Keynote Speech
Presented at the
Presented at the
18th Annual
Teaching and Technology Conference
Baruch
College, City University of New York
April
17, 2015
I
am sure that, for many of us here this afternoon, it is hard to imagine that
online learning is already approaching its second generation. The fact that this is the 18th conference on technology and learning here
at Baruch College is one reminder.
And, in fact, we can trace online learning back more than 20 years. One milestone was the development
of the first Web browser back in 1990.
Not too much later—in 1992—the Sloan Foundation made the first of what
would eventually be $75 million investment in what it was calling Asynchronous
Learning Networks.
In
short, we’ve been doing this for a while now. Over the past two decades, online learning has become a
global phenomenon that has had an impact on just about every kind of higher
education institution—not to mention K-12 education and job training. It has stimulated new kinds of
institutions, new collaborations among institutions, new partnerships between
colleges and employers, and new ways of thinking about the processes of
teaching and learning, on campus and off. In the process, it has become clear that online
learning is not simply a new educational technology. Instead, we need to see it as a way that higher education
can adapt to the new demands on our communities that have arisen as the
Information Revolution has matured into a Global Information Society.
Looking Back
I’d
like to start, though, by looking a bit further back. I am always a bit surprised when our colleagues—inside and
out of higher education – argue that colleges and universities have not changed
since the Middle Ages. That
couldn’t be further from the truth.
In fact, we went through a powerful change in the 19th and
early 20th centuries as a result of the Industrial Revolution. That experience can help us
better understand what is happening with higher education today—and where
online learning can help higher education go in the coming generation. So let me take a minute to outline that
experience.
The
Industrial Revolution was marked by several key changes in our society. One, of course, was the emergence of new industries—coal,
steel, manufacturing. Along with
that came a demand for new kinds of professionals—engineers, business managers,
and, eventually, teachers and social service providers. But industrialization also saw rapid urbanization
as people moved from the rural areas to work in the new mills. At the same time, it drove immigration;
people came here from all over the world to work in the mines and mills.
It
was, in today’s parlance, a time of disruptive innovation. Higher education—which had been for the
privileged and future clergy—responded in many ways. We saw research take a central role in academic life, for
instance. Colleges and
universities introduced laboratory courses and internships to help prepare new
professionals. New disciplines
emerged—statistics and social psychology, for instance—to prepare people for
new roles in society. And, whole
new institutions emerged: land
grant universities were founded to provide education in the “mechanical and
practical arts.” Normal
schools—forerunners of today’s state teacher colleges and universities—were
established to provide the thousands of teachers needed to educate the children
of immigrants who were crowding into our mill towns and mining towns and
industrialized urban areas.
As
the Industrial Age matured, another concern arose: given the massive
urbanization that was underway—and the fact that it was harder to “keep them
down on the farm”—people began to ask:
did the United States have the agricultural capacity to sustain
industrialization, urbanization, immigration? Teddy Roosevelt chaired a Commission on Rural Life out of
which emerged the Agricultural Extension Service at our land grant
institutions, a new kind of research and technology transfer that envisioned
researchers working with farmers in their fields. In addition, the Commission proposed something that
would better link rural families with the urbanized mainstream, making farm
life more attractive. It was
called Rural Free Delivery. In
1892, while RFD was still experimental, three institutions—Penn State, the
University of Chicago, and the University of Wisconsin—launched the first
distance education programs in the United States—correspondence study. Penn State’s was called the Home
Reading Program in Agriculture and included courses in agriculture, of course,
but also courses designed to improve home life in rural areas.
Over
the years, as the Industrial period matured, we’ve seen many other innovations
in distance education—radio, television, satellite, interactive video—and in
institutions—the rise of community colleges and special-purpose adult-serving
institutions like Empire State College and Thomas Edison State College—the GI
Bill and other services to support entry of new students into higher education,
to name just a few. It was an
exciting period, to say the least.
Looking Around
So, then, how is the Information
Revolution different from the Industrial Revolution? While the Industrial Revolution began as a revolution in
transportation—the steam engine that powered the great sailing ships, and the
internal combustion engine that gave us cars, highways, airplanes, etc.—the
Information Revolution began as a communication revolution—radio, television,
satellite and, of course, the computer—the digital revolution that made
information freely available to anyone. The changing nature of information is one of the most
significant differences between the two eras.
Technology
is also changing the way we work.
While the industrial revolution stimulated immigration and urbanization,
the information revolution has given us a more globalized supply chain, which
requires that professionals of all sorts develop new cross-cultural
skills. At the tip of this change
is the phenomenon of the distributed office place, where teams work from their
homes rather than in central offices.
And,
of course, technology is changing many aspects of our daily life: how we shop, how we find information to
solve problems, how we communicate with friends and participate in
communities. In fact, it has
changed the nature of community itself.
The great agrarian writer Wendell Berry defined a community as the
interrelationships of people and institutions in a particular locality. Today, most of us belong to both
physical and virtual communities and that is changing our sense of
ourselves—our identities as members of society.
The
information society also demands a more—and differently—educated
workforce. The STEM movement
reflects the need for a workforce that has greater skills in science, technology,
engineering, and math. And it is
just the tip of the iceberg. In the industrial era, the general
assumption was that 25% of high school graduates needed to go on to college in
order to meet the need for managers, engineers, and other professional
specializations. Today, the U.S.
Department of Education has argued that we need to move from the current level
of 39% to 60% of high school graduates going on to college to allow our
communities to compete in a globalized technology-oriented economy. That’s a huge increase in higher
education student population. And,
for the foreseeable future, it means reaching out to people who are already in
the workforce to help them prepare for careers in the new economy.
Kevin
Carey, author of The End of College,
has said that the Information Revolution will mark “the end of colleges as
we've known them for roughly the last 140 years.” (1) Indeed, this is happening at a time when public
confidence in higher education is at a low ebb. Just recently, Tom Ross, president of the University of
North Carolina, said, “America is losing her way with regard
to higher education. We seem to have forgotten the real value of higher
education – both to our economy and to our society.” He added, “We must decide whether our society still values
higher education – particularly public higher education. There is an ongoing debate – sometimes
beneath the surface and sometimes more overt – about whether higher education
conveys a public good or a purely private benefit.” (2)
As
online learning has matured, it is beginning to help our institutions address
that question and the demands placed on us by the Information Revolution and to
revitalize our social mission. Media-based
distance education has been with us for decades. Today, however, more institutions than ever before are using
online learning as a strategy to address issues on campus and to reach beyond
their local campus constituencies to serve students near to campus and further
away whose access to traditional campuses are limited by either time or
distance. As Elaine Allen and Jeff
Seaman found in their 2015 annual survey of higher education leaders, “The
proportion of academic leaders who report that online learning is critical to
their institution’s long term strategy has grown from 48.8% in 2002 to 70.8%
this year.” (3)
As
we’ve seen here today, institutions are also innovating with hybrid courses and
blended degree programs. This
approach—like fully online courses--provides increased flexibility for
students—reducing, but not eliminating physical classroom sessions. That, in turn, creates increased
capacity by releasing classrooms so that we can serve more students in
traditional classes or other hybrid courses. However, the potential for hybrid courses goes well beyond
access. This approach, mixing
in-class and on-line experiences, can also encourage curricular and pedagogical
innovation that can benefit both traditional and nontraditional students. Ultimately, pedagogy and flexible
access go hand in hand: both
empower the student.
Let’s
look at one kind of hybrid course: the flipped classroom. Students go online to get access
to subject matter organized by the instructor. Then, they use both online and classroom time for discussion,
analysis, and application. Of
course, the online environment itself allows for a greater level of
discussion—interaction between student and instructor and interactions among
students—than are possible in a typical undergraduate classroom. The result is richer student engagement
in the learning process.
And
this is the true point of online learning beyond access. In today’s world, education is no
longer about the one-way transfer of knowledge from teacher to student. Today’s world demands an education in
which students actively seek out information, evaluate it and turn it into
knowledge, and then apply that knowledge to address problems or situations—an
approach to learning that, at one time, was restricted to the graduate seminar
or honors The flipped
classroom and other kinds of hybrid learning environments support an active
learning environment in which all students are engaged in multi-level interactions—student-content,
student-student, and student-instructor. Increasingly, learning at all levels can be active, collaborative,
inquiry-oriented, and problem-focused.
New
educational philosophies are beginning to arise out of these environments. One of the most popular is the
“community of inquiry” model.
First fully developed in Canada, it focuses on creating a “deep and
meaningful learning experience” through the development and interaction of
three interdependent elements – social presence, cognitive presence, and
teaching presence. The online
environment has proven to be a good way to help students in all three
dimensions of inquiry—interaction with content, with their instructor, and with
each other focused on finding meaning in a topic—and to do this at a scale that
was not previously possible.
Again, access to learning and learning effectiveness can go hand in
hand.
Looking Ahead
Let
me turn now to the “to do” list. Much of the initial institutional focus of online learning
has been on increasing access and reducing cost. As I mentioned earlier, the idea that higher education
is less a public good than a private good continues to be a problem. That said, one major challenge, looking
ahead, is to re-envision the social mission of our institutions in this new
environment.
Curriculum
Since
we just talked about pedagogy, let me continue on that track for a moment. Much of our current thinking about the
teaching/learning environment has focused on pedagogy and instructional design
at the course level. However, it
is also clear that, in today’s information society, individuals need new skills
and attitudes if they are to function well as both citizens and professionals. Throughout the 20th century
there were several periods when general education arose as a social policy
issue. In the 1950s, for
instance—at the very beginning of the Information Revolution—the Truman
Commission on Higher Education identified eleven principles or goals that
summed up key characteristics of an educated person on the eve of the new era:
·
An ethical code of behavior
·
Informed and responsible citizen solving problem
skills
·
Understanding global interdependence
·
Habits of scientific thought in personal and
civic problems
·
Understanding others and expressing one’s self
·
Enjoyment and understanding of literature and
the arts
·
The ability to create a satisfying family life
·
The ability to choose a useful and satisfying
vocation
·
Developing critical and constructive thinking
habits (4)
The
question looking forward is: are
these principles the goal of undergraduate education in the mature Information
Society? If not, what principles
should guide the undergraduate curriculum? Online learning and pedagogical models like the
community of inquiry are central to this debate. They are tools of change. Properly applied online learning allows us to tackle these
general education curriculum goals more effectively and at a scale that we
couldn’t do in the past. This is
one dimension of what might well be the most disruptive innovation ahead of us.
Competency-Based Education
Another
facet of innovation in curriculum is competency-based education—or CBE. Writing in EDUCAUSE Review last year, Michelle Weise called online CBE “the innovation most likely to disrupt
higher education.” She added, “It
serves as the missing link between learning outcomes and industry needs. A true
workforce solution, competency-based education has the potential to bridge the
widening gap between traditional postsecondary education and the
workforce . . . Online competency-based education marks the
critical convergence of multiple vectors: the right learning model, the right
technologies, the right customers, and the right business model.” (5)
The
U.S. Department of Education describes CBE as “a structure that creates
flexibility [and] allows students to progress as they demonstrate mastery of
academic content, regardless of time, place, or pace of learning.” They go on to say, “This type of
learning leads to better student engagement because the content is relevant to
each student and tailored to their unique needs. It also leads to better
student outcomes because the pace of learning is customized to each student.” (6) Given the need to create and
maintain a professional workforce in a rapidly changing environment, on-line
CBE is becoming increasingly attractive as a social investment.
iNACOL—the
International association for K-12 online learning notes that, “The core element of a competency-based approach is that
students progress to more advanced
work upon demonstration of learning by applying specific
skills and content.” (7) CBE is
already finding a place in K-12 schools.
Within higher education, the Western Governors University was among the
first to promote a CBE approach.
CBE,
the flipped classroom, and the community of inquiry approach are examples of how
online learning gives our institutions tools that can shift us to a more
student-centered approach to curriculum—and, in the process, re-invigorate an
understanding of our societal role.
Sharing Resources
During
its first two decades, online learning has tended to focus on competition: removing time and space as access
barriers meant that every institution competed with every other institution for
every potential student. This ran
counter to older forms of distance education—from correspondence study to
satellite delivery—where institutions shared resources, licensing media-based
course materials to each other on a regular basis. However, several models of inter-institutional sharing
are now emerging in the online environment.
Open Educational Resources One of these is the
Open Educational Resources—or OER—movement. This started with a meeting in Capetown, South Africa,
in 2007 when a small group of educators crafted the Capetown Open Education
Declaration, which stated, in part:
We are on the cusp of a
global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing
a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to
use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth
can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also
planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape
and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they
go.
This emerging open education
movement combines the established tradition of sharing good ideas with fellow
educators and the collaborative, interactive culture of the Internet. It is
built on the belief that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize,
improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint. Educators,
learners and others who share this belief are gathering together as part of a
worldwide effort to make education both more accessible and more effective. (8)
The Declaration has since been
signed by 2493 individuals and 257 organizations from around the world,
including a good number from the U.S.
The Commonwealth of Learning, headquartered in Canada, remains an
international leader in this area.
Here
in the U.S., the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
now has more than 250 members and includes 150 open textbooks. Internationally, the Creative Commons
promotes the open sharing of online content with a goal of “universal access to
research and education and full participation in culture.”
One
possible implication of the CBE and OER movements going forward is that the
traditional boundaries of our institutions will begin to blur. For instance, colleges and universities
are beginning to make online courses available to high school students as “dual
enrollment” courses in which students can simultaneously earn high school
graduation credit and college credit.
We can envision a time when higher education institutions make OERs from
selected lower-division courses available to high school teachers to help
strengthen the high school curriculum.
This was a major role of public broadcasting through the 1980s, by the
way.
I
mentioned earlier the Department of Education goal to increase the percentage
of high school graduates who go on to college from the current level of around
39 percent to 60 percent. One
problem with that goal is that, today, most students who graduate from high
school prepared to enter college do so.
Thus, in order to meet the goal, we need to increase dramatically the
percentage of kids who graduate from high school ready to go on to
college. Together, open
educational resources and competency-based education offer a way that higher
education institutions can help K-12 schools meet that goal, while lowering the
total cost of higher education, both to students and to society as a
whole.
Sharing Faculty and Students
The online environment is also stimulating another kind of sharing,
as institutions share not just resources, but their faculty and students in
order to offer the best possible education to meet need sin their primary
service area. A good example is
the Great Plains Institutional Distance Education Alliance—otherwise known as
the Great Plains IDEA. This is a
group of public state universities in the Midwest that are working together to
offer online master’s degrees in the human services professions. Rather than try to duplicate academic
expertise at each campus, they share faculty and students offering degrees that
include courses from multiple institutions to ensure that students in all
participating states have access to the best academic talent. It also ensures that these specialized
academic areas will be able to maintain healthy student enrollments. Students enroll with the understanding
that they will get their degree from their home institution but will take
courses from many institutions.
Similar kinds of collaborations can be found around the world. Increasingly, we will see these
kinds of partnerships based on complementary research and teaching strengths,
shared professional contacts, shared workforce and economic development needs,
and shared commitments to improving society. The online learning environment makes this kind of sharing
not only possible, but preferable.
They not only reduce cost, they also ensure high quality standards and
open opportunities for other kinds of collaborations among faculty.
Supporting Students
One
other area where I think many institutions are now ready to innovate is student
support, especially for students who have no or limited access to traditional
campus services. At Penn State, the World Campus serves
truly distant students whose first trip to campus may well be on graduation
day. Often, the first person these
students want to meet is not their favorite faculty member, but their advisor,
who has helped the student through many of the life issues that they encounter
trying to balance learning with family, job, and community obligations. A strong, compassionate staff
dedicated to helping students succeed is a critical success factor for any
e-learning operation that serves off-campus adult students.
The
newest dimension of helping students succeed is “big data.” Big data has been described by
Christopher Pappas as “data that is created by learners while
they are taking an eLearning course or training module.” (9) The data can be collected within the
learning management system and can serve several purposes. For instance, it can help designers
improve the course structure itself by identifying elements that are most
used—or least used—by students.
But it can also allow instructors to provide feedback to students during
the course by helping them recognize students who are most likely to run into
trouble. This kind of help
within the course itself could be a key to a more student-centered learning
environment—one committed to helping students truly succeed.
However,
big data also requires that we take a fresh look at our responsibilities to the
student. We need to ask some
questions: What specific student
data will be retained after the course is completed? Will the data be available to others outside the course? If the data is maintained on a
commercial data system, who controls its long-term use? The principle concern is that the
student be fully aware of what kinds of data are being collected and how they
will be used. This is an important
policy issue for our institutions.
That said, collecting this kind of data with the student’s full
knowledge and sharing it with students to help them succeed can be an important
new dimension of a student-centered learning design.
Re-Engaging the Community
Finally,
let me turn to one other dimension of online learning that is fast rising on
the horizon. For the past two
decades, most of our attention has been focused on the use of online learning
in credit courses and formal certificate and degree programs. In the future, I would hope that we
would also begin to use online technology in a more consistent, strategic way
as a means to engage the community for research and technology transfer,
workforce training, community development, and other noncredit activities
traditionally housed in the “continuing education” or “extension” mission. Open Educational Resources offer one
vehicle for moving our academic knowledge into the community. Webinars and other online conferencing
systems can allow us to convene widely distributed communities of interest
around important issues. And, I
personally believe that MOOCs—massively open online courses—will realize their
true potential when they are used to bring people together around shared
training and development needs in a noncredit—rather than simply
credit-free—environment. They
could well be the 21st century’s answer to the 19th
century vision of agricultural extension as the researcher working side-by-side
with the farmer in his fields. As
we go down the road, these noncredit engagements—institution to industry, institution
to community, institution to government, and to other institutions—will be of
increasing strategic value.
I
have tried to outline briefly several areas of innovation that could help shape
the mainstream of four institutions through online learning in the future: competency-based education, sharing
open educational resources, sharing faculty and students through
inter-institutional collaboration, using big data to help students succeed,
and, finally, creating new kinds of informal engagements with the communities
we serve. All of these, I
believe, will help our institutions demonstrate that, in the Global Information
Society, higher education is, indeed, not just a private benefit to students,
but new way to serve society as a whole.
References
1. Fain,
P. “The End of College?” Inside Higher Ed 3/23/2015. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/03/23/kevin-carey-talks-about-his-new-book-end-college Accessed 23 March 2015.
2. Ross,
T. “Tom Ross: The Real Value of
Higher Education” The News and Observer, 15
March 2015. http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article14056646.html
Accessed 23 March 2015.
3. Allen,
I. E., and Seaman, J. Grade Level: Tracking Online Education in
the United States. Babson
Survey Research Group and Quahog Research Group: February 2015, p. 4.
4. Kennedy,
G. (ed.). Education
for Democracy: The Debate Over the
Rerport of the President’s Commission on Higher Education. Boston: D.C. Heath, 1952, pp. 25-30.
5. Weise,
Michelle R. “Got Skills: Why Online Competency-Based Education
is the Disruptive Innovation for Higher Education.” Educause Review, 10
November /2014. http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/got-skills-why-online-competency-based-education-disruptive-innovation-higher-education
Accessed 23 March 2015.
6. “Competency-Based
Learning or Personalized Learning.”
U.S. Department of Education.
http://www.ed.gov/oii-news/competency-based-learning-or-personalized-learning Accessed 23 March 2015.
7. Sturgis,
C., and Patrick, S. When Success is the Only Option: Designing Competency-Based Pathways for
Next Generation Learning. iNACOL, Vienna, Va, 2010, p. 8.
8. The Capetown Declaration. Open Society
Institute, September 2007. http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/read-the-declaration
Accessed 23 March 2015.
9. Pappas,
C. “Big Data in E-Learning: The Future of eLearning Industry.” E-Learningindustry.com, 24 July 2014 http://elearningindustry.com/big-data-in-elearning-future-of-elearning-industry Accessed 23 March 2015.
