Blog: Advice
You are hired by Baruch College to use new media to improve the College. What are some suggestions you would make using new media?
Baruch College is one of New York City's most diverse campus, with people from all over the world coming to studying at three different building on Baruch's campus. If I was hired by Baruch College to use new media to improve Baruch College, I would focus on three key areas to improve. The first area is to focus on the improvement of the technological structures in order to support new media. The wifi and internet access has been been an issue on campus which has prevented many to use new media on campus. The hardware and software system will be replace for one that has more reliability.
The other areas that I would use new media would be to improve the way that students study and learn in class, as well as improving the student life on campus. Textbooks has been a huge issues due to its cost to buy them and maintain them. I would require a centralize ebooks for textbooks, where all students has access to them for free or with a low yearly cost located in one site. Each class or department would have its own wikis in order to have a central page for lecture notes, videos, and class materials. With many television around campus, I would also suggest an official campus podcast that can been shown on these screens. It can be for an hour once a week, and it can be both informative about important school dates, sport teams results and highlights, as well as interview guests from different professionals. This is a great way to inform the students on campus as well as connecting the students from different backgrounds.
While I think the textbook idea is a great idea, I don't think it's practical. In this capitalistic society, college students is one of the populations where publishers can increase textbook prices indefinitely and we will still buy the textbook. It would also be hard to get different publishing companies that are competing for the same group of people to work together and give us a lower price. However, I don't think that it's completely impossible since Cengage already has the unlimited option that gives access to all their textbooks. Hopefully it does become a reality in the future.
ReplyDeleteHi Matthew,
ReplyDeleteIt was interesting to read about your three prong approach of advice to give to Baruch College. I agree wholeheartedly that there should be improvements on the technological infrastructure as a whole, especially in the older building where access to the internet is limited. With the importance of access to up to date information, having the infrastructure to do so is important. I also think the idea of more classes using the wiki could be great if well encouraged and taught