Ep. 32 - 21st Century Graduates and the Ineffectiveness of Career Services Today's college graduates face incredible odds, entering the 'real world' with mountains of debt and few tools to navigate a challenging job market. Most colleges and universities provide career services to their students, but many employers claim these job-seeking grads still fall short. What can be done to…
Ep. 31 - Building an Inspiring Learning Environment: Lehigh's Mountaintop Experience While there is still far to go in the transformation of higher ed, there are plenty of universities that are paving the way with innovative programs and initiatives. Lehigh University's Mountaintop is one of those programs. Mountaintop was developed to be a unique learning environment in which students are…
Ep. 30 - David and Goliath in Brazil: 2 Cases Studies of Higher Ed Transformation, Insper and UFMG Transformation of engineering education is taking place all over the world, and sometimes initiatives are particularly energetic far away from the usual suspects in North America. Big Beacon Radio host Dave Goldberg is joined by two engineering deans from Brazil, Irineu Gianesi…
Ep. 28 - Most Likely to Succeed: A Conversation with Tony Wagner The same forces at work bringing change to engineering education and higher education, more generally, are at work at the primary and secondary levels the world over. In this episode, join host Dave Goldberg and guest commentator Mark Somerville (Olin College) for a wide-ranging and expansive conversation with Harvard's…
In the most recent episode of Big Beacon Radio: Transforming Higher Education, guest Jeff Shelton discussed his educational background and how it led him to become the host of the Engineering Commons Podcast. Jeff went back to school to receive his PhD later in life, decades after completing his initial degrees. By the time he returned to school, Jeff had years of professional…
Ep. 25 -Creativity and Innovation in Higher Education: A Conversation with Stu Walesh We live in a time of great bounty in the social sciences and neurosciences in which once mysteries of the mind are being revealed in greater detail in ways that can be acted upon in both practical and educational settings. In this episode, host Dave Goldberg interviews…
Post contributed by Stuart G. Walesh, Ph.D., P.E. The human brain’s left and right hemispheres have markedly different capabilities. The left hemisphere exhibits valuable verbal, analytic, logical, and linear characteristics while the right hemisphere offers equally powerful nonverbal, emotional, intuitive, spatial, and holistic features. Betty Edwards, in her 1999 book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, says this…
Ep. 24 -Motivation, Rewards, and Education: A Conversation with Edward L. Deci The idea that we get more of a behavior when it is externally rewarded or reinforced is built into many organizational processes and educational institutions and is often treated as axiomatic, but studies going back to the early 1970s have firmly called this into question. Today, businesses and…
Ep. 23 - Using Social Labs for Change In and Around Higher Education: A Case in Canada Social labs bring together stakeholders with different, even opposing, points of view in a practical effort to promote systemic change. Show host Dave Goldberg, recently witnessed one session of a social lab called the Engineering Change Lab in Toronto, Ontario that brought together…
Ep. 22 - Toward A Whole New Kind of Value Creation: An Interview with Kyle V. Davy Increased specialization and expertise have been hallmarks of both higher education and commerce for many centuries. And this game plan worked sufficiently well until information technology facilitated low-cost integration across disciplines in new ways. The resulting misalignments and disruptions are felt in corporations as…