Critical Thinking Coursework Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Critical Thinking - Coursework Example Effective leadership needs employment of communication strategies geared towards increased openness, job satisfaction and productivity. Every leader needs to realize that the employees need to have an understanding of what is going on in the company as they also need to plan their work in advance. If the leader fails to include them in the decision making process, they feel isolated and just work puppets which is not motivation enough to increase productivity. Inclusivity leads to ownership and productivity (Walker, 2010). Whenever a decision is made in an organization by the leader and which needs immediate action from the employees without explanation about it, proper prior timeline to accept the project and familiarize themselves with it, it leads to complaints from the employees. By explaining the decision prior to making them or immediately after, the leader lets the employees familiarize themselves with it and accept it. Having regular communication means that the leader should not only be communicating with the staff only when there is a project coming up or due but also when they are idle. It creates rapport with the employees and also sows the seeds of trust (Zwilling, 2015). This keeps the employees at ease and they perform better in an environment that is relaxed than one that is tensed. Constant feedback mean that employees get to relay their problems, worries, disappointments as well as ideas and creations to the leader which are useful in preventing conflicts and increasing productivity. In order for there to be constant feedback, the communication system with the leader must be open and trust be created for the employees to be open and truthful in their feedbacks (Zerfass and Huck, 2007). William is anti-technology in communication which is the new and convenient form of communication with the employees. It not only saves paper and printing ink, but it encourages feedback and constant communication. The technological

The Higher Education Crisis by Nicholas Carr Article - 1

The Higher Education Crisis by Nicholas Carr - Article Example Carr is making the argument that the rise of the MOOC and its substantial international demand has opportunities for improving the quality of education for students around the world. Why is this? When the author compares the online courses available through paid tuition, he suggests that it has become a rather homogenous and boring model consisting of videotaped lectures, thus providing little innovation in the learning process. Hence, Carr describes several case studies in which reputable instructors, such as Sebastian Thrun, a robotics teacher from Stanford, are launching free online courses to expand higher education to the less advantaged. While it was expected that a free artificial intelligence class online would receive interest from, potentially, 10,000 students, in reality, the class received over 160,000 interested learners. This massive interest from adult learners prompted Thrun to partner with two other robotics experts to launch a new start-up online learning company, U dacity, in order to attempt to revamp the online educational process and improve its quality. As Carr attempted to illustrate that educational quality had been depleted in recent years, the concept of inspired start-up learning centers allows innovative educators to create new online learning models that are aligned with unique concepts and instructional materials. Laura Pappano of the New York Times describes some of the business model of Udacity, the online company started by Thrun where selecting the appropriate instructors involves a very discriminating set of criteria. Offered a representative of Udacity, â€Å"We reject about 98 percent of faculty who want to teach with us† (Pappano 4). This tends to support Carr’s notion in â€Å"The Crisis in Higher Education† as the MOOC concept seems to break the restrictions associated with university and college bureaucracy and liberates instructors from using a standardized online teaching curriculum and, instead, d eveloping more relevant and pioneering instructional tools and lessons for the MOOC teaching model. The concept of Udacity is that even though instructors might be renowned in their field, they are not always the best educators to provide a quality educational experience. With a more stringent set of criteria for hiring educators in the MOOC, this new concept in learning (enhanced with no-fee learning) could significantly outperform traditional campus-based learning and the for-fee online class experience.  Ã‚