Blogs

Summer Courses!

As every summer starts approaching I always wonder to myself, should I take an online class? The answer to that this summer is YES! In fact I will be taking two summer courses, both of which will be online.  This year A&S has made it really easy to see all the courses that are being offered over the summer and they have even color coded them to help make your search easier.  You can filter the courses by sessions, a selected list of courses such as A&S humanities or you can just browse the entire catalogue to find something that you might be interested in taking.  This year A&S has made it really easy to find all the courses being offered and I would encourage you to check it out and take a class (or two)!

My Winter Intercession Experience

 

Over the break, I had taken an online winter intercession Course (STA 210), this course was designed to be a semester long course but was jam-packed into 9 days.  Since I am still on USP I needed this class to fulfill my requirements and graduate but it was not one that I wanted to spend an entire semester doing.

While I was thinking I was doing the smart thing by cramming it all into just over a week long course, it was difficult to do.  First because I was out of town for the first week of the class and it was difficult to stay motivated to complete all the assignments every day but second because there was so much information being thrown at you at once it was easy to rush through the assignments to get them done.  This was my approach to the class and while I felt great that I had completed all my assignments and did well in the course, at the end I felt as though I had not learned much from the course.

Canvas VS Blackboard

I have been taking ITIQ Web Publishing (A&S 100-205) which uses Canvas a system that is similar to Blackboard but in my opinion it functions much better.  One of the first things that I noticed about Canvas was that the login page took you straight to your course, where BB (Blackboard) takes you to another landing page where you have to select your course from a list.  Another thing that Canvas does better than BB was the way that you can switch between courses, there is a drop down at the top of the page that you just select a different course.  This is much better than having to go back to the BB landing page, wait for it to load and then select another course from the list. 

Canvas is much faster and everything on a page loads very quickly.  There are two sections on the BB landing page that I don’t know what they are about because they never load, which doesn’t matter because all I want are my courses anyways. 

Higher Ed and the Presidential Election

Writing in the final days leading up to the 2012 presidential election, I am struck both by the importance of higher education to the presidential contest and the deep engagement of our College faculty and students with the election. As our nation debates its future, it is no surprise the future of higher education has become a key issue. Our future depends on increasing access to college; affordability of a college education and the availability of student loans are thus essential. Funding for research is equally essential. Public research universities, including the University of Kentucky, are responsible for more than sixty percent of the nation’s academic research and educate over seventy percent of the scientists, engineers, doctors, and professionals that we produce in this country. Continued public investment in our basic and applied research is therefore essential to the health, prosperity, and technological advancement of our nation.

A new semester and new beginnings

Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting all of our entering A&S students during the University’s K Week events, wherein we welcomed our largest undergraduate class ever. The official numbers are not in yet, but the University was set to enroll as many as 4700 new first-year students, up from 4100 last year. The total number of A&S majors is also set to achieve an enrollment high. As the College teaches 85% of all UK Core and 60% of all undergraduate students credit hours we will see almost all these new first-year students in our courses this fall. Educating such a large number of students can be exhilarating. On this issue, I am continually impressed, at the innovation and dedication of the A&S faculty. Over the last several months many departments have taken on curricular revisions. For just a few examples I offer the following: the Department of Mathematics offered a calculus boot camp for incoming students two weeks before classes started. Dubbed FastTrack, first-year students came to campus in early August for an intensive, two-week, 8-hour a day calculus study, and by all measures this pilot program was a success with plans for further expansion next year. The Chemistry Department has completely reimaged their General Chemistry courses, which is the most populous course in the entire University.

Welcome to your new home!

 

The start of the new academic year has arrived.  I am pleased to welcome our returning students back to UK’s College of Arts & Sciences.

And I am thrilled to have so many new students joining us.

The College of Arts and Sciences is the home of knowledge.  It is the home of Aristotle and Plato.  It is the home of Einstein and Galileo.  It is the home of DuBois and Skinner.  It is the home of Darwin and Goodall.   It is the foundation of all professions, it is home to the scholarship, written communication, and quantitative reasoning of all major discoveries.

And now it is also your home.  For the next four years, you have been granted the time and space to learn to live a life driven by the mind.  Spend the time wisely.  It is the biggest investment you will ever make.  Use it to explore some of the most pressing questions of our time, challenge major assumptions, adopt new opinions, investigate long-standing theories, discover new worlds, dream big dreams, and sharpen your critical thinking skill sets.  Use it to be tested and tasked, to define yourself for yourself and to begin your professional and personal life.