I know the calendar doesn’t require me to be thankful this week, but I can’t help myself.
It’s a permanent condition I caught working with so many incredibly talented and kind people in higher education ;-)
Now that we’ve wrapped up the last session of our online certificate courses at Higher Ed Experts – the online school for professionals like you working in universities and colleges – it’s finally time to congratulate and celebrate the Higher Ed Experts Class of 2013!
Higher Ed Experts Grads are awesome for many reasons!
Donna Barnes and her Higher Ed Experts certificate in a “Selfieticate” as part of our social media contest
It wasn’t easy but they stuck with it, so they could better serve their institution and advance their professional careers.
After taking our certificate courses, some of them got promoted. Others accepted new exciting job offers.
All showed great work ethic and achieved a high-level of expertise as it takes a good amount of both to earn the required “80% or above” final grade necessary to walk away with a Higher Ed Experts certificate of achievement.
Congrats 2013 Higher Ed Experts Grads!
Today I’d like to congratulate publically the 134 professionals who took our courses AND earn their certificates.
Instead of sharing a long list of 134 names, I’ve chosen to create a word cloud with all their names, because all of them (minus yours truly as I always take the first session of our new online courses for assessment purposes) are bright stars in the future of our industry, always learning and always passionate about higher education.
You’ll notice that some names are bigger than others. I didn’t play favorites. The explanation is simpler: we had 7 students who’ve earned not 1 but 2 certificates this year – and in some cases, it was their 3rd or 4th Higher Ed Experts certificate, since we started offering our online courses in September 2011 (yep, some folks get addicted to this kind of intensive professional learning).
Higher Ed Experts “Selfieticates”
Yep, the force was with Anthony Green from Curtin University (Australia) when he earned his Higher Ed Experts certificate.
It’s a word I made up after the Oxford Dictionnary chose “selfie” as the word of the year.
A selfieticate is a selfie where you show up not just your nice hair style, but also the certificate you’ve worked hard to earn. I see it as a celebration of hard work and great brains as well as an opportunity to have some fun on social media ;-)
I HAD to show you some of the “selfieticates” a few of our grads posted over Twitter or emailed us as part of a little contest we ran for our students last week, so you can meet some of our great grads and maybe congratulate them yourself if you know them.
I also thought it was worth sharing these selfieticates, so you can “borrow” and adapt the idea if you like it – to run a similar contest for YOUR grads to get some social media engagement during or after commencement!
