducing a new, innovative iPhone Pilot, while investigating the learning & teaching potential of this new, multimedia-based, powerful, convergence of numerous technologies

Vehicle: iPhones
Involving: Languages, Art, Music, and potentially other academic programs

• What if Calvin College piloted the use of Apple’s new iPhone for languages, arts, and for certain music courses/programs?
• We could try to negotiate a deal with Apple to provide iPhones to all students enrolled in a limited number of pilot courses/subjects.
• Calvin could get massive PR from this – such as Duke did with/ their iPod Initiatives.
• We need to ponder which courses/applications would best be served by this revolutionary device.
• Eventually, if successful, we could leverage the campus-wide digital audio/video recording solution and "The Proof's in the Podcast" initiative with this endeavor as well.

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Vision:
Provide an instrument to help students decide what they want to study and perhaps go into

Vehicle: "What Color is Your Parachute?" website
Involving: All students, admissions, student advising/counseling

The idea here is to give new and returning students a tool to help them answer the following questions:

• What should I study here at Calvin?
• What might I go into after Calvin?
• Which program/academic option is the best match for my gifts, strengths, interests and characteristics?
• Which programs should I probably steer clear from as they may not be as good of a fit for me?

Delivery options:
(Both options would require assistance from the Deans and Department Chairs to help us determine what characteristics are needed to succeed in any given area)

1. Provide an online instrument that would prompt the student to answer a set of comprehensive questions, then immediately evaluate the answers and return some some feasible options to discuss with/ an academic counselor
   or
2. Build a front-end into a Calvin College database of programs where the student could query the database for various things

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• Build Calvin College's next generation Training & Development site -- complete with podcasts, videocasts, newsletters that employees can subscribe to, etc.
• Create online-based training and development pieces for Calvin’s faculty and staff -- allowing training on demand -- training that's available at anytime from anywhere
• These pieces will demo the power of multimedia, which will in turn open up further ideas on how the faculty can use multimedia in their own courses; example--> Office 2007 Quiz
  

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• Art students could create and share their exhibits and explain their work via videocasts
• In a theatre class, videocasts could be critiqued by other students or could be permanently displayed if the pieces represented exemplary work
• Music majors could record and comment on each others' performances
• Language students could use digital audio to learn Dutch, French, German, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Latin, and Spanish
• Other disciplines that could easily benefit from multimedia include:
  • Communication Arts and Sciences
  • Asian Studies
  • History
  • Sociology
  • Youth Ministry Leadership
• Tools like Apreso, Tegrity, MediaSite can capture almost everything -- if not everything -- that occurs in a classroom (even responses from "clickers"). This would aid students here at Calvin's campus in Grand Rapids, and enable them to stop, fast-forward, rewind, etc. their lectures. But it would also enable Calvin to make these materials available to an online student body that spans the globe.
  

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Vision:
Increase enrollment

Vehicle: Offer more courses online and/or as part of an online consortium of Christian colleges
Involving: Calvin as a whole

• Offer certain courses online -- such as those in the Religion Department
• Develop a wider-audience and have a greater global impact
• The key vendors in online learning -- such as Blackboard -- continue to move towards a social, networked, global, online, life-long learning community; how will this direction affect higher education? Calvin College?
• Will our students need to increasingly work longer hours to help pay their way through Calvin? What can we do to aid them in this area?
  

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• Develop mobile recording "labs" to capture senior recitals and senior projects
• Post those multimedia objects on KnightVision using the e-portfolio tools/area
• Enable recent grads (and perhaps even alumni for X years) to point to those items in order to obtain jobs
• This would increase the return on investment in Calvin's investment in Blackboard's systems -- such as the Content System -- and would be another example of how Calvin helps students succeed in the workplace
• Marketing the college would also be involved as people check out these projects/links
• So, for example, an engineering student could describe their work while displaying it and point to/link to this presentation in a cover letter, resume, personal website, etc.

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Questions to ask / directions to consider

• Publishers as education providers?
  Will publishers move into the business of delivering higher education? They already have much of the content created and they already have access to numerous subject matter experts. Will students be able to take their courses directly from the authors of their textbooks?
  
  
  
• The Internet's continuing influence on markets
  As Mark Walsh, Chief Technology Office for the National Democratic Committee asked years ago at the Blackboard Users Conference 2002:
  
  
  "If the Internet helped to create such powerful exchanges and online delivery channels as e-Bay, Google, Expedia.com, Amazon.com, etc....do we really think higher education can escape the oncoming tsunami?"
  
  The Internet -- and related technologies -- have already brought us online learning and virtual learning spaces. But the Internet is also quickly bringing about the day when any successful college-level course will require a team effort to be successful, as one person won't be able to meet all of the required skillsets any longer.
  
  Also, consider the rise of social networking services like RateMyProfessor.com -- which allow young people to find out about professors from a student's perspective before they take a class.
  
  
• Student Choice
  Will students in the future fulfill their degrees by being able to take class A from college XYZ, while taking class B from university ABC? Will they have the choice to take their courses from a consortium of colleges and universities? Will students have their own learning spaces that they can invite others to -- whether those invitees be internal or external to the college that they are attending? (Blackboard is already moving towards this direction, according to David Yaskin, VP Product Development, in an April 25th, 2007 conference call.)
  
  
• Student Participation
  Do today's students expect to participate more in their learning process than did students from 10-20 years ago? Will this trend continue? What should we do about it and how do we prepare to meet this need?
  
  
• The "traditional student" -- a dying breed
  Will the "traditional student" be able to survive? That is, will the 18-23 year old who is attending college on a full-time basis still exist 5 years from now? 10-15 years from now? Even today, many students have to work a significant amount of hours to make their way through school. What tools can we provide to help them?
  
  
• The iPhone as a "clicker"?
  Will Apple's new iPhone work as a clicker in the near future? That is, could it substitute for something similar to what Calvin uses from e-instruction? It should. Apple would sell a lot more phones and it could follow iTunes U's growth right through the doors of many higher education institutions.
  
  
• The key vendors in online learning -- such as Blackboard -- continue to move towards a social, networked, global, online, life-long learning community; how will this direction affect higher education over the next decade? How will it affect Calvin College?
  

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As a disclaimer, I already own the OneMinuteWord.com/.net/.org domain names, as I believe the Lord wants such a site to be built. The site will be far more successful and influential for His Kingdom, however, if numerous people are involved. Multimedia -- and the web -- are most exciting and excellent when various peoples' gifts are involved in creating the content.

As the Lord as shown me, it takes a team of people to create excellent multimedia. I offer up the idea because I believe the Lord wants it to happen. What we here at Calvin choose to call such a site is up to those involved with the project. It does not have to be involved with, link to, or in any way be called "The One Minute Word" website.

Again, it is only an idea, but I submit, a powerful one that could change the world while bringing glory to God. It is consistent with Calvin's mission to be agents of renewal in the world in which we live.

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