It has been ten days filled with lots of highlights from our President’s Focus Breakfast where we challenged the community to take the ball [1], to our Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership hosting UCF alumnus and Blair Witch Project co-creator Robin Cowie, to the launch of our Blackstone LaunchPad and our Titen Visiting Scholar Series speaker, UCF alum Dr. Glenn Hubbard. (Yes, the external relations team has been putting in a lot of hours this month.)
But perhaps my favorite moment this week occurred during our Dean’s Advisory Board meeting when a member asked what our contingency plan was for dealing with the possibility that Massively Open On-line Courses (MOOCs) would become wildly popular and disrupt higher education. I responded that there was no plan B–that we had to win plan A by providing value through face-to-face education–if we couldn’t do that we were dead. I expected rebuttal from the board member. Instead I got a satisfying smile. As I looked around the room, people nodded.
Sometimes there can’t be a plan B–you have to be “all in” on plan A. Everything we have done in the past ten days or so, all those highlights I mentioned a moment ago…those are the sorts of things that will help us win with plan A.
Paul Jarley, Ph.D., is the dean of the UCF College of Business Administration [2]. He blogs every week at http://www.bus.ucf.edu/dean [3]. This post appeared on September 30, 2013. Follow him on Twitter @pauljarley [4]