Michael roth wesleyan university lectures video

These three self-proclaimed lifelong friends have found ways to support and balance each other. At Homecoming and Family Weekend families reunited, a couple got engaged, a deep legacy was honored, and all came together to celebrate. Related Videos. View More. Find out more about this video. Perhaps alumni who sign up for the class will want to meet at Reunion or Homecoming to talk about the material.

That would be exciting for me!

Michael roth wesleyan university lectures video: On February 3, , Wesleyan's

The five-week course will consist of four weekly video lectures about 15 minutes in length. Watching yourself on video is always a horror show, but reworking these lectures for a new medium has helped me sift and refine my ideas. It puts the material in a new light. I always try to guide my students to think like filmmakers—to confront the specific choices in sound and image that create the cinematic experience.

In his Coursera class, Higgins tries recreate the classroom experience by walking students through film scenes and sequences bit by bit.

Michael roth wesleyan university lectures video: Michael S. Roth '78

You can find other videos and photographs here. Yesterday I sent messages to faculty, staff and students asking for new ideas to enhance the distinctive educational experience of Wesleyan students by making the most of our residential dimension. Our new Provost, Ruth Striegel Weissman, will be working with other Cabinet members to vet the short proposals we will receive.

When I asked for input for big projects six years ago, we received ideas that enabled us to create new writing programs eventually the Shapiro Writing Centerresearch stipends, and the College of the Environment. I can hardly wait to see what new ideas come forward this time! What kinds of programs should we strengthen or create to offer our students deeper opportunities for learning?

What kinds of programs should we create or strengthen to extend the impact of the years spent on the Wesleyan campus? Rather, they put into sharper relief what is so very valuable about residential education. I realize that our curriculum evolves organically, and that many departments are regularly renewing the offerings. But Ruth and I agree that this is a particularly propitious time to launch experiments aimed at enhancing our work as a residential liberal arts university.

From advising to the First Year Seminars, from interdisciplinary programs to capstones, our work here should build on our residential foundations. How can we do so more effectively?

Michael roth wesleyan university lectures video: Wesleyan President Michael Roth

We need your ideas. We hope to receive page proposals from faculty members by November 1. Proposals may be submitted to wesleyan. We will also be soliciting ideas from students and staff. At that point we will request more detailed proposals. Thank you in advance for thinking about how we might even further energize the distinctive educational experience of Wesleyan students.

The trip started out with a talk to the Annapolis Group, an organization of liberal arts colleges from across the country. Andrew knows Wesleyan well, as he was part of our visiting team during the accreditation process. He spoke about the investment that Wellesley has made in EDx, and the long process that his campus is still going through to develop classes, produce them and share them through the platform started by Harvard and MIT.

I spoke more about the experience of teaching a MOOC, and the surprises that came from working with very different kinds of students from around the world. I explained that I saw our large online classes neither as a quick revenue stream nor as a threat to the model of residential learning. But we are learning a lot about teaching in a different medium and about how to communicate what liberal education is all about to students from around the globe.

This will inform our work back on campus. I explained to my liberal arts college colleagues that rather than seeing MOOCs as a threat to what we do, I see many of them as showing an appetite for the kind of broad, contextual learning that we prize. It was clear from many of the discussion boards for the Wesleyan classes on Coursera that students were learning for its own sake, and that they saw these courses as opportunities to broaden their intellectual horizons and connect with other people around the world who might have similar interests.

There is no way that the experience of these online classes replicates the campus experience. The dynamic synergies of campus learning in a small residential setting are uniquely powerful. The online experience is quite different, but it, too, can provide a context of learning that is compelling for many students who otherwise would never have an opportunity for this kind of education.

The appetite for liberal education is much deeper and broader than many of us had imagined!

Michael roth wesleyan university lectures video: Michael S. Roth offers

Last night I moderated a conversation with three Wes alumni who exemplify many of the virtues of liberal education. We spoke about the joys of public service and also about the frustrations of gridlock. Education was high on our list of issues to be addressed, and we also fielded questions from the audience concerning climate change, poverty, gender, money in politics, and the challenges of compromise in an age of hyper-partisanship.

There were several current students in the audience, as well as alumni from the last six decades. We all reconnected with old friends and made some new ones. This week two more Wesleyan classes debuted on Coursera. These are free, online versions of courses given at Wesleyan, and there is still time to enroll. Scott Higgins just finished up his class on The Language of Hollywood.

Since I was also enrolled I can say that it was a great success. There is a strong demand for film studies classes, and his introduction to sound and color was a hit. One of the discussion threads on his class said that Prof. Higgins, We Love You. Students from around the world are giving me new insights into the material. One writes about thinking of Nietzsche as she watches her son ski into the woods, another about how she carries a copy of Baudelaire with her as she bikes around town.

Next week, Sigmund Freud and then on to Virginia Woolf! Jim Holt likes to pursue questions — big questions. And he does so with a sincerity and light-heartedness that draw his readers along for the ride. By helping readers understand what some very smart people think an answer to this question might look like, he introduces us to advanced mathematics, theology, physics, ontology and epistemology — just to name some subjects he visits.

Holt is usually very good about not losing us along the way, even when the math or the logic gets pretty esoteric. He wants to know how nothingness, a state in which absolutely no things exist, gave rise to a universe that includes all the things around us. Why am I here? Because my parents had sex. The second kind of answer moves from cause to meaning.