Advice to Baruch College

I believe Baruch College is doing a good job by leveraging the power of social media through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Blogs. On the school’s website there is a list of social networks and other resources – the list can be accessed here. However, there are few things that can be improved.

Recorded Lectures 

Ilona on her blog post addressed the benefits that podcasting classroom lectures would bring to students. I agree with her views. UC Berkeley has podcasts and webcasts for some of their undergrad courses available here. Yale also has some courses available here. Baruch already has an iTunes page and a YouTube page that contain videos from special events, such as Executives on Campus, but it would be great to have  recorded lectures of the most popular courses. I think it would greatly benefit students, since current students would be able to review the lectures and prospective students could explore the topics covered in courses they are interested in.

Enhanced Courses

Baruch has certain courses designated CIC (Communication Intensive Courses), I believe these courses could accomplish their goals by requiring students to Blog frequently as extension of other communication intensive in-class activities.

There are other courses that require heavy team-work, these classes could be greatly improved by assigning wikis to students to collaborate within their groups. In one of my courses we collaborate mostly through email, and keeping track of the conversation and deliverables is not easy. I went in search of online collaborative applications and found few wikis (pbworks.com & wikispaces.com) that fit the mold, however, the new issue was getting everyone familiar with wikis. A way to solve this, would be to require students to complete a new media seminar before getting into Zicklin School or advanced courses.

EBook Readers

It would be environmentally friendly to have a special program that lends EBook readers to eligible students, say those with a GPA greater than 3. This would require professors to use books from publishers that provide EBook versions of their printed works.