The last decade has been a time of
significant innovation in university extension and outreach. At the same time, higher education in
general has been under increasing criticism for focusing on narrow professional
programs and losing its social mission.
Much innovation has been driven by technology—putting existing curricula
online to serve adult and part-time learners, especially. As we look ahead, we need to ask how we
can use both traditional means and online technology to address the many
problems facing our communities in a new social and economic environment. Here are four areas where I think we
are ripe for innovation in Extension and Outreach:
1. Partnering
with K-12 Education It is generally understood that, if our communities are
to compete in the new global information economy, we need a better-educated
workforce. More high school
graduates need to go on to college. The Obama Administration proposal to make community college
free to qualified students is an example of this goal. The U.S. Department of Education target
is that 60% of high school grads will go on to college; only about 39% do
now. The problem is that most high
school graduates who are prepared to enter college already do so. In order to increase the percentage, we
need to increase the number of high school students who are, in fact, prepared
to succeed in college. Two innovations could set the stage for
new, ongoing relationships between higher and K-12 education:
·
Dual
Enrollment Courses
Universities can partner with local schools to allow high school
students to enter lower-division college courses and simultaneously earn high
school graduation credit and college credit. The result is students who are more ready to enter college
and who do so with some credits already on their resumes.
·
Open
Educational Resources Universities
that offer online courses can extract online content modules from courses and
make them available to help high school teachers enrich college prep courses. There is a model for this—the
relationships among public television stations, local schools, and state
departments of education that delivered content over the air to schools from
the 1960s through the 1980s.
2. Re-Imagining Extension Originally, Agricultural Extension was
created to increase agricultural production, so that the U.S. could sustain the
combined forces of urbanization and immigration that fed the Industrial
Revolution. Today, we are facing
different challenges. As the 21st
century advances, we will need to help farmers deal with a range of
agricultural issues—this time in the face of dramatic climate change—but we
also need to expand the Extension ideal to help our communities, large and
small, deal with the economic and social issues presented by the Information
Revolution. How can we help
communities maintain their social and economic validity in the face of a
globalized economy? In an era of
social media, how do we rebuild the physical community—our towns and villages,
as well as our cities—into socially and economically viable places to live,
raise families, conduct business, and exercise citizenship? Online technology can play a role here,
too, by bringing community leaders together to share ideas and best practices
and to learn from faculty researchers, building new ways to transfer research
and technology into daily practice in business, government, and civil society.
3.
Globalizing the Discussion Over the past few generations,
institutions have tended to see international outreach as a one-way street—a
way to export our faculty expertise, our research and technology, and our
credentials. Today, we need to
seek out more evenly balanced institutional partnerships that bring faculty
together across cultures, eco-systems, and economies to share ideas, to find
common solutions, and to inform each other—and our students—about new
perspectives in our globalized society.
The Worldwide Universities Network is a pioneer in this arena and a model that other institutions can follow. Another early innovation is the
partnerships between institutions to offer “sandwich” doctorates that reduce
brain drain from developing countries while developing new collaborative
research opportunities. A
fundamental challenge in this area is to help our constituencies better
understand the global environment by allowing them to interact with
counterparts around the world as students, as outreach/extension clients, and
as research transfer partners.
4. Preparing Retirees for the Third Act In today’s world, people live longer,
more healthy and active lives. For
many, retirement is no longer the end of active life, but the beginning of a
“third act,” when men and women can look beyond the need to support their
families and find new interests.
Helping the first few generations of these new seniors find a place in
society—whether it be in new professions or as volunteers or just active
individuals—is a new way that outreach and extension units can bring university
knowledge and expertise to bear to serve individuals and, in the process,
strengthen communities. Older
adults are a new and growing population who need access to university resources
no less than they did as young professionals. And, our communities need older adults who are prepared to
contribute in new ways.
These
innovations are not technological per se, but they are facilitated by
technology. The demonstrate how
public higher education can re-imagine the roots of its outreach/extension
mission in the process of re-focusing on the needs of today’s community.
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