Pedablogy: Musings on the Art & Craft of Teaching

There is a lot in this post, but rather than waiting until I have the time to think it through, I’m going to put it up.  I’m sure that’s better than never posting it at all.

Despite the many participants in higher education who do not see that change is necessary, I believe that the forces above us (tuition & budgetary) and the forces below us (alternative models of higher education) will put traditional universities in a vise, and what survives will be radically different from the status quo.  I don’t see any way we will be allowed to continue our enterprise as we have for so many years.    What are the changes facing us?  I obviously can’t be sure, but I think they will be a combination of how we design the learning environments in which we teach, and how (and to a lesser extent, what) we expect our students to learn.

Adrian Sannier identifies several signs that higher education may be approaching a tipping point:

• Disruptive Innovation of the type described by Christensen & Eyring, and by Rosen – This comes in two varieties:  For-profit universities and Online learning (whether offered by for-profit or more traditional universities).  It should be clear that the only way we are going to educate the increasing numbers of students demanding higher education this century is with some combination of the two.  Both are making great strides at improving the quality of the education they provide and traditional universities ignore them at their peril.  There are even some important things that For-profit schools are doing better than traditional institutions.  If you don’t know what those things are, you need to pay better attention.
• e-Readers, whether kindles, nooks, iPads or other tablets – According to Sannier, Apple sold more iPads in 2011 than all PCs sold across the industry.  iPads are increasingly the tools of choice for faculty and students.  They offer the prospect of substantially cheaper texts and other resources.  The texts can be interactive, searchable, and always up to date.  Perhaps most importantly, publishers are signing on to provide content of this type.  One speaker at the conference announced a plan to offer high school textbooks for under $20 each.
• Free Open Courseware and Open Courses – What’s better than an inexpensive text?  The answer is a free one. Most of you are familiar with open courseware:  Course syllabi, content, and assignments offered online from MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, and other universities for anyone who wishes.  What may be better than taking a course at Stanford University?  The answer is a free course offered by faculty at Stanford.  That is a reality today.  And coming soon are free “certificate courses” to be offered by MIT and other prestigious universities   What does your school have to compete either on price or quality with these?  Still think that your institution is sitting on a strong foundation?  (If so, consider the image above.)

Much of what follows is speculative, but I think it offers some possibilities for the future.  First, as Milliron stated, learning needs to be in the center of everything we do as teachers!  (I think it’s safe to say that at present teaching is at the center of what we do as teachers.  But to quote a wise former colleague, “It’s not what we do (in our courses) that matters—it’s what our students get from it.”

We need to get away from the notion that individual faculty “own” courses.  Faculty should think of themselves as stewards of the courses they teach for their department.  This is especially true of required courses in their programs, where what students learn is a prerequisite to downstream courses.  Faculty have a responsibility to teach not just what they want, but what is expected by the program they serve.  When we think of our courses as “ours,” that doesn’t always occur.  This is one thing the For-profit schools do better than traditional schools in higher education.

Faculty need to transform from being practitioners of the art of education to being practitioners of the science of education.  As part of that, teaching needs to be recast from an individual to a team-sport.  When I began my career, almost no PhDs I knew received any significant training in teaching or course design.  From what I’ve heard since then, not that much has changed.  In the last few decades, there has been significant research on learning and cognition, which is known to instructional designers but only rarely to faculty members.  It seems clear that we could improve the quality of the courses we offer by bringing readily available expertise into the planning process.   We need to reimagine course design as a collaboration between content experts (the faculty), instructional designers, instructional technologists, librarians, etc.  While the faculty member should still be in charge, he or she can never have the expertise of the others in the collaboration, and doing without that expertise means a weaker course, no matter how excellent the teacher.  This would require a radical change in the way course design occurs.  How many faculty at traditional schools obtain significant help from other specialists when they design or revise their courses.  At present, the answer is very few.  This team approach needs to become the norm.

Chuck Dzuiban argued in his session at the ELI that faculty will respond if they can be convinced that these changes will lead to greater student learning.  He suggested further that the best approach is to enlist faculty to convince other faculty.  I’d like to believe that Chuck is right, but I think we need more than that.  Faculty need to be convinced that business as usual will no longer be adequate, that our livelihood depends on our taking a serious look at how we are teaching and what our students are learning.  I do not believe we are there yet.  There are too many incentives within our disciplines and within academia that work against it.

We also need to radically rethink the learning environments we create for our students.  What should students be learning?  What are the critical literacies for 21^st Century learners?  I can see several new types of critical literacies.  None of them are completely new; all draw from existing notions of literacy.  Learning to learn will be even more important in the 21^st Century than it was in the last.  What will be critical is not knowing the answer, but knowing how to find the answer, knowing who to ask in one’s Personal Learning Network; in short, knowing how to research an answer using “distributed cognition.”

Increasingly, making meaning out of complexity is a necessary skill (or perhaps literacy is a better term).  More often than not, complexity requires interdisciplinary thinking.  But interdisciplinary thinking is countercultural in the existing siloed world of disciplinary departments.

How should our students be learning?  One clue was provided at the ELI:  We need a new set of pedagogies centered on experiences instead of predigested content.  The experiences teach students the skills they need to learn in the context of the content, but the objective is not learning facts.  There may have been a time when educated individuals knew all there was to know, but that time is long past.  (e.g. Look how large the typical introductory text book is.)  This experience-based approach to learning is different than the distinction between skills and content.  I have blogged on this topic before.  What is the most important thing students learn from study abroad?  I suspect it’s not academic skills or content.  What is the most important thing students learn from a senior research project?  I think it goes beyond standard research skills and knowledge of the subject.  Either way, I suspect that liberal education is particularly well suited to an experienced-based approach to learning.

Many students find online or digital games tremendously engaging.   They rarely find school work the same way.   Increasingly, researchers are exploring ways games can be used for teaching and learning.  There is great potential in virtual learning environments, like the ones being studied by Chris Dede, in which students control their exploration of an augmented reality or a virtual world.  This may be the most promising way for understanding “complex causality” – problems than can’t be solved analytically, that require simulation to figure out.

Whatever you think of these speculative ideas, the fundamental questions remain those I posed previously:

How will student learning be different in a world of digital resources and digital communications?” and “How can teaching be different in that world?

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joedsilva/4698703312/sizes/m/in/photostream/

One of the themes of this year’s ELI conference was Learning Analytics, a movement which comes at least in part from the practices of For-profit universities.  A good introduction to the topic is ELI’s 7 Things You Should Know about First Generation Learning Analytics.

Learning Analytics starts with the premise that student engagement in a course is highly correlated with student learning.  Learning analytics seeks to apply powerful software to large datasets using background characteristics that students bring to higher education as well as data from students’ participation in course work (as measured by the institution’s learning management system) and measures of the students’ academic outcomes.  The idea is to predict when students are on a path likely to lead to failure and to communicate that information to the individual students, faculty advisers, etc.  A good example of Learning Analytics is the Signals Project at Purdue University, led by John Campbell.  Signals periodically sends students a “traffic light” indicating that they are doing well academically (a green light), that they might need to reconsider their study practices (a yellow light), or that they need to make a change to avoid failure (a red light).  This is data mining to the n^th degree, and to some, it raises the specter of “big brother.” Learning Analytics may be gross (in more ways than one), but we shouldn’t forget that at this point, it is only in its infancy.

For me, the most interesting part of the Learning Analytics panel was Randy Bass from Georgetown, who noted:  “The current enthusiasm for Learning Analytics is a presenting symptom of higher education’s failure to respond to research on teaching and learning over the last 40 years.”

Bass pointed out that the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning might be viewed as the “Slow Analytics Movement,” in contrast to the current Learning Analytics.  He then posed an important question:  In recent years, we have discovered the educational value of the so-called “High Impact (Learning) Practices.”  Why then are the results of High Impact Practices (as well as the NSSE) invisible to Learning Analytics?  How can we measure experiential learning or the effects of seminars and other practices which do not have economies of scale?  Important questions!

This conversation made me wonder if a system like Purdue’s could actually make students less reflective and metacognitive about their learning analogous to how I’ve found software like Pearson’s MyEconLab or Cengage’s Aplia makes students “stupid” when they don’t bother to do reading or homework until the software tells them to.  I hope not, but I wonder.  Additionally, the system only works if faculty fully use the LMS.  In other words, if readings and assignments are not on the LMS, student activities in those areas won’t be captured and the system will give false readings.  I also wonder when students will start to try to “game the system” to get credit for clicks when they’re not actually doing the work.  Lots to think about.

Photocredits:

• http://farm1.staticflickr.com/69/229822320_403849c7b4_d.jpg
• http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4019/4272283260_7a6d3958e6_d.jpg

In February (yes, I realize it’s now June), I attended the 2012 ELI Annual Conference.  It was a great event—very thought provoking in a number of ways.  The underlying theme of the conference was the changes facing higher education with a particular emphasis on Learning Analytics.

I was favorably impressed by a number of speakers I had not anticipated liking, primarily because of their affiliations.  (See my note below!) That shows my prejudice, and I’m glad it didn’t prevent me from attending those sessions.  My particular favorites at the conference were:

• The Bob Heterick Memorial Lecture: Adrian Sannier, “If Not Now, When?” 
• Mark Milliron, “An Optimist’s Education and Tech Agenda:  Leveraging Technology to Improve Access and Success in Higher Ed”
• Chris Dede, “Transforming Higher Education via Emerging Technologies  ”
• Randy Bass, Gardner Campbell, John P. Campbell, and John Fitz, Panel on Learning Analytics: “You Get What You Measure, So What are We Measuring? ”
• Chuck Dzuiban, “Prototypes, Connections and Contracts: Examining Increasingly Complex Learning Environments”

I highly recommend these presentations, which you can view on the accompanying links.   [ Note:  Both Adrian Sannier and my friend Jim Groom were named among the 12 Tech Innovators in a recent Chronicle article.  If you are suspicious of Sannier based on the Chronicle article, consider how the same article portrayed Jim.]

The vast majority of my colleagues in higher education see no reason to change the way we operate, or more precisely the way we teach our students.  Most of us generally care about our teaching.  But the fact is, very few of us know how well our students are learning.  I certainly don’t.  I know what feels good to me, but that’s not the same as what students learn.  I know what I’m comfortable with.  I’ve been lauded as a good teacher throughout my career, but I don’t really know.  Very soon, this sort of “evidence” is not going to be acceptable.

Adrian Sannier, in the opening keynote, observed,

These are “the days of miracle and wonder” … except at school.

Think about how our lives have changed in the last few decades, and how our work environment has changed.  It’s hard to imagine what it was like before computer networks, cell phones, etc.  But the way faculty teach their classes is largely the same as it was 10, 50, or even 100 years ago.

Sannier continued,

Education is more like a church than commerce.  It’s more like an abbey than it is like a factory.  I get that.  You get that.  But increasingly the people we work for don’t get that.

Anyone who has paid attention to higher education has seen that public higher ed faces declining confidence that what we offer justifies the cost to taxpayers.  The result is declining support from the state.   Additionally, except at the very top schools, there is a latent revolt on the part of parents who are questioning perennial tuition increases whether at public or private universities.

Our system of education is training people for jobs that largely no longer exist, when it should be training people for jobs that haven’t yet been invented.  The way many faculty teach is, quite simply, archaic and better ways exist if faculty could be persuaded to adopt them.  But there are significant institutional incentives against that.

Here are a few sobering facts.  Who are our students?  They are not who they used to be.  In past generations, we could teach poorly and count on bright students to figure it out for themselves.  Or more charitably, we could teach to the best students only, because all our students were the best.  We can’t do that anymore.

The students in our classes today are different from those of past generations.  The diversity of our current students is nothing short of breathtaking.  My point is not to complain about our current students, a popular pastime among faculty, but rather to raise attention.  In his session at the ELI, Mark Milliron pointed out:

• The majority of our students are not recent high school graduates aged 18 – 22, that is “traditional” college students;
• The majority are older, often working full time and with a family;
• More than 80% of undergraduates are employed at least part time while going to school; the ideal of students seeing college as their full time vocation is no longer the norm.
• 40% of first year students are underprepared for college;
• 70% of first years at open-access institutions are unprepared.
• Only half of students who start college (and this includes community college) earn a degree.

In short, we need to teach the students we actually have, instead of the ones we’d prefer (or the ones we think we used to have).  (A number of speakers at the ELI made this point.)  Faculty who do not accept this will remain disappointed.

To be continued…

I woke up last night and couldn’t go back to sleep because my mind was on fire. I was in that state because of four days spent at an extraordinary conference, though few would have expected that. It wasn’t so much the conference as the people who were there. It is a rewarding experience to be surrounded with very bright people, all of whom want the enterprise to be successful. And so it will be.

Like the Titanic, higher education is sinking, though to most of the stakeholders, it is business as usual.  But make no mistake: The Titanic was doomed once it hit the iceberg.  The iceberg of higher education is the digital revolution.  Like the Titanic, higher education is such a large vessel that it may take a while to sink, but nonetheless, it is mortally wounded.

 

In ten or twenty years, students will not be coming to our schools because we offer CHEM 101 or ECON 201.  Those will be commodity courses, obtainable any number of ways.  They will come to our schools only because we offer a vibrant, compelling intellectual community where they can explore questions that matter.  If we don’t, they won’t come.

– paraphrase from Carol Long

The key question for schools isn’t “Should we be offering MOOCs?” or “To what extent should our courses be online?”  These questions are too small and they are fundamentally the wrong questions which serve to marginalize people in academia who do these things.  The fundamental questions are: “How will student learning be different in a world of digital resources and digital communications?” and “How can teaching be different in that world?”  The question isn’t should we be teaching online or face-to-face, but rather how should we change what we’re doing whatever the venue or medium (I dislike the term mode-of-delivery) to utilize what we now know about digital knowledge?

– inspired by Gardner Campbell.

There are a chorus of voices telling institutions of higher that they need to think about being more efficient, and I agree.  But efficiency doesn’t have to mean lower cost.  It means better value, which can be reached by providing a better service, a more valuable experience, as well as by doing it more cheaply.  As Alfred Marshall, one of the economic greats, said, “Which blade of the scissors cuts the paper?”  I suspect that by thinking of these questions, we may be able to lower costs, but we will certainly be able to provide better, more valuable education.

Increasingly, faculty are spending their time on things which don’t fit nicely into the categories of teaching, scholarship and service.  Which category should hold supervision of undergraduate research, for example?  A great deal of effort has been spend on figuring out how to shoehorn these types of activities into the “correct” box.  If there is no clear box, these things are “appreciated, but not valued.” (The phrase is due to Phil Hall.)

The problem is that faculty, like most people, respond to incentives.  As a consequence, if things are not valued, they tend not to get done.  There is something in the nature of a positive externality here where the benefit to society exceeds the benefit to the individual who needs to do them.  And yet, increasingly we believe they should be valued.

The solution is to blow up the boxes.  These boxes are the flip side of the credit/course system for student learning.  Both of these are analogous to the tenure system.  Tenure is sometime described by insiders as “velvet handcuffs,” because once you have tenure, it’s difficult to leave.  How can we add supervision of undergraduate research to our professional responsibilities, when we have no time to add anything?  How can we give credit for undergraduate research, when students already have courses to take?  Sure, we could eliminate some course requirements, but only the courses that don’t matter, and none of my courses.  So if we’re going to support undergraduate research, we need to shoehorn it into the curriculum and into our professional workload.

Unless we blow up the boxes.  Suppose we were to start from a strong and clear understanding of what we wanted our students to accomplish, to know and be able to do in our program.  Then suppose we thought of the best ways to accomplish those goals.  In my discipline, the ultimate goal would be to be able to analyze issues and problems like an economist.  The most complete way to demonstrate that is to complete an original research project.  Suppose that was our capstone experience.  Can that be done within the context of a course (or courses) and credits?  Perhaps it could, but is that the best way, or is it simply shoehorning another thing into the strongbox.  What would students need to learn first to be able to complete an original research project?  What would be the best ways to organize teaching and learning of those experiences?  What other activities should add to the undergraduate economics experience?  If we built our program around these questions, we would have a far better way of teaching what we have to offer.  And who knows, it may well be more efficient too.  Perhaps it would only take 3 years to complete.  Or perhaps students would get more out of it.   It would be more difficult to administer, to be sure.  How would we know when a student was done, if we didn’t have credits to add up?

Imagine if a faculty member’s full time work load were negotiated between the needs of the department and his or her interests and abilities.  Perhaps a faculty member’s full time load might be to spend half time supervising undergraduate research projects and half time advising first year students and majors.  (If you think one couldn’t put enough time and effort into those types of activities to amount to full time work, perhaps you’re marginalizing the import of those activities because you’ve never put full effort into them.)  Another faculty member might spend all of their time teaching courses.  Another might spend ¾ of their time completing a significant research project of their own, while teaching ¼ time.  These things are all possible, though not without plenty of cultural hurdles.  But first, we would need to blow up the strong boxes. 

Who has the dynamite?

I recently finished Andrew Rosen’s Change.edu.  I found a lot to like in the book, but I also think the author missed an opportunity to clarify something important that I don’t understand about For-profit universities.  The book has six chapters and each is largely stand-alone.

1. Harvard Envy – This is the same point Christensen & Eyring made in The Innovative University: That Harvard is the epitome of higher education and that which all (not-for-profit) universities strive for.
2. Club College: Why so many colleges look like resorts — This chapter on the forces pushing schools to become like “Club Med” was powerful.  Admittedly, this has been a pet peeve of mine for years.   Should schools try to compete for students based on their amenities or should schools try to compete on the basis of their educational programs?  For me, the latter is a no-brainer.  At the same time, I’m well aware that students can’t easily compare the quality of one school’s programs over another, but they can and do select the school with the professional quality fitness center or hotel quality residence halls over schools that do not.   How do we get off that train?  I don’t know and neither apparently does Rosen except to say “Just don’t do it.”  Competing on amenities is like attack ads in politics:  We say they’re bad, but we believe they work.
3. The Challenge of Community Colleges — This chapter on why community colleges are not the answer to higher education’s woes was unpersuasive to me.  According to Rosen, the problem with community colleges is they try to do too much, from offering vocational training to general education for students interested in transferring to four-year schools to offering hobby courses.  As I read this chapter, I found myself wondering if it wasn’t merely an attempt to justify the relatively narrow range of programs offered by the For-profits.  Rosen also argues that community colleges aren’t as cheap as people think because of the subsidies offered by the states.
4. A Crucial Part of the Solution:  How a new kind of college serves a new kind of student – This is Rosen’s argument in favor of For-profit universities.  He reminds readers that when land grant universities began, and again when community colleges began, the reaction by traditional higher education was just like the reaction today to For-profit schools.  It’s clear to me that more people need higher education, both initially and as lifetime learning.  Rosen’s argument that For-profits are part of the solution makes sense.
5. The Case Against Private-Sector Higher Education – This is the chapter which received acclaim for Rosen’s being open to the criticisms made against For-profit schools.  I found the chapter disappointing.  After paying lip service to the well-known examples of a few schools aggressively recruiting students from homeless shelters and obtaining loans for them, Rosen didn’t seriously address any other criticisms of the For-profit sector.
6. 2036 and the Coming 25 years of Change in Higher Education – I really liked this chapter.  Rosen may be wrong on some of the details, but I think he’s nailed the major trends we’re going to see in higher education.

I think Rosen overreaches when he argues that the tuition (only)-based model of For-profit institutions is an advantage over the multiple funding streams of most non-profit schools.   He makes a good case for the way research and intercollegiate athletics can take on lives of their own, driving some schools in directions that shortchange undergraduate education.  I found his argument that public universities are in this same category, due to the subsidies provided by states, less convincing for a school like mine where state support is only slightly more than 20% of our budget, where we have no Division 1 athletic programs, and where faculty have substantially higher teaching loads than at research universities.  Additionally, I wasn’t convinced by his argument that For-profit schools are in fact cheaper than public universities.  Rosen says that For-profits are cheaper for tax payers since there are no public subsidies, but even if that’s true, it’s not the point.  He seems to conflate two distinct issues: the relationship between private costs and benefits, and the relationship between social costs and benefits.

If higher education provides a public good, and arguably it does (though admittedly we have done a poor job in recent years in making that point clear to taxpayers), then providing the right amount of higher education requires subsidy, assuming that the social benefit is there.  It’s not clear to me that the social benefit of schools with very low completion rates, like some For-profit institutions, justifies the costs, especially when the financing takes the form of government-provided or guaranteed loans.  When those loans are repaid, there is no cost to taxpayers, as Rosen states.  But when students fail to complete a degree, they often fail to repay the loans.

One of the criticisms by traditional colleges and universities about the for-profit schools is that the latter are providing mere certification, rather than education, or that at best they offer narrowly defined training.  The author missed a chance to speak directly to this criticism.  What is the vision of education offered by the for-profits?  Is it limited to a fairly narrow range of career-oriented fields?  Does that imply that those are all we should offer in higher education?

The strength of Change.edu is the author’s assertion that we must do a better job of measuring the learning that takes place at Not-for-profit schools.  Only then can we make an apples-to-apples comparison.  I note that while assessment is critical, not all the benefits of traditional higher education can (as yet) be measured, but we need to incorporate them in our assessment nonetheless.  If quantitative assessment is difficult, then qualitative assessment is worth pursuing.