Day 98

I'll be heading to Mankato two weeks from yesterday, to pick up my son Gio for Thanksgiving break. I'll be driving down after class on Tuesday and heading back home on Wednesday. This seems like a good opportunity to follow up with the people who sponsored the OER and Z-Degree talks I did at the end of September. I emailed them all this morning to see if they would be available for coffee. With the confusion swirling around BSU's future plans and the anxiety the retrenchments and reorganization are causing, it's unclear what the prospects will be for moving forward with the effort to offer ZTP (Z-Degree Transfer Pathway) options in the near future. I will be trying to assess this before I meet with folks from the system office next week. Talking with my colleagues who'll be remaining at BSU after I'm gone, to see if there's some interest in continuing the effort. But it also has occurred to me that Mankato is much more advantageously situated right now, to become a destination for Z-Degree AA graduates seeking to complete a bachelor's degree in a similarly low-textbook-cost format. They already have a core group of administrators, faculty, librarians, and instructional designers who are committed to Open Ed, so it might be possible to organize and motivate them to take the next step. The system will be opening another round of Exploration Grant funding at the very start of the spring semester, and it would be great to see Mankato start that process and get an application together before the new year. I've written a successful grant application for that program, so maybe I can be helpful there.