The Student as the Unit of Measurement

I’ve only recently gotten caught up on my blog reading. A couple of weeks ago, Martha posted this thought-provoking missive. The part I want to react to says:

I hear a lot of talk about how Web 2.0 is changing everything — how social networking, folksonomies and tagging, and user-created content have the potential to radically alter the way we’ve been approaching teaching, learning, and the influence of technology in those two endeavors. … What does it really mean for higher education? …
If CMSs are off-base by valuing the course as a unit of measurement aren’t they really just guilty of reflecting what’s valued by the institutions? When are schools going to start to value people over courses?

One thing that seems clear to me about this revolution in digital tools is that it should help change the focus of higher education (and by that I mean the unit of measure, the way instructors and students view their roles) from courses to individual students. We’ve played lip service for quite a long time to the notion that universities educate students individually, that each student has their own set of courses they study (think transcript), but below the level of the course, it’s been all the same. Each student in a given course faces the same set of expectations and assignments. What they make of them can differ, of course.

Increasingly I’ve tried to teach students as individuals where they are. What that means is that, to the extent I can, I expect different things of different students. I try to push all my students, but differentially based on their experience to date. In seminars I give stronger students more challenging readings, or I give students with certain backgrounds readings that draw on those areas. In my research methodology course, I push more experienced students to pursue more advanced research projects. Does this mean I expect less of weaker students? In a sense it does, though I try not to characterize students as stronger or weaker per se, but as having different strengths and weaknesses. I don’t think this is merely semantics. I think the seminar as a whole will be a richer experience to have the business students read and bring to the table the finance literature while the international affairs students do the same for the political science literature. If you disagree, consider this: would it be be better to try the converse, or should we only use readings that every student can handle?

Now, I suspect we’ve all been doing this to a degree, but digital tools increasingly allow us to make it a regular part of how we teach. The next step is to get students to buy-in to the notion that the education is their own. Perhaps that will be a way to reach the satisfycing students, whose only goal is to get by.