In 1999, the
National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges and the
Kellogg Foundation charged a Commission led by 24 public university presidents
and provosts to look at the future of public higher education in the
information age. The result was a series
of six reports, under the general heading Returning
to our Roots. The final report noted:
“The mission of our institutions has
not changed, but the context in which we pursue it is in every way different.
Just as surely as the dawn of the 20th century marked the American transition
from agriculture to manufacturing, the 21st will usher in the full flowering of
the information and telecommunications age.”
(Renewing
the Covenant, p. 16).
This paper
will look at several ways that learning technologies may be pointing to major
changes in how public universities can meet that challenge. I will focus on three technology elements—online
learning, Open Educational Resources, and social media—and how they are
beginning to shape higher education’s new engagement to fuel the learning
society.
1. Online Learning: A New Spirit of Collaboration
Let’s start by looking at the impact
of online delivery of degree programs. Just last month,
Penn State celebrated the 20th anniversary of its online campus, the
World Campus. Starting with just 48
enrollments in 4 courses in January 1998, the World Campus now enrolls 14,000
students in 150 undergraduate and graduate degree and certificate programs. Back in 1998, Penn State was one of a small
number of institutions that were experimenting with the Internet to deliver
distance education. That’s no longer the
case, of course. A new report from the
Babson Research Group, which has been documenting the growth of online learning
for more than a decade, found that, in 2016, more than 6.3 million students—or
31.6% of all American higher education students—took at least one distance
course. (Seaman, p. 3). 52.8% of all students who took at least one distance course
also took an on-campus course, and of those who took only distance
courses, 56.1% reside in the same state as the institution at which they were
enrolled. In short, online technology is
beginning to change how colleges and universities relate to students both on
campus and off, in-state and beyond.
This is an important factor as institutions face the prospect of
declining enrollments as the Millennial generation moves past college age.
A New Era of Collaboration
One thing that the online
environment does is eliminate geography as a limitation and as an
advantage. When we first started, the
fear was that online programs would make us all competitors, destroying a
history of cooperation and sharing in distance education that dated back to the
1930s. As it is turning out, however, we
are beginning to see a new spirit of collaboration among universities to use
online learning to share faculty expertise, course content, and students.
The Great Plains IDEA An example
is the Great Plains IDEA—Interactive
Distance Education Alliance. The Great
Plains IDEA brings together public universities to collaboratively offer online
graduate degrees in agriculture and the human sciences. As their website says, “Why
rely on just one university to help you earn your degree when we can help you
learn from the best faculty at multiple universities?” GP IDEA began with a group of human sciences
deans at seven Midwestern universities who were interested in a collaborative
master’s degree. By the time the
Alliance was formalized in 2001, it had ten charter member institutions. Today,
it includes 19 universities across the Midwest, west, and south.
The vision is that institutions will
create and maintain strategic academic alliances that “allow institutions
working together to field graduate programs that are greater in reach and
significance than any single institution could field alone, that manage
institutional and shared resources in highly efficient ways, and that enrich
the teaching experience for faculty and the learning experience for students.” The model assumes that a student will
matriculate at her home university but take courses online from multiple
institutions. The final degree is offered by the student’s home institution. Institutions agree on a common tuition. Currently, GPIDEA offers 19 graduate degree
programs.
Course Share A similar
collaboration was created by the Big Ten Academic Alliance. Called Course Share,
it allows Big Ten institutions to make selected online
courses available to resident students at other Big Ten institutions. The focus is on courses in lesser-taught
languages and other specialized courses, where students have limited access to
faculty and where campuses may have trouble filling seats locally. Students enroll at their home institution and
join courses online. “To date,”
according to the Big
Ten website, “over 130 different less commonly
taught languages (LCTLs) and area studies courses have been shared
using CourseShare including Swahili, Thai, Vietnamese, and Islamic and Korean
Studies courses.”
EPCE
We can also point to partnerships among higher education institutions
and employers that extend professional and vocational education to the
workplace. One example in this area is
the Energy Providers Coalition for Education (EPCE),
which brings together private, public, and government-owned utilities; energy
contractors and suppliers; professional associations; local
unions; and workforce investment boards and four universities to provide online
training and education opportunities for workers in the energy field.
2. Open
Educational Resources: Sharing Across Sectors
Another innovation
that encourages collaboration is open educational resources—or OERs. The Hewlett
Foundation, which funds grants to support the
development of open educational resources, defines OERs as “high-quality
teaching, learning, and research materials that are free for people everywhere
to use and repurpose.” OERs can be many
things: full online courses, course
modules or lessons, video or audio lectures, interviews with experts,
demonstrations, simulations, experiments, solutions to math problems . . . you
name it. What makes all of these things
OERs is that they have an open copyright that makes them free for the public to
use, to adapt, and to redistribute.
OERs can be shared among
institutions to enhance teaching and to reduce the duplication of effort
involved in creating local course materials.
Open texts also reduce costs to both institutions and students. OERs can also be made available to community
clients, such as employers, to enhance professional development and practice
and to help transfer research findings into practice.
The idea of OERs as an international
movement is rooted in a 2007 meeting of educators in Capetown, South Africa,
who crafted a declaration on OERs that called for educators to transform online
content into open educational resources
that could be freely shared and for governments and educational boards to
create policies that recognize these resources.
It has since been signed by nearly 2,500 institutions and public
agencies around the world.
Here in the U.S., the Creative Commons
was founded in 2001. It provides copyright licenses for OERs, helping to make
materials available for free use globally, with special focus on materials that
support scientific research dissemination and educational applications.
Community colleges have been
especially active in the OER movement.
The Community
College Consortium for OERs was founded in 2007
to encourage the development and adoption of OERs with the goal of making
college more affordable while expanding the resources available to
faculty. It maintains a catalog of more
than 750 open textbooks. Most recently,
it has been encouraging full degree programs based on OERs.
Inter-Sector Collaboration
We are finding that OERs also
encourage cross-sector collaboration. Increasingly,
for instance, OERs developed by colleges and universities are being used to
enhance teaching and learning in K-12 schools.
This is likely to continue to grow as states establish online charter
schools; as of 2015,
there are more than 150 online charter schools in 18 states, plus the District
of Columbia. This does not include K-12
brick and mortar schools that offer some courses online. iNACOL—the International Association for K-12
Online Learning—reports that at least 8 states are actively working on
statewide policies for the use of OERs in their schools.
Curriculum Issues The combination of university-created online
courses and open educational resources in K-12 curricula has great potential to
fuel curricular innovation in both environments. In the process, it might also
blur distinctions between the two sectors.
For instance, university-level college courses can be used as “dual
enrollment” courses that allow registered high school students to simultaneously
earn high school graduate credit and college credit. The online environment
makes dual enrollment more convenient for high school students who live far
from a college campus but want to earn college credit while in high school. Dual enrollment helps fill vacant seats in
both online and traditional university courses, while offering students a head
start toward a college career.
Similarly, university-developed OERs
can help ensure that high school students graduate with the knowledge and
skills they need to successfully make the transition to higher education.
As these innovations expand, we can
expect to see a need to take a fresh look at the transition between K-12 and
higher education curricula. Back in the
1940s, the Truman Commission on Higher Education recommended, among other
things, the idea of moving from a universal K-12 schooling system to a K-14
system, under which taxpayers would support education for all students through
the second year of the undergraduate curriculum. The recommendation was not acted on, although
it probably helped to reinforce public support for low-cost tuition at
community colleges. Just recently,
though, the State
of New York approved a plan to offer full
scholarships for first two years at SUNY and CUNY to students whose parents
earn less than $100,000 per year. The upper limit will increase each year. San Francisco now has a “Free
City” program that provides city residents
tuition-free access to San Francisco City College. These are important steps toward the idea of
universal K-14 education.
Re-Thinking the Curriculum
This, in turn, suggests the need to
more effectively align the pedagogy and content of the high school curriculum
and the general education college curriculum to (1) eliminate unnecessary
overlap and duplication, (2) to ensure that critical skills—such as effectively
introducing STEM skills and citizenship development early in the curriculum—are
properly covered, and (3) to innovate with pedagogy that takes advantage of
information technology to develop student skills in finding, evaluating, and
applying information, and their ability to collaborate and to solve
problems. A new study by Ithaka.org,
was just published in January. It
reports, “Faculty collaboration in creating new educational resources
that rely on technology can serve as a catalyst for rethinking pedagogy, and
has the potential to be a cost-effective means by which liberal arts colleges
can provide more students high-quality learning experiences that are in line
with the core tenets of a liberal arts education.” (p.2)
Micro-Degrees
Another twist on curricular innovation is the Micro-degree. EdX,
a nonprofit created by MIT and Harvard, offers 1900 open courses—what are
sometimes called MOOCs—from 39 institutions around the world. They’ve been taken by more than 14 million
people around the world. More recently, MIT
and EdX have collaborated on a “micro-master’s”
program designed to help learners earn accelerated master’s degrees. One program in supply chain management, for
example, includes 5 open courses that are the equivalent to one semester of
graduate work. They are now in the early
stages of doing the same with a micro-bachelor’s program.
It seems reasonable to expect that
curriculum change—supported by the kinds of innovations we’ve just
discussed—will be part of a re-invention of undergraduate education in coming
years.
Other Technology Innovations A couple of other elements also have
potential for shaping curricular and pedagogic change. One is the rise of so-called “big data”
services that allow institutions to collect data on how students participate in
online elements of courses. This data
can then be used to help guide students to more productive study habits and
help faculty and course designers improve pedagogy and course delivery. Big data—and how institutions use data about
individual students—may offer powerful new tools for course design and student
advising and support; at the same time, it raises important questions about
privacy and student autonomy, but the potential is clear.
Another
factor is the rise of “badges” and other nontraditional certifications for both
credit and noncredit programs. These
certificates could provide a new pathway for universities to engage students
throughout their careers and career changes.
However, while many institutions now offer badges and certificates, we
still need standards that will ensure quality and acceptance of these new forms
by employers and by other institutions.
In January, the International Council for Open and Distance Education
(ICDE) announced that it is forming a working group on badges and other
alternative digital credentials—an important first step toward creating
standards in this arena.
3. University
Engagement: Creating New Learning Communities through Social Media
When institutions first began to
innovate with online learning, it seemed that its success came, in part at
least, at the expense of more traditional models of continuing
education—evening classes, research transfer workshops, noncredit professional
development programs, etc. However, that
is beginning to change. Today, the tools
available to us include, in addition to online learning course management
systems, OERs, an increasingly sophisticated social media environment that
allow us to bring people together both synchronously and asynchronously.
This, I believe, will be part of the
next phase of our evolution to a learning society: creating sustained learning communities
focused on specific professions, geographically distributed community functions,
or research arenas. Public universities
have a long history of bringing together communities around professional
development and research and technology transfer. Information technology will transform these by
using multiple IT applications, united by social media, to meet different needs
within the community. For instance,
faculty activity within a learning community might include:
·
Online noncredit courses—and new
certifications—that help alumni and/or employees in client organizations grow
professionally.
·
Webinars that can transfer research
findings to professionals in the field and to provide professional development
training.
·
OERs—videos of lectures, games and
simulations, and other presentations—that are available to client organizations
to use in their own internal training programs.
·
Faculty-moderated discussion groups as
an ongoing link to the community, to encourage open-ended communication among
community members and academics to raise questions and seek solutions from
peers and from university faculty.
Who might benefit from a learning community? Well, in Pennsylvania there are 501 school
districts. That means there are 501
school superintendents that could join a College of Education community. Or, 501 school librarians. Or, 67 county commissioners or directors of
tourism, etc. Learning communities could also be built around professions or
industrial specializations. One can
imagine faculty-led learning communities around a wide range of specialties,
from agriculture to natural gas engineering to tourism to management of
personal care homes. The learning
community concept offers a way to reinvigorate noncredit community engagement
while better linking faculty with the professional and social communities that
they serve and providing ongoing opportunities to identify new research
opportunities.
Finally, the learning community
concept could be a very effective way for universities to continue to support
recent graduates as they move into their professional lives.
Conclusion
The Kellogg Foundation project that
I mentioned at the beginning of this talk included a piece called “Toward a
Learning Society.” That report noted a
two-fold challenge:
First, we must ensure that the remarkable growth in demand for education
throughout the lifetime of virtually every citizen can be satisfied; second, we
must demonstrate that we can meet this need at the highest level of quality
imaginable, along with the greatest efficiency possible (A Learning
Society, p. x).
The Information Revolution has matured
to a point where we are beginning to see incredible changes in our economy and
social systems. Online learning, OERs,
social media, and the use of these to collaborate and to create new curricula,
new pedagogies, and new kinds of learning communities are examples of where we
seem to be heading. The global
information society brings with it the need for people to learn how to work
across local cultures and to use technology in almost every aspect of our
lives.
Over the past five decades, we have
seen higher education respond to several new technologies as the Information
Society has emerged. There was
educational television in the 1960s, satellite and cable in the 1980s,
interactive video in the 1990s, and, finally, the mature Internet, which led us
to the innovations I’ve focused on tonight.
All have opened new doors to how we engage communities—how we teach and
how we share the results of our research.
Today, the range of innovation is astounding. It is an exciting opportunity for a new
generation of innovators.
Note: This paper was presented to the Torch Club of Central Pennsylvania on February 14, 2018.
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