Red Balloon Project
Overview
The American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) is
launching its Red Balloon Project. It is focused on helping member
institutions re-imagine undergraduate education.
AASCU VP George Mehaffy
describes the project.
Introduction to the Red Balloon Project
Executive Summary
The Red Balloon Project is a national initiative to re-imagine and
then to redesign undergraduate education for the 21st century. Public
colleges and universities are facing a complex set of challenges:
transformational changes in technology, reductions in funding, shifting student
demographics, growth of the private sector in higher education, demands
for greater accountability, and more. The Red Balloon Project will help
institutions restructure to respond to the rapidly changing circumstances of the new century.
Created by the American Association of State Colleges and
Universities (AASCU) and its member colleges and universities, the
project is creating a national dialogue, a repository of resources, and a
collection of demonstration project to foster
innovation among public colleges and universities.
The initiative is named the Red Balloon Project in honor of the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which sponsored a
contest to find 10 red weather balloons randomly placed throughout the
United States. The purpose of the contest was
to explore the way that the Internet can use social networking
tools to achieve an outcome. The contest winner, a team from MIT, found
all 10 balloons in 8 hours and 52 minutes. For more information about
the contest and its outcome, visit this website.
The Red Balloon contest serves as a metaphor for the
newly-networked world. This new way of generating, aggregating and
disseminating information has profound implications for higher
education. It challenges long-held practices of teaching and
learning, institutional organization and structure, and the very
notion of expertise. The Red Balloon contest also serves as an analogy
for how a community of higher education institutions and their national
association can work together to promote and support change in
higher education.
Project Goals
The goal of the Red Balloon Project is to collaboratively create models of undergraduate education that:
- Created by the American Association of State Colleges and
Universities (AASCU) and its member colleges and universities, the
project is creating a national dialogue, a repository of resources, and a
collection of demonstration project to foster
innovation among public colleges and universities.
- Utilize educational technologies to better engage
students in authentic learning experiences more aligned with the ways
that knowledge is being generated, aggregated and disseminated in an age
of networked knowledge.
- Provide students with the knowledge, skills, and
abilities they will need to become successful participants in careers,
engaged citizens in a democracy, and thoughtful leaders in the global
society of the 21st century.