Creating Significant Learning Environments
Pearson Plc chief learning officer Sir Michael Barber argues an avalanche is coming to Higher Ed that is caused by:
MOOCs, globalization, technology change, rising educational costs, changes to the value of a degree. Bottom line: more competition.
Pearson has made available Barber’s report An Avalanche is Coming: Higher education and the revolution ahead for free.
It’s MOOAs, Not MOOCs, That Will Transform Higher Education – The Conversation – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
While professor Laurie Essig’s post calling for Massive Online Open Administrations or MOOAs instead of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as the salvation for higher education must be recognized as a good work of satire, the post does reveal that we have a fundamental problem in Higher Education.
Whenever an industry is being radically disrupted the constituents within that industry will start to entrench their positions and defend the status quo that they know so well by taking pot shots at the people or groups who they believe are disrupting their world. This post reveals that many faculty are being threatened by MOOCs and technology in general and are opposed to being forced to change the way that they have been teaching. Similarly, many administrators are turning to the technology flavour of the day to improve the bottom line for the University and are often asking faculty to change simply for the sake of change. Yes, it is much more complicated and involved but the reality is that higher education cannot sustain it current practices and must change. The proverbial writing has been on the wall for a very long time. Change is happening.
Unfortunately, for Alberta instiutions the opportunity to be proactive and to control how to deal with the forces of change have passed. The Edmonton Journal article Mandate Letters Sent to Schools reveals:
On Friday night, Advanced Education and Enterprise Minister Thomas Lukaszuk sent out the first drafts of so-called mandate letters to top university officials outlining expectations under the new guise of Campus Alberta.
The notion of the “new guise of Campus Alberta” is not accurate. Various iterations of Advanced Education over the past decade have been warning higher education leaders and faculty that a voluntary move toward a collaborative Campus Alberta was necessary to sustain and improve education options for all Albertans. Unfortunately, time and dollars have run out and the once voluntary option has now turned into a mandate. Despite these strong words there still is an opportunity for Alberta Universities and Colleges to be proactive. Even though Advanced Education and Enterprise is requiring a move toward Campus Alberta the details on what the Campus Alberta will look like, how resources are shared, how institutions will collaborate is open for discussion.
Perhaps there is still time for the administration and faculty in higher education in Alberta to be proactive. Unfortunately, when you look at past performance as indicator of future potential is doubtful that there will be little more than a reactive response to the cutbacks. We only have to go back a few years to the late 90′s to see how well higher education reacted to forced change.
How can so many highly educated people continually miss the opportunity to proactively improve education. Pointing fingers isn’t going to help. When the faculty blame administrators (who were once faculty), when the administrators blame the faculty and when unions and everyone else blame the government we all loose sight of the fact that it will be our learners, our children, who will loose out.
How do we fix it? We focus on the learning. By building a learning culture that prepares our children how to learn how to learn we can prepare our children for an ever changing future. The solution is really that simple–unfortunately, changing or re-shaping our culture is the challenging part. We out it to our children to move beyond our personal needs and ambitions and take on this challenge.
The recent McKinsey report Education to Employment: Designing a System that Works reveals that despite a world wide shortage of skilled workers less than half of students think their education prepares them for employment. Unfortunately almost three quarters of the institutions surveyed believe that they are doing a good job of preparing their students for entry level positions in their field of studies. My recent experience as the Vice President Academic of a small liberal arts University confirms that most faculty, administrators and staff believe their institution is doing a wonderful job at preparing students when in reality they are not. How can so many seemingly intelligent people be so wrong and not fully grasp the changes that society is facing and the need for our educational system to adapt?
I have been considering this question for over 30 years and unfortunately, I haven’t seem any significant systemic changes in the educational system since my time as student in grade school–but this may be about to change. Yes, we are using technology like whiteboards instead of blackboards and some institutions are even dabbling with digital content but for the most part any advances in technology are used to make the delivery of information more efficient. We even give our Learning Management Systems names like “Blackboard” to help preserve the notion of information delivery in the traditional sense.
I think a significant part of the problem is that those who are really good at doing school as students come back as instructors and administrators–it is a self perpetuating system. In the extremely popular TED Talk Do schools kill creativity? Sir Ken Robinson makes the argument that if aliens were to visit our school system they would simply see it as system established to produce University Professors. This perhaps explains the disconnect between what the business world and students expect and what the educational system provides. Most instructors are convinced that the system is doing a great job because they are delivering the content in the same way that they had it delivered to them. They did very well in the system so they are living proof that the system works well. They do unto their students what was done onto them and so on. As we see from the data most of these people in the system do not see any problems. Fortunately, those outside the education system see the need for reform and the power of disruptive innovation is about to change the education system in ways that will be beyond the system’s control.
In the recent Forbes article One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students: How Khan Academy Is Reinventing Education author Michael Noer argues:
No field operates more inefficiently than Education. A new breed of disruptors is finally going to fix it.
The article highlights Salman Khan’s Khan Academy which is a collection of over 3000 short video clips that can be used in a just in time basis to help understand and learn many mathematical, scientific or other technical concepts. The videos themselves are really not that high in aesthetic quality so many traditional instructors are quick to dismiss them on this basis. But this is a classic example of a disruptive innovation. The disruptor often from outside the industry (Sal Kahn is not even a teacher) comes in and fills a need that the incumbent market leader ignores. Kahn upstages the educational establishment with his instructional videos that can be accessed for free that enable the learner to learn at their own pace and master concepts before they move on. Kahn has not discovered anything new and his presuppositions have been well researched by educational theorists. Self paced differentiated instruction and the promotion of mastery based learning work well. We see small pockets of these methodologies all over the world–the ideas are nothing new. It simply took an outsider to the educational establishment to make it work in a way that the educational system couldn’t.
Perhaps this is the secret–perhaps it will take those outside of the educational system to help the educational system to change. The Forbes article points 15 Classroom Revolutionaries who are exploring disruptive technologies that may change the way we teach and learn.
Perhaps the best place for out of the box ideas is from outside of the box.
Ben Hammersley editor-at-Large for Wired magazine and guru of the digital age points to the realities we must face as a result of the impact of Moore’s Law. For example he discusses the impact of disruptive innovation and the Kodak example of inventing the digital pictures but not seeing how the initially substandard technology would grow to eliminate film photography.
If you see something coming down the line and you are dismissing it because it is not very good it is going to kill you in 10 years time. The inevitability of the tides of Moore’s Law make this so.
Hammersley argues that this very rapid rate of change puts us in a position of alway having to prepare for a future that we won’t be able to fully imagine. This rapid change is a fundamental force that is driving society forward. He offers the following example and challenge:
These weird fundamental forces are of the fact that every time you get a new phone it is out of date, every time you get a new laptop it is out of date… this is a fundamental driving force for the future of humanity. For those of us who understand it or learn to understand it, it is our responsibly to go out to other people, to go to our friends, colleagues relatives and specifically go to our politicians and our elected officials and tell them about these changes in the way we have to think.
These fundamental forces of change are part of our present reality and Hammersley argues that we are not doing a good job of preparing for the future because most of our leaders are confused by the present. His closing statement summarizes this challenge that we face:
“Right now, we have entrusted our future to those who are confused by the present and that is no way to go forward into the future.”
Are you doing your part to warn those in your sphere of influence about these fundamental forces of change? Are they listening?
Alfie Kohn reviews a Indiana University School of Education survey that finds little correlation between time spent on homework and better course grades for math and science students. The survey did reveal a positive relationship between homework time and performance on standardized tests but all this demonstrates is a correlation not causation. Furthermore, the correlation was modest and the resulting one to two hours of homework only result in an increase of two to three points on a test. Kohn warns:
Thus, a headline that reads “Study finds homework boosts achievement” can be translated as “A relentless regimen of after-school drill-and-skill can raise scores a wee bit on tests of rote learning.”
Kohn also points out that while the survey revealed a modest correlation between homework and standardized test scores he reminds us more importantly that the survey revealed
There was no relationship whatsoever between time spent on homework and course grade, and “no substantive difference in grades between students who complete homework and those who do not.”
Perhaps the most accurate prediction that came out of this article was that despite the data showing the homework is not worth the time or effort many people would offer platitudes about its importance and would be afraid to give it up. The concluding paragraph is following by comment confirming Kohn’s prediction:
many people will respond to these results by repeating platitudes about the importance of practice, or by complaining that anyone who doesn’t think kids need homework is coddling them and failing to prepare them for the “real world”… Those open to evidence, however, have been presented this fall with yet another finding that fails to find any meaningful benefit even when the study is set up to give homework every benefit of the doubt.
This is a sad commentary on our educational system. Even when the data is clear study after study that homework is not beneficial you still have people in the system commenting that they would not be willing to take the risk of NOT assigning homework and having to deal with irate parents or school administrators. Fear is holding back our children’s and our future.
