JP - Dealing with a reluctant learner ...

Hi,  this is Jim Patton, Founder/Director of New Millennium Education.  I’d like to give some background on why we started New Millennium Education, what it’s about, and where we want to go. After spending over 20 years working as a professor, department chair, dean, vice president of academic affairs, and provost in a variety of post-secondary institutions, I recently retired and decided to “switch” careers.  Isn’t that the way of the world?

When I began New Millennium, I didn’t know exactly how it was going to evolve.  The only criteria were that it had to involve education, and it had to be fun.  I’ve dealt with the issues of accreditation and credentialing in the administration of undergraduate and graduate degree programs, and I wanted to avoid many of the associated issues by focusing on non-credit courses.  That doesn’t mean, however, that we have sacrificed a high level of quality associated with accredited coursework.  In fact, because we depend heavily on student input in the design and teaching of the courses, I daresay we are more sensitive to student input and needs than many accredited institutions.

New Millennium is learning for the fun of learning.  It’s modeled after a community education program, and we hope to team with a large number of community education providers to complement their offerings. The intention is to provide courses that are a mix of highly relevant, topical, entertaining, unusual, cultural, and  global offerings.

We welcome courses from all over the world in an effort to increase global understanding of the world’s diverse cultures.

We want to enable instructors who have special knowledge and a desire to teach with the tools that will enable them to teach online. We want to provide low-cost courses, but we also want to provide incentives for people to spread their knowledge and for community education organizers to promote their own community education programs.

The goal of New Millennium is to harness the power of the Internet in the sense that we’re interested in offering courses that could not be offered in a classroom setting by conventional community education programs. The Internet gives us the ability to collect a group of students together that would otherwise be impossible to find in sufficient numbers to justify a course.  What this means is that we’re not all about offering the most popular courses, or courses that will bring the greatest revenues.  Now, if some of our courses catch on in a big way, no one will be more pleased than we are. However, we want to provide a low-cost venue where we can experiment and offer highly unusual or “rare” courses. Whether you are interested in taking such a course, or teaching a course, we want to hear from you. Please fill out the contact box on the right, send your comments to comments@newmiled.com, or post your ideas in the blog comments sections.

Please sign up to receive information about courses, communities, or other issues concerning New Millennium.  If you’re a student, when you provide your name and e-mail address in the box on the right, we’ll show you how to provide input into the course design so we can offer the courses you want.   We’ll notify you when we have courses that will be of particular interest to you.  If you’re a teacher, and you provide your name and e-mail address in the box on the right, we’ll send you more detailed information on how to propose a course and get started teaching. If you’re a community educator, and you provide your name and e-mail address in the box on the right, we’ll send you information on partnering with New Millennium and how it can financially benefit your program.

Dr.  Jim Patton
New Millennium Education, LLC
(612) 208-NEWM (or 6396)