Education and Society

General Education and the Engaged University

2012-02-10T11:13:00.001-05:00

This week, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett announced hissecond annual budget proposal. Last year, he sparked a lot of controversy by proposing a 50% reductionin state funding for Penn State. This year, he proposes to cut the state appropriation to Penn State,Pitt, and Temple by 30% and to the State System of Higher Education by20%. The rationale isstraightforward: Pennsylvaniagovernment is not generating enough revenue to fund at a higher level.

Certainly, the specific percentages will be subject tonegotiation over the next few months. However, we can expect that the final number will still be a significantreduction in state support. Theimpact will be to further shift the cost of higher education from the taxpayerto the individual student. This reinforces a fundamental question that hasunderpinned much public discussion over the past decade: Is higher education a public good,which enriches the entire community, or is it a private good, that primarilybenefits the individuals who attend and graduate?

The idea of higher education as a “private” good came intofocus for me recently, when a LinkedIn discussion quoted an institution thathad done an “ROI” report. It usedsalary gains by alums as the primary measure of ROI, although it also noted thepositive economic impact on the local community in which the campus islocated. By using this approach, the institutionessentially bought into the idea that its value can be measured in terms of howa student’s investment in tuition dollars is returned through increasedsalary. It is the “private good”argument.

However, it misses several important considerations. Prime among these is the fact that the student pays for onlypart of his/her education. Therest is paid by direct state appropriation and, increasingly, by state andfederal student financial aid. Thetaxpayer has a huge investment in the education of each individual whograduates from a higher education institution in the United States. That includes for-profit institutions,which are at the very top of the pile of institutions that receive federalfinancial aid.

A second, perhaps less obvious factor is that a collegeeducation is not meant simply to prepare one for a profession. The college curriculum has two distinctcomponents. One is theupper-division professional component—the major and minor. The other is the general educationcomponent. At most institutions,this is the broad “liberal arts” curriculum that introduces students to theculture in which they live, with the goal of preparing them to betterparticipate as a member of society. To be sure, for some institutions this idea has eroded to become asimplistic “distribution” curriculum that gives students a taste of the majordisciplines. However, otherinstitutions have taken care to ensure that their graduates are prepared to beboth citizens and professionals.

In 1948, as America was finding its way into a new worldorder after two World Wars that effectively ended the social order that hadbeen set into motion by the Enlightenment and set the stage for a globalsociety and the Information Revolution, a Presidential Commission on HigherEducation issued a report, HigherEducation for American Democracy, which stated that “The crucial task forhigher education today . . . is to provide a unified general education forAmerican youth . . . General education should give the student the values,attitudes, knowledge, and skills that will equip him to live rightly and wellin a free society” (quoted in Gail Kennedy, Educationfor Democracy, 1952). TheCommission outlined eleven objectives for general education:

1. Todevelop for the regulation of one’s personal and civic life a code of behaviorbased on ethical principles consistent with democratic ideals.

2. Toparticipate actively as an informed and responsible citizen in solving thesocial, economic, and political problems of one’s community, State, and Nation.

3. Torecognize interdependence of the different peoples of the world and one’spersonal responsibility for fostering international understanding and peace.

4. Tounderstand the common phenomena in one’s physical environment, to apply habitsof scientific thought to both personal and civic problems, and to appreciatethe implications of scientific discoveries for human welfare.

5. Tounderstand the ideas of others and to express one’s own effectively.

6. Toattain a satisfactory emotional and social adjustment.

7. Tomaintain and improve [one’s] own health and to cooperate actively andintelligently in solving community health problems.

8. Tounderstand and enjoy literature, art, music, and other cultural activities asexpressions of personal and social experience, and to participate to someextent in some form of creative activity.

9. Toacquire the knowledge and attitudes basic to a satisfying family life.

10. Tochoose a socially useful and personally satisfying vocation that will permitone to use to the full[one’s] particular interests and abilities.

11. Toacquire and use the skills and habits involved in critical and constructivethinking.

Today,one can argue that the global Information Society requires a fresh assessmentof general education. Regardless,institutions of higher education that rely on tax support need to articulatehow their curriculum helps advance the total society and not simply the careersof individuals. We cannot walk away from our societalmission just because times are tough. Instead, we need to find new ways to express how we are engaged withsociety and to communicate that to all of our stakeholders. The general education curriculum is onecomponent of that.

A strategic engagement initiativeshould also include a strategy for engaging through outreach, research, andtechnology transfer. It is time forthe academic community to look up and look out, beyond our campuses, and toengage our institutions with the broader society that they serve.

Re-Engaging Penn State

2012-01-10T16:24:00.000-05:00

Like many other alumni and, especially, current and formerfaculty/staff, I have felt deeply the problems that Penn State has beenexperiencing as a result of the Jerry Sandusky scandal. Unlike many of those Penn Staters, I amnot a football fan. To me, PennState is first and foremost a great land grant university. While football is not a part of my life(other than the occasional Saturday traffic snarl), I do love this institution,which has given me more good things in life than I could ever haveexpected. The challenge facingPenn State is not simply how to recover its sports reputation—that will takecare of itself as the new coach builds his team—but how to help the variouspublics that we serve better understand the rest of the University. I’d like to share some ideas about howwe might move forward.

First, some context. I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, in what is now Hermitage in MercerCounty. I came from a poor familyand had no expectation of being able to go to college unless, like an oldercousin, it was through the military. However, when I did well on my SATs (which I took on a dare from afriend), several teachers talked to my mother and encouraged her to apply forstate scholarships so that I could attend the new Shenango Campus of PennState, which opened when I was a senior in high school. I did get a PHEAA scholarship,which allowed me to attend Penn State full time while living at home andkeeping my part-time job.

So, for me, one of the essential qualities of Penn State isthe way it has provided access to education for thousands of Pennsylvaniansthrough its system Commonwealth Campuses. Without that system, many Pennsylvanians might never have achieved acollege education. Today, wecan add the World Campus, which uses online technology to extend access wellbeyond the Commonwealth.

When I transferred to Penn State in my junior year, I neededa job and was lucky to get one at WPSX-TV (now WPSU-TV) as a part-timeproduction assistant, operating a camera in the studio and, occasionally, onremotes around campus and beyond. After graduation, I moved to a full-time position and eventually becameDirector of Instructional Media, helping faculty develop media materials forboth on-campus and off-campus use. Throughout this time, I was able to see the incredible diversity of PennState’s academic community at work. With the College of Education, we produced and broadcast televisionlessons on science (Introductory Sciencefor Elementary Education) and social sciences What’s in the News) and with the College of Arts and Architecture,a series on art (Art for the Day) sothat even students in small, rural schools would be assured a good head starton their educations. With theCollege of Earth and Mineral Sciences, we produced The State of the Weather/the Shape of the World (now called Weather/World), extending Penn State’sinternational leadership in meteorology to Commonwealth residents. And, of course, with the College ofAgricultural Sciences WPSX broadcast a daily series that extended the knowledge and expertiseof Cooperative Extension Service faculty. With the College of Health and Human Development, we produced series onparenting, family food shopping, aging, and many other topics that reflected theintersection between the research specialties of faculty and the needs of thecommunity.

We also produced formal college courses for delivery viabroadcast and cable television, including courses on accounting and businesslogistics from the College of Business Administration and a series ofinnovative interdisciplinary courses (examples include The Behavioral Revolution andThe Finite Earth) in Science, Technology, and Society in collaboration withTemple University and the University of Pittsburgh. In the 1990s, with the establishment of the WorldCampus, we greatly expanded this concept, working with faculty across thespectrum of university academic departments to put complete undergraduate andgraduate degree programs online.

In my last years at Penn State, I was also involved in awide range of continuing education activities that included Conferences andInstitutes, which helped faculty members develop research and professionaldevelopment conferences that brought academic leaders and practitioners fromaround the world to Penn State to share ideas and discoveries in theirfields. One of these conferences eventually contributed to the establishment of a new discipline--Astro-Statistics.

This, then, is Penn State as I know it: an incredibly rich and diverse publicinstitution whose faculty and staff are committed to reaching and teachingstudents, conducting and sharing the results of research, and serving thepublic interest through a wide array of outreach and research transferactivities.

The Sandusky scandal and the resulting firing of a legendaryfootball coach and a nationally respected president have given rise to seriousconcerns about the internal organizational culture that has developed over thedecades and distracted the public from our mission. President Erickson is committed to addressing theorganizational culture issues. Theremaining question is how to re-establish a public understanding of PennState’s role within the Commonwealth.

More than a decade ago, former President Spanier chaired the KelloggCommission on the Future of State and Land Grand Universities. The report, Returning to Our Roots, called for institutions like Penn State to become“engaged universities.” Engagement, the Commission emphasized, goes beyond what most of us thinkof as traditional outreach/extension and toward an ideal based on a commitmentto sharing and reciprocity. “Byengagement,” notes the report, “the Commission envisions partnerships, two-waystreets defined by mutual respect among the partners for what each brings tothe table. An institution that responds to these imperatives can properly becalled what the Kellogg Commission has come to think of as an ‘engagedinstitution’.”

The Commission identified three characteristics of anengaged university:

1. It must be organized torespond to the needs of today’s students and tomorrow’s, not yesterday’s.

2. It must enrich students’experiences by bringing research and engagement into the curriculum andoffering practical opportunities for students to prepare for the world theywill enter.

3. It must put its criticalresources (knowledge and expertise) to work on the problems the communities itserves face.

The best way that Penn State can respond to the Sanduskyscandal and all of the issues that have arisen around it is to self-consciouslyre-commit itself to the ideal of engagement.

The first step in that direction is to define what we meanby the “communities it serves.” Certainly, Penn State serves the local communities that host Penn Statecampuses. The Commonwealth itselfis also a community. However,there are also other communities: the agricultural community is a traditional focus of somekinds of engagement; other industries and professional fields affected by PennState’s education, research, and service work—from mining to K-12 school teachers—arealso communities. Not all of thesecommunities are bound by geography; in some cases, the “community” may beglobal. So the first step is toarticulate what “community” means to Penn State and then to create anengagement strategy around that meaning.

A second step is to ask representatives of those communitiesa simple question: “What problemscan we help you solve?” PennState is well situated to conduct a community-based needs assessment. Within the state, there are CooperativeExtension offices in each county and campuses with links to diversecommunities, including alums, in nearly every region. The results could feed a University-wide engagement strategythat would touch all three facts of Penn State’s mission—teaching, research,and service—and serve to ensure that current programs are meeting emergingneeds as the Commonwealth shifts from its historical base in agriculture andindustry and finds it role in the global knowledge economy that is reshapingsociety in the 21^st century.

Convergence or Transformation: Optional Futures for Distance Education

2011-12-17T18:09:00.003-05:00

Note: This is a reposting of a speech that I gave on June 11, 2008, at the National University Telecommunications Network conference in Park City, Utah, where I received a distinguished service award.

In 1992, Iwas invited by the American Center for the Study of Distance Education toproject long-term trends in the field. It was an interesting time to be looking forward. We were about a decade into therise of video in distance education—the movement from correspondence study tobroadcast telecourses and satellite-delivered live interactive courses (thelatter of which had spurred creation of NUTN in the early 1980s), but it wasclear that the Internet was on the horizon. I identified four trends:

· The simultaneousdiversification and convergence of technologies.

· Changingrelationships with students

· Changingrelationships among institutions

· The emergence ofa new mainstream

Onthe technology side—this was a year before the first web browser I hasten tonote—there were already multiple ways to deliver video, audio, and print and tofacilitate interaction through all three media. It was clear, however, that, amid this diversity,institutions needed to think in terms of convergence. We could not afford to have video, audio, print, andcomputer all in separate organizational silos. My prediction was that “organizational structures that donot facilitate a mixing of technologies will find it difficult to reach theirfull potential in this new environment.” This, in turn, would create a “new institutionalinfrastructure” where use of technology for instruction would be consideredalongside its use for administrative and research applications, creating a“broader community of interest.”

Ifthat was true for the technologies of the early 1990s, it is true in spadestoday as we consider how the Internet has changed the university infrastructureand created new communities (or, in the absence of these communities, hasparalyzed innovation) at our institutions.

Thesecond trend was a changing relationship between our institutions and ourstudents and, particularly, the rise of synchronous and asynchronous “learningcommunities” as a critical pedagogical issue. I also mentioned another relationship issue: the riseof the “empowered student” or “community of scholars” as a result of studentshaving better direct access to large databases, video and textualmaterials—what we now call “learning objects.” This trend, I suggested, “will require that we rethinkour definition of instruction, our assessment of learning, and our ideas aboutcurriculum.”

Today,we are still experimenting in this area, but with much higher stakes as the Webmoves from a publishing environment to a collaboration environment and we enterwhat some are calling a “conversation economy.” Blogs, wikis, Facebook, You-Tube, socialbookmarking—all of these Web 2.0 applications are creating a demand for a new,more collaborative, more inquiry-oriented approach to learning—on campus andoff—that reflects how people use technology at work and at home. The goal posts have moved a longway ahead of us on this issue, but there are some great things happening aroundthe world as educators experiment with these new tools and as institutions andgovernments begin to set new policies on sharing content.

The third trend area was a forecast thatthe use of new technologies would also change relationships among institutions. The examples I cited in 1992—theUniversity of Mid-America, the International University Consortium, theNational Universities Degree Consortium and the Mind Extension University—havelong since passed from the scene, but we are seeing new forms ofcollaboration. Two examples pointto the scope of change that is now gathering momentum: the Great Plains Interactive DistanceEducation Alliance (IDEA) and its mission of offering collaborative onlinedegree programs for adults that no single institution can offer alone, and theCourseShare initiative in the CIC—the academic counterpart of the Big Ten—whichuses online learning to share rarely-taught language across institutions toregular, full-time undergraduates on campus. When you look internationally, you can begin tosee potential that is just now being explored. In the international sphere, collaboration takes manyforms. Almost every regionalassociation for open and distance education has an initiative to developquality standards that will facilitate sharing, for instance. There are individual examples of institutionssharing courses at the graduate level, such as Penn State, the Universities ofLeeds and Southampton in the UK allowing their graduate students to take onlinecourses in Geographic Information Systems from each other’s programs. Perhaps the most dramatic collaborativeinitiative internationally is the Open Educational Resources movement. Here, the potential wasarticulated by a leadership group that met in Cape Town, South Africa, andissues the “Cape Town Declaration:”

…wecall on educators, authors and institutions to release their resources openly.These open educational resources should be licensed to facilitate use,revision, translation, improvement and sharing by anyone, ideally imposing nolegal constraints other than a requirement by the creator for appropriateattribution or the sharing of derivative works. Resources should be publishedin formats that facilitate both use and editing, and that accommodate adiversity of technical platforms. Whenever possible, they should also beavailable in formats that are accessible to people with disabilities and peoplewho do not yet have access to the Internet.

Iprojected one other trend back in 1992: The emergence of a new mainstream in American higher education in whichdistance education is fully integrated into a broader institutional strategy torespond to what I called the “currents of social change.” This has been a little lesseasy to track, but I suspect each institution represented here has seen someevidence of this kind of convergence. At Penn State, for instance, our online distance education program, theWorld Campus—which offered its first fully online courses a decade ago—is now aleading part of a broader institution-wide consortium called Penn State Onlinethat tries to coordinate among the many different applications of onlinelearning for students on campus and inter-campus, as well as at adistance. Several degreeprograms developed for distance education are now being offered as “blended”programs at some of our smaller campuses; some academic colleges have createdtheir own online services to support on-campus instruction and then make thesecourses available to World Campus students. We an also point to project like the National enter forAcademic Transformation and the CIC CourseShare initiative as examples ofdistance education techniques being used to improve instruction on campus.

Anotherevidence of convergence—of the mainstreaming of distance education—is theincredible growth in the number of institutions that now offer degree programsonline to off-campus students and, equally important, a commitment not just tocourses, but to complete degree programs. As far back as 2004, the annual Sloan survey, Growing by Degrees, reported that 44percent of all institutions that offered Master’s degree programs offered atleast one program online. Sixty-five percent of institutions were using primarily core faculty toteach their online courses—a rate comparable to face-to-face courses. In short, online distanceeducation is emerging as an ongoing commitment of academic units, reflected inthe long-term commitment to degree programs and to the assignment of corefaculty to serve both on-campus and distant students.

Themost recent Sloan report—Online Nation—notesthat the number of students taking at least one online course has growth to3.48 million in 2006, more than double the number reported four years earlier(p.7). While the Sloansurveys do not distinguish between truly distant students, full-time commuterstudents, and resident on-campus students, I think it is safe to assume thatthis dramatic growth is the result not just of increases in adult students at adistance but also increases in the number of commuter students taking onlinecourses for convenience and scheduling flexibility, and the number of full-timeon-campus students taking online course as part of their campuscurriculum. In fact, a PennState undergraduate student told me last year that he has not had one semesterin which he did not have at least one course that had a significant onlinecomponent.

However, online learning is not havingan equal effect at all institutions. Online Nation reported thatthe greatest impact is in public colleges and universities, with communitycolleges leading, followed by public universities. The impact has been least felt on private, baccalaureateinstitutions (p. 12). Inother words, those institutions that have a mission to serve off-campus orcommuter students are more likely to fully embrace online distance educationthan those whose mission is more campus-centric. Interestingly, a clear majority--59.1 percent--ofacademic leaders now see online learning as “critical to the long-termstrategy” of their institutions (p.16).

Clearlydistance education and the mainstream have converged and, in the process, themainstream has been changed and distance education—at least in some cases—hasbeen more fully embraced—or is being re-invented—as a strategy for the totalinstitution. This has beendriven partly by market forces—the rising importance of continuing educationfor adults who are already in the workforce, by the need for local institutionsto more effectively compete for commuter students, and by the growingwillingness of traditional-age students to study online. Last, but certainly not least, theconvergence has been driven by economics—the need to cut costs and improveefficiency on campus and the need to generate new tuition revenues fromnontraditional students in light of reduced government funding and increasedcompetition.

Allthat said, today, we are working in a vastly different environment—both insideand outside our institutions—than when distance educators began experimentingwith online 15 years ago. People have begun to notice that the Information Revolution is not somuch about how quickly information is broadcast, but about how it brings peopleand ideas together in new ways. Weare beginning to realize that the Knowledge Society, in reality, is a “SkillsSociety.” Providing access,convenience, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness will continue to be importantissues, but the emerging question for the next decade or so is: how can we help individuals learn howto build and sustain new communities built around collaboration and sharing ofknowledge to solve both local and, increasingly, global problems? For those of us in distance education,the challenge is more focused: Howcan we use what we’ve learned about online distance education to help transformour institutions to meet the needs of this emerging society?

Wecan envision a broader strategic horizon in which distance education is a keypart of a more complex picture, one that includes fully online courses offeredto students both on campus and at a distance, hybrid courses offered on campusand through continuing education, blended programs that mix distance educationand site-based experiences, and, more generally, an academic environment inwhich e-learning is seen as a utility available to all faculty and students. Access will continue to be a criticalstrategic issues, along with efficiency on campus and, perhaps most important,continuing to evolve a new pedagogy that responds to the new needs ofindividuals and their communities. A generation into the Information Revolution, some new trends areemerging that may signal where we need to go. All of them have something to do with the idea ofbuilding community, so let me use that as an organizing metaphor.

Traditionally,we tend to think of communities as local. A community is a village or aneighborhood of people who live inter-dependent lives. You may own the town bank, but my sonteaches your daughter in the local school. The kids we went to school with grow the food we eat, work,run the shops where we buy what we need, attend the same churches, etc. In a globalized economy that kindof highly localized interdependence is harder to find. Online learning removes geographic andtime as defining characteristics of interaction. We need to re-perceive the whole idea of community tounderstand how we are inter-dependent in today’s world and to develop theskills needed to work together in a new environment. For higher education, this has implications at several levels:

Atthe institutional level, we need tore-define the communities we serve and re-articulate our mission in thosecommunities. For most of us,distance education has meant reaching very far beyond our local campuscommunity in order to aggregate markets for specialized programs or servewidely dispersed professional groups. The very first Penn State teleconferencethrough NUTN, as an example, allowed our Nuclear Engineering faculty to sharewith their colleagues around the country what they had learned from analyzingvideotape of the core at the Three-Mile Island nuclear plant after the accentthere. Today, we arestarting to see institutions use online distance education as a way of moreeffective serving local commuting students who cannot always come tocampus. In addition, the movementtoward blended programs is allowing institutions to more easily developprograms that respond to local needs by mixing on campus and online activities.Online dual enrollment courses—which allow high school students tosimultaneously earn high school graduation credit and college undergraduatecredit—signal another new relationship between higher education and the schoolsthat is another trend in this area. These are starting points for rethinking how our institutions relate toour local communities.

Atthe faculty level, new kinds ofacademic communities are emerging that may redefine the relationship betweenfaculty members and their institutions in the long run. Projects like the CIC’s CourseShare,the Great Plains IDEA, and the Worldwide University Network’s sharedprograms—all of which I mentioned earlier—bring faculty from multipleinstitutions into an inter-institutional community where they can expand theimpact of their specialized research. And, of course, the Open Educational Resources movement—something thatbegan outside the distance education community but that presents greatopportunities for it—allows faculties to retain control of their intellectualproperty so that they can share it with colleagues around the world.

Centralto this transformation is the student. Here, “community” has two meanings. The first is the need to prepare students—of all ages—tobecome effective citizens and professionals in this new society—call it aconversation economy, an age of cognition, a knowledge society, a globalinformation society, etc. Today’sworld demands that people have the skill to work collaboratively acrossboundaries and to participate in communities that are not defined by geographyand time. This, in turn,calls for a new pedagogy that redefines what we mean by a “learningcommunity.” For most publiccolleges and universities—which need to be responsive to workforce andcommunity needs—the new environment demands a curriculum that not only ensuresthat students gain discipline-based core knowledge but that also emphasizesactive and collaborative learning, inquiry-based approaches that help studentscreate useable knowledge out of information and apply that to solvingproblems. One can envisionthis as a new general education—not an introduction to the disciplines, but thedevelopment of general skills and attitudes that cut across alldisciplines. Recentinnovations with Web 2.0 innovations—blogs, wikis, etc.—point the way, but thereis much to do before a new pedagogy is fully understood, accepted, andintegrated into a new curriculum.

Finally,we can apply the “community” metaphor to new relationships that are beginningto emerge between institutions. We can anticipate more collaborative degree programs, especially at thegraduate level. We can alsoanticipate that Open Educational Resources movement will stimulate newpartnerships among institutions that have related specialties and betweenuniversities in developed countries and those in developing or transitionalcountries. These new partnershipsmost likely will be highly variable. Some may focus on undergraduate curricula, others on graduate programsor collaborative research that builds institutional capacity, or assistance toindustries served by multiple institutions. Laterthis month, for example, the Inter-American Organization for Higher Educationis holding a meeting in Ecuador to explore the idea of collaborative doctoralprograms—what the organizers are calling “sandwich” programs—in which facultymembers from Latin American institutions can earn their doctorates fromNorthern institutions while building a research capacity at their homeuniversity. The programs would useonline elements to reduce the amount of time Latin American faculty memberswould spend away from their home institutions, in an attempt to reduce theacademic brain drain.

Theinternational dimension of distance education in a transformed university wasbrought into focus by Stemenka Uvalic from UNESCO, ata distance education conference sponsored by CREAD in Ecuador in May 2008. She painted this picture in herkeynote: There are now 132 millionpostsecondary students worldwide; China and India have doubled theirenrollments in the past decade. However, countries are having trouble funding capacity to handledemand. This has stimulated threetrends: (1) new private (profit and nonprofit) institutions that do not receivegovernment funds (she noted that 80% of postsecondary students in Japan are nowin private institutions); (2) student mobility-2.4 million students went abroadin 2004, with 1 in 16 postsecondary students from Africa going abroad; and (3)the growth in open and distance learning (ODL). The number of open universities has doubled in Commonwealthcountries; the number of for-profit online providers is growing globally. This has an impact on studentmobility. Fully a third of allinternational students enrolled in Australian institutions studied from theirhome country in 2004. Uvalicprojected that “cross-border distance education may become the most significantdevelopment” in the years ahead.

Clearly,distance education has converged with the mainstream of higher education overthe past decade. The challenge forthe future is for us to help stimulate a broader transformation that will allowhigher education to meet the emerging needs of a maturing knowledge society inwhich very local communities are affected by global events. This is a momentous year on severalfronts. On December 10, we willcelebrate the 60^th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration ofHuman Rights. Distance educationorganizations around the world are collaborating to produce special issues oftheir journal to recognize the unique role of distance education in providingequitable access to education. Butthis is also the 40^th anniversary year of the assassinations ofMartin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, both of whom died in the process oftrying to make real the ideals of the Declaration. It is a reminder to us that these rights are not “naturallaws” but need to be claimed and made new in every generation. Higher education is a uniqueinstitution when it comes to helping our communities and individuals in themfulfill the promise of the Declaration. Our generations are lucky to be working at a time whendistance education has the potential to help our institutions realize themission of public education in a new and more complete way than has ever beforebeen possible as our institutions adapt themselves to the needs of theInformation Age. We can’t do this on our own, but I think the distanceeducation community—all of us in this room—have the experience and, as aresult, the perspective, that can help stimulate and guide change in each ofour institutions. It is animportant challenge and a wonderful opportunity at the same time.

Thankyou again for the Distinguished Service Award and for allowing me to sharethese ideas with you today.

After the Scandal

2011-11-09T10:49:00.000-05:00

All of us who have been touched by Penn State over the yearscannot go untouched by the Sandusky child abuse case—the charge that the formerPenn State football coach had molested young boys who were in his care throughhis leadership of the Second Mile charity and that Penn State leaders failed toproperly report the abuse.

I have lived in State College most of my adult life. I came here in 1968 as a junior and waslucky to get a full-time job at Penn State when I graduated. I left in 1987 and returned in 1994 asan Outreach administrator until my retirement in 2007. Jerry Sandusky was a neighborwhen our son was a little boy. I’ve worked closely with Tim Curley’s brothers at Penn State and knowGary Schultz as a colleague and leader. I even worked with Joe Paterno when I was in public broadcasting and heproduced a weekly show, TV Quarterbacks,during the football season. Oneyear, in an attempt to lure more viewers, I interviewed all of the coaches todevelop a give-away poster that described the role of each player.

Most people seem to think that this scandal is about thefootball program. However, theimpact is surely to be felt well beyond Beaver Stadium. And that is what bothers me most. For me and for many others, thefootball program is an interesting sideline to the university’s true mission asa public land grant university: to extend access to education and service toall Pennsylvanians in order to build a stable and productive society. Penn State has 24 campuses in additionto the University Park campus. Oneof them, the Shenango Campus, opened in Mercer County the year before Igraduated from high school. If itwere not for that new campus opening in my backyard, I may not have been ableto go to college. It allowed me tolive at home and to work pretty much full time while I completed the first twoyears of my undergraduate education and then to seamlessly move to UniversityPark to finish my degree. Thereare thousands of Pennsylvanians who have had the same experience of Penn State.

In the final decade of my career at Penn State, I wasresponsible for developing the university’s 25^th campus—the onlineWorld Campus. Through it, we arenow able to provide full baccalaureate and graduate degree programs to workingadults around Pennsylvania and, indeed, around the world. It is the natural extension of the landgrant mission for the Information Society.

For many thousands of alums in Pennsylvania and elsewhere thereal meaning of the university lies in its commitment to helping students—bothyoung people and adults—achieve their life goals by making education accessiblewhile simultaneously ensuring quality. There are, of course, other aspects of Penn State’s mission. Some see it more as a researchinstitution, for instance. Penn State research has made significantcontributions to improving the quality of life around the world, fromagricultural production to new materials that are used in artificial knees tonanotechnology to understanding and combating global climate change—all in thespirit of the land grant vision. Then, of course, there is the service element that helps individuals andorganizations implement the results of research to improve the quality oflife. Ultimately, it is theinteraction among these three missions—teaching, research, and service--that has madePenn State a great university.

The current scandal must run its course. I suspect it will change PennState in the process. However,when it has died down, I do hope that the University will again focus its energies tohow to re-articulate and re-commit its considerable talents to the land grantmission –to the integration of teaching, research, and service—in light of thechallenges presented to our economy and culture by globalization and informationtechnology. This, more than football or anythingelse, will ensure that Penn State continues to be a great university for manyyears to come.

Globalizing Agricultural Extension?

2011-10-13T12:53:00.000-04:00

Last night, I attended a meeting of the Torch Club—a groupof people from a variety of professions and disciplines who meet monthly fordinner and a talk by one of the members. Our speaker last night was Dr. Steve Smith, professor emeritus ofAgricultural Economics and Rural Sociology at Penn State. His topic: “Traditional Agriculture in Latin America.”

Steve focused on how village farmers in Peru usedcenturies-old techniques, including terracing to raise a variety of cropsyear-around in a very arid climate. It was, at one level, a very interesting travelogue, with wonderfulphotos of rural Peru and the farming families who produce 27 or more varietiesof potatoes and other vegetables in this demanding climate. However, at another level, it was abrilliant insight into how important these traditional farming techniques arebecoming as the world changes.

As Steve described traditional threshing process used inPeru, others in the group raised their hands to say, “That’s also done inEgypt” and “I’ve seen that in Turkey, too.” Steve noted that there are more than a billion traditionalfarmers worldwide and that their work is critical to the economic health ofmany countries around the world. He also reported that, in the next 30 years, the world’s demand for foodwill grow by 50%. In the past,agriculturalists looked to the Green Revolution to meet this demand. However, the impact of the GreenRevolution has begun to level off. Supporting traditional farmers—and helping them improve the output oftraditional farming techniques—will be critical to meeting the world’s need forfood in the next generation. Steveemphasized that the goal should not be to replace traditional farming withsomething else. These traditionaltechniques have proven to be effective in mountainous and arid areas whereother approaches would fail. Thekey is to help these farmers be more productive within the context of theirtraditional methods.

America’s research excellence in agriculture began as aresponse to the Industrial Revolution. The societal worry then (in the late 1800s) was that we might not beable to support the immigration and urbanization that drove industrialization;we feared we could not produce enough food to feed the cities. Land grant universities tookresponsibility for agricultural education and research and for extending thatknowledge to farmers and rural communities through the Cooperative ExtensionService. It was, in reflection, awonderful example of governments and social institutions working together in asustained effort to meet an ongoing societal need. American agricultural education became a model for theworld.

Today we are living in a globalized Information Society. The challenge will beto find productive ways in which our universities—in the United States and elsewhere—can help maketraditional farming and other forms of farming around the world more productivein the decades ahead. Do we need aglobal counterpart to the 19^th century U.S. commitment toagricultural research and education?

Tribute to a Mentor: In Honor of Marlowe Froke

2011-10-04T13:21:00.001-04:00

I thought of Marlowe Froke the other day, when I bought thelatest Tony Bennett “Duets” CD. Afew months before he died, Marlowe and I had lunch together, and I gave him thefirst “Duets” CD. He had told meearlier how much he liked Bennett and not newer music. I thought this would be a neat way forhim to bridge the generation gap.

Ifirst met Marlowe when he was 41 and General Manager of WPSX-TV, the publictelevision station at Penn State University. It was 1968, and I was a 20-year-old undergraduate studentlucky to have gotten a part-time job as a Production Assistant in the TVstudio. A year and a halflater, in spring 1970, I became a full-time staff member, first in productionand, later in programming and public information. I didn’t realize it at the time, but over the 19 years thatI worked in public broadcasting, Marlowe would become the only person who Icould rightly say was a mentor to me.

WPSXhad been on the air only three years when I first signed on as a part-timecamera operator. There was apalpable sense of family among the staff, who were all young and excited aboutbeing in at the beginning of an exciting new, creative venture. We knew we were innovatingand, within the university, operating a bit on the radical edge. It was a great time to be starting out.

Inthose days, “public” television was “educational” television. Throughout his career, Marloweemphasized the educational nature of our work. In our programming logs, general audience programs were“general education” (series like PennsylvaniaMagazine and Second Chair, forwhich I produced interviews with visiting authors like Jorge Amado and AnthonyBurgess). We produced programs forthe K-12 classroom on science (example: Sciencefor the Seventies, which in the 1980s became ISEE: Investigative Science for Elementary Education), art, andcurrent affairs (What’s in the News,which eventually went national), working under the guidance of top Penn Stateeducation faculty. And, ledinitially by Executive Producer Lou Florimonte and later by Diana Dean andGeorge Thurman, we produced adulteducation programs like Parenting, Food$en$e, and a series ofinterdisciplinary courses on Science, Technology, and Society with titles like The Behavioral Revolution and The Finite Earth. At the other end of the educationalspectrum, we produced how-to shows on everything from wood carving to playing bluegrassmusic. A Public Affairs unit, ledby the late P.J. O’Connell, documented the institutions of small townPennsylvania life—“The Spirit” ofPunxsutawney (about a small town newspaper) and documentaries on life in ahospital, a volunteer fire department, and a local smelting company, asexamples. James DeVinney headed aunit that produced programs on the arts, often featuring Penn State musicgroups—the Thalia Trio and the Alard String Quartet. And, of course, there were daily informational programs likeFarm, Home, and Garden from theCooperative Extension Service and The Stateof the Weather/The Shape of the World from the College of Earth and MineralSciences.

Allof this was in the spirit of using technology to extend access toeducation. That was Marlowe’spersonal vision, and it became, during his tenure, the hallmark of WPSX-TV,which declared on its station ID’s that it operated as a “continuing educationand public service.” In fact, one ofMarlowe’s first accomplishments in 1965 was to create a consortium of schooldistricts in our 29-county service area and to dedicate the daytime schedule toprograms broadcast for use in school classrooms.

Marlowehad been a journalism professor. When I moved into the Public Information position at WPSX-TV, one of myjobs was to write three press releases per week promoting new programs. I had been an English major and knewhow to write, but I didn’t know how to write press releases. For the first few weeks, Marlowe wouldsend every press release back with detailed edits. Eventually, I learned how to write and how to embody hisidea that even a press release was an attempt to create a more educated viewer.

Overtime, my role at WPSX-TV evolved from simply public information to what wecalled “Viewer Services.” The unitcovered several different ways in which we could engage viewers in broadcasts,from creating informed viewers (from press releases to feature stories in ourprogram guide to sending Penn State faculty members out to libraries to talkabout the context of programs (for instance, sending a historian out to talkabout “I, Claudius” on MasterpieceTheatre) to organizing viewers groups in communities to discuss programs toformal credit and noncredit courses. During this time, I was able to participate in two of Marlowe’s experiments inusing technology to extend access to education. One, in thelate 1970s, was to help create Pennarama, a statewide educational cable TVchannel, one of the first networked cable channels. Around that same time, he affiliated WPSX with theAppalachian Educational Satellite Program, which used an experimental ATS-6communications satellite to deliver teacher education and nursing educationprograms to schools and hospitals in the Appalachian Region. Using technology to extend access toeducation.

In1981, WPSX-TV and the on-campus media service unit—the University Division ofInstructional Services—were merged under Marlowe’s leadership into a groupcalled Media and Learning Resources. I became Director of Instructional Media in this new unit, responsiblefor developing instructional video materials for both on-campus and externaldelivery. Now, my main job was touse technology to extend access to education across multiple deliveryformats: broadcast, cable,satellite, and new technologies like videodisc. Marlowe’s vision had become my career. Together, we got involved inseveral national and international initiatives, including the NationalUniversity Teleconference Network, the International University Consortium forTelecommunications in Teaching (IUC), and Glenn Jones’ Mind ExtensionUniversity. Just as it had been inthe 1960s, it was wonderful to be actively involved in the distance educationinnovations of the 1980s. Suddenly, without really planning on it, I had become a distanceeducation leader in this new environment, thanks to Marlowe’s mentorship andhis vision: using technology toincrease access to education.

Ileft Penn State in 1987. Marlowehad passed me over for one of the few promotions that I thought I would be ableto get at Penn State: Station Manager. Later, he told me that the decision had been one of his hardest and thathe felt I could make a better contribution in the instructional area. Turns out he was right. I moved to Maryland and becameExecutive Director of the IUC and Associate Vice President for ProgramDevelopment at the University of Maryland University College.

Sevenyears later, Marlowe called me. Penn State had decided to hire an Assistant Vice President for DistanceEducation, and he encouraged me to apply. He also worked with his new Vice President to arrange for us to meet ata conference. Marloweretired before I was hired and returned to Penn State. His vision, which he honored for fourdecades at Penn State, had prepared the way for the World Campus, theuniversity’s online campus. Usingtechnology to extend access to education.

Manyof today’s leaders in online learning do not have a long history of using othertechnologies before the Internet. The field has been informed by a lot of new thinking, as a result. Some of us, though, have been throughthe other changes and understand that, one of these days, a new technology willcome along that will revolutionize distance education, just as television andcable and satellite and the Internet did. Marlowe’s message for this new generation might wellbe: Don’t identify yourself with aparticular technology itself, but with how you use whatever technology isavailable to extend education for those who otherwise would not have access.

Thanks,again, Marlowe.

Revisiting General Education

2011-10-03T09:52:00.000-04:00

The general education curriculum,as it evolved through most of the 20^th century, is a product ofhigher education’s adaptation to the Industrial Revolution. The question today is whetherthat curriculum will meet the needs of individuals and society a generationinto the Information Revolution. Doesthe changing societal context demand that we re-perceive General Education forwhat various writers have dubbed the Information Society, the KnowledgeSociety, the Skills Society, or Conversation Society?

The IndustrialRevolution required a higher level of education for professionals who wouldcreate industrial innovations. Atthe same time, America was becoming urbanized and, due to waves of newimmigrants, much more diverse. Recognizing that higher education increasingly was serving a spectrum ofstudents much broader demographically and vocationally than were served by theclassical curriculum, innovators like Dewey, Meiklejohn, and Hutchinsdetermined that General Education was not just about liberating the individual,but about preparing individual students from a broad spectrum of backgrounds tofunction effectively in society as professionals and citizens.

Bythe 1950s, the idea of General Education as a purposeful and comprehensivecurriculum intimately involved in the needs of a democratic society were firmlyrooted. The Truman Commission onHigher Education listed eleven principles or goals for General Education thatsummed up the function of General Education at mid-century:

· An ethical code of behavior

· Informed and responsible citizen solvingproblems

· Global interdependence

· Habits of scientific thought in personal andcivic problems

· Understanding others and expressing one’s self

· Enjoyment and understanding of literature andthe arts

· The ability to create a satisfying family life

· The ability to choose a useful and satisfyingvocation

· Developing critical and constructive thinkinghabits

Still, by the1980s—when the first impact of the Information Revolution on daily life wasbeginning to be felt—several national reports decried the disarray in theundergraduate curriculum. One,sponsored by the National Institutes on Education argued that excessivevocationalism had weakened the ability of a baccalaureate degree to “foster theshared values and knowledge that bind us together as a society” (Malcolm Scully, "U.S. Colleges Not Realizing Their Full Potential," Chronicle of Higher Education, October 24,1984).

A quarter of acentury later, the concerns are just as real, but we have a better sense of howthe revolution in information and communications technology is affecting theproblem. We are now ageneration into the Information Revolution. And, just as educators a generation into the InformationRevolution grappled with the rise of the “utilitarian university,” we arestruggling to understand just what it takes to prepare individuals to thrive ascitizens and professionals in a globalized knowledge society.

Drivers of Pedagogical Change

Severalsocietal factors are driving the need for changes in our approach to GeneralEducation. Prime among these is howthe Information Revolution has changed the way we think about knowledge andinformation. Today, information isubiquitously available on the web. In this environment, education is less about the transfer of alreadyorganized knowledge than about how to find and evaluate information and turn itinto useable knowledge that can be used to solve problems and providemeaningful insights. Activeinquiry, as a result, becomes both a means and an end of General Education--acore skill of the new curriculum.

The rapidity ofchange in a global economy is also changing how we work. Increasingly, work tends to get done byteams—often virtual—teams with members at multiple locations. This work environment putsgreater emphasis on collaboration rather than individual competition. Similarly, rapid changes in knowledgerequire an environment of continual, bottom-up innovation. Collaboration and innovation areboth professional and civic skills that need to be taught. Even on the most informallevel—as evidenced by Facebook and Twitter today—students need to develop asocial ethos to guide how they interact with social networks so that they candevelop and sustain professional, civic, and personal relationships throughboth face-to-face and virtual networks.

An underlying featureof the Information Society is that technology has removed geography as adelimiting factor in how we live and work in communities. Members of an Information Society liveand work in “distributed communities” (we may need a better term to describe thisphenomenon) that accomplish much of their work through technology. This includes virtual working teams,professional associations, and a wide variety of social networks. The boundaries of thesecommunities tend to blur, as people include both social and professionalcontacts in the same network. Inter-culturalunderstanding takes on a new immediacy: every culture is potentially present inour virtual communities. GeneralEducation, with its emphasis on educating the student for success within the contextof his/her society, can help individuals define how to conduct themselves inthese new communities.

Knowledgecreation, collaboration, innovation, and community building are workplace andcivic skills that should be incorporated into General Education for theInformation Society. Thechallenge of General Education in this new environment is:

· To create lifelong learners who can createknowledge

· To instill problem-solving and innovation asboth workplace and civic skills

· To develop the skills of collaboration acrosscultures and across geography

· To help students understand the nature of thecommunities in which they live and work so that they can become effectivemembers of these communities.

This suggeststhat the next generation of General Education should not just be a newcollection of courses, but courses guided by a common pedagogy designed toengage the students in the above goals, regardless of the discipline beingstudies. This new GeneralEducation pedagogy should be resource-centered, inquiry-based, andproblem-oriented and, perhaps, one that is better integrated with theprofessional studies part of the undergraduate curriculum. It should also encourage students to use online technologyto collaborate to findinformation, evaluate it and turn it into useful knowledge, and apply thatknowledge to solve problems. Theseare key elements in preparing students for life in an Information Society.

One new pedagogythat is gaining attention in the online learning community is the Community of Inquiry (http://communitiesofinquiry.com/model)pedagogy. This approach maintainsthat the educational experience is the intersection of three factors: social presence, cognitive presence,and teaching presence. Social Presenceis “the ability of participants to identify with the community (e.g., course ofstudy), communicate purposefully in a trusting environment, and developinter-personal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities”(Garrison, 2009). Teaching Presence is the design,facilitation, and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purposeof realizing personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learningoutcomes (Anderson, Rourke, Garrison, & Archer, 2001). CognitivePresence is the extent to which learners areable to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection anddiscourse (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2001).

In a recent Washington Post opinion piece ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/our-unprepared-graduates/2011/09/30/gIQAJGYBBL_story.html), Kathleen Parker noted a new study, “AcademicallyAdrift: Limited Learning onCollege Campuses” by Richard Arum and Jospia Roksa that reports that “Gainsin critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills are either‘exceeding small or nonexistent for a larger proportion of students” and that“Thirty-six percent of students experience no significant improvement inlearning (as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment) over four years ofhigher education.” Part of the problem,she notes, is the erosion of the core curriculum. I would argue that the problem is not simply that thecore subjects are no longer being taught, but that, when they are taught, theyare taught out of context—as simply introductions to the disciplines—ratherthan as skills one needs to be successful as an individual and as a citizen.

The quality ofAmerican undergraduate education has been lamented for a generation now. The key to improving it is notsimply to focus more on the major areas of study, but to examine the totalexperience and to develop a unique General Education curriculum that preparesstudents to be socially responsible professionals and citizens. A new approach to pedagogy ispart of the solution. A newapproach to the economics of undergraduate education that will allow for a moreintegrated general education curriculum to be organized of the traditionaldisciplines may also be needed. It is well-past time for the re-envisioning of General Education to betreated as an institution-wide issue.

NOTE: This is an expansion of an item that I originally posted in 2010.

University World News - GLOBAL: New guidelines for open educational resources

2011-09-14T14:16:00.000-04:00

The Commonwealth of Learning and UNESCO are collaborating to create guidelines for the development and sharing of open educational resources. The guidelines promise to give faculty and institutions much-needed standards to guide quality in the sharing of educational content globally.

University World News - GLOBAL: New guidelines for open educational resources

What College Can Mean to the Other America - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education

2011-09-12T10:03:00.000-04:00

While the political debate over whether higher education is a public good or a private good continues to rage, this article makes a convincing case that we must serve individuals to the benefit of society as a whole. In essence, serving the public good is the context in which colleges and universities should meet individual needs.

What College Can Mean to the Other America - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Thinking about Culture in International Online Learning

2011-09-09T08:57:00.001-04:00

In June, I had the opportunity to speak at a Policy Forumsponsored by the International Council for Openand Distance Education. TheForum focused on ICDE’s possible role in international inter-institutionalcollaborations. The discussion,with leaders from more than 30 countries, included a topic that is much on theminds of our open and distance education colleagues around the world, but thatis discussed very little within the United States: the cultural implications of cross-border delivery ofeducation.

Historically, it is fair to assume that most U.S.institutions expected that international students came to their campuses toimmerse themselves not only in their disciplines, but also in the Americanprofessional culture and, more broadly, in the American social culture. In return, the presence ofinternational students helped to broaden the horizons of local U.S. students,many of whom were away from home for the first time.

Online distance education creates a much differentenvironment, however—one in which the cultural intent of education becomes muchmore visible as a practical issue. For the most part, international students in online programs are notexpatriates. They tend to beworking adults, living and working in their home cultures and wanting to applytheir learning to their lives in their home countries. Online learning has also sparked anew movement—the Open Educational Resources(OER) movement—through which faculty developers of online materials can sharetheir online content with colleagues at other institutions worldwide; this focusesthe culture issue even further, as instructors in other countries will be using,with local students in their home countries, content developed by their U.S.colleagues.

Another aspect of this idea is that higher educationinvolves immersing the student in the academic culture. This has been the rationale forrequired residencies in graduate programs that prepare students for academiccareers. However, immersion inacademic life has proven not to be as relevant in programs that preparestudents for careers in non-academic professions; in this case, the betterargument is that students should be immersed in the professional culture inwhich they will work after graduation. The problem, until very recently has been that, aside from internshipsand practica, institutions could not provide this kind of immersion.

These developments raise some serious questions about how weengage these students—and, indeed, how we engage all students—into our onlinecommunities and how we contextualize content in this new learning environment. At minimum, we must becomeself-conscious of the cultural context in which we teach and in which we expectour students to work together as part of a learning community. The question is: What is the cultural context in which we ask our learningcommunity to operate within each course?

While it is safe to say that most online programs have notaddressed this issue, two approaches have begun to emerge. One—the multicultural approach—usesboth content and pedagogy to create a context in which students see themselvesand their professional studies in the context of a broader regional or globalcontext. This option has been anissue in Europe, where there has been a backlash against an approach thatwelcomes all cultures, at the perceived expense of the student’s homeculture. The second option is to use the onlineenvironment to help students contextualize the curriculum within their own localculture.

The issue is made more complex by the fact that most onlinecurricula are not limited to international students, but mix students from theinstitution’s home state, other states in the U.S., and internationalstudents. One might ask whether“local” students would benefit equally from an approach that encourages allstudents to apply their learning to their local situation.

Either approach requires a serious and self-conscious effortto create curricula, content, and pedagogies that reinforce the goal. At minimum, it means avoidingunnecessary—and usually unintended—cultural bias in the form of “inside” jokesand remarks about the culture (in the U.S., this often takes the form of jibesabout government processes or sports analogies). Beyond that, however, lie more complex pedagogicalissues that require participation by multiple faculty members in a program toagree on a shared approach. Insome cases—where multiple programs across multiple disciplines are involved,for instance—it may also require support (in the form of instructional designand editorial staff) at the institutional level.

Online learning is transforming how colleges anduniversities reach out internationally, both to other institutions and directlyto students. Collaborativeinternational degree programs and Open Educational Resources are twoexamples. Addressing theissue of culture is the next step in this transformation. Needed now are best practices andmodels to guide both content and pedagogy.

Public vs Private Good: Options for the Public University

2011-07-12T09:57:00.001-04:00

Speaking at a Penn State conference, “The Legacy and the Promise: 150 Years of Land-Grant Universities,”on June 24, 2011, Penn State President Graham Spanier noted five challenges to the future of the land grant ideal: privatization, globalization of public higher education, the erosion of public commitment to land-grant mission, 21st-century students' complex needs, and the quality of student learning in the context of today's faculty reward system.

"The privatization of American public higher education is one of the key trends out there, and the reason it is so relevant to the land-grant discussion is that many of the functions that universities like ours provide for our states have no offsetting income source. There is no tuition for what we do in fulfilling our land-grant mission," Spanier said. "There may be support for undergraduate education, but there is little or no opportunity to generate income in many of the units that we have considered fundamental to our land-grant activities. That is why decreasing commitment from state government has increasing implications, particularly in this area."

This is not a new issue, but it is gathering momentum in the current political climate. As early as 2005 President Spanier warned of “public higher education’s slow slide to privatization” due to skyrocketing tuition costs. At the same 2005 event, Katharine Lyall, president emeritus of the University of Wisconsin, commented on declining state support for higher education, noting, “America is rapidly privatizing its public colleges and universities, whose mission used to be to serve the public good. But if private donors and corporations are providing much of a university’s budget, then they will set the agenda, perhaps in ways the public likes and perhaps not. Public control is slipping away.” (See the New York Times website for a full report on the 2005 discussion: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/education/16college.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1309960952-CqQLudVp5Qywcxe1guXrVwe1guXrV )

Even earlier, in 1999, the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land Grant Universities (which Graham Spanier chaired) noted in its report, Returning to Our Roots: The Engaged Institution:

One challenge we face is growing public frustration with what is seen to be our unresponsiveness. At the root of the criticism is a perception that we are out of touch and out of date. Another part of the issue is that although society has problems, our institutions have “disciplines.” In the end, what these complaints add up to is a perception that, despite the resources and expertise available on our campuses, our institutions are not well organized to bring them to bear on local problems in a coherent way.

The problem, it seems, is both external to the university and internal. On one hand, there is the increasingly market-centered conservative political leadership, which believes in reducing the size and scope of government in favor of the private sector. Healthy markets, this view believes, will create healthy societies. The purpose of higher education (in fact, education generally) in this view is to create professionals who will fill roles in free markets. Education, seen as purely vocational, is thus a private good. On the other hand, a significant number of faculty members see our state and land grant institutions primarily as research universities; their careers increasingly are reliant on corporate research grants, private sector consulting, and building relationships with alumni who work in the private sector. For these academics, serving the public good is confined to the largely unrewarded “service” component of the tripartite mission of teaching, research, and service.

These trends have been unfolding for a full generation. Its roots might lie in a reaction against the social activism of the 1970s or in the wide acceptance of free market philosophy during the 1980s. However, it has also been a transformative generation: the first full generation of the Information Revolution. One could argue that this transformation has exacerbated the problem. In fact, if we look back at the same period in the 1800s—the first generation into the Industrial Revolution—we can see that the existing higher education system was not particularly responsive to the societal needs generated by the Industrial Revolution. It took new institutions—the land grant universities and state universities—to ensure that higher education was engaged in the social transformation of that era: the need to create teachers to educate the children of immigrants, the need to create new kinds of professionals for an industrial economy, and the need to engage academics in improving agricultural production needed to sustain urbanization and immigration. Interestingly, it is the social purpose of the same institutions that, in today’s transformation, is now being challenged.

How should higher education respond to this challenge? I can see at least four options:

1. Accept the fact that the public no longer sees education as a public good and speed the move to privatization. This option recognizes that, if there is no substance left to the land grant covenant, it would be best to simply move on to other sources of funding. I suspect there is already a sizable cadre of faculty and administrators that would be happy to privatize their institutions in order to better position them for closer, multi-dimensional relationships with corporate sponsors.

2. Maintain the social mission of our institutions, regardless of whether state government is able to fund that mission. The underlying problem with the first option is that it assumes that the public good mission of land grant universities is not really a mission, but just something we did because money was there to do it. That makes it easy to walk away from the relationship if the money dries up. However, Option Two assumes that serving the public good is, in fact, the mission—the soul—of the institution. If public funds are not available to support the mission, then funds must be found elsewhere, but the mission itself must not fail. Today’s public universities attract far more money from other sources than from direct state appropriations. The challenge is to direct these funds to support the core mission—the public good mission. One option is to reserve a specific percentage of all gifts, sports revenue, auxiliary enterprises, and other discretionary dollars to support the public mission. For instance, if a donor gives money for a building, then 5% of that amount could be set aside to reduce the cost of tuition for in-state undergraduate students or to support county Extension offices. Similarly, indirect costs recovered from federal or corporate research grants could be used to support core public good activities. The key to this option is to ensure that all activities that generate revenue contribute to the public mission at one level or another.

3. Organize the institution so that the public purpose can co-exist with the private purpose. It is often difficult for the public mission to find a voice in an academic conversation that is dominated by individuals whose research and teaching is more directed to private good. Public good activities are diverse—they range from evening/weekend programs to conferences to county-based Extension activities to branch campuses, community-based action research, and summer camps for kids to name a few—and, too often, they are unconnected. The institutional urge to decentralize the administrative and operational support for these activities further weakens the ability of the institution to speak with one voice on its public mission. The solution at some institutions may be to bring all of these activities under one senior administrator so that there is a leadership voice for the public mission. This does not mean that individual academic units would be free to ignore the mission (in fact, there should be a strong governance system to ensure that academic units also have a voice in these activities), but that there would be an organization that would help them innovate at very little financial risk or investment by the individual academic unit.

4. Embrace the public mission and work with the public sector to develop a new strategy for engagement. Ultimately, if the commitment to and understanding of the university’s public mission has become blurred both by the public and by the institution, perhaps the best step would be to start from scratch: to bring together both university and public thought leaders to (1) define and better understand the problems facing the state a generation into the Information Revolution and (2) agree on how the university can help individuals and social institutions (including government, employers, and social service organizations like K-12 schools) better respond to the challenges of the new societal context presented by the Information Society. A first step would be to convene a relatively small group of thought leaders to discuss the issues facing the state and to identify the broad areas where the university can best engage to help address issues. This would result in a strategic vision for engagement, which would be used as a discussion paper with smaller groups organized by region and/or by common interest (schools, health care, workforce development, industry, etc.). The original thought leadership group would then convene again to review the results of these smaller workshops and to agree on a five-year engagement strategy that would drive state funding, institutional fund-raising, and outreach programming. A subset of the thought leadership group could meet annually as an advisory panel to review progress.

This final option would result in a new and openly accessible covenant with the public and a new focus for engagement. It would also entail risk—especially the risk of the university losing its ability to act independently based on its own assessment of public need. This and other risks would have to be accommodated in designing this new approach to engagement. In the end, the challenge is to ensure that the public good that is generated is worth the risk.

Ensuring Quality in Cross-Border Inter-Institutional Collaborations

2011-06-28T10:11:00.001-04:00

On June 20, 2011, I had the honor of keynoting a Policy Forum sponsored by the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE). Since its founding in the 1930s (when distance education focused on correspondence study), ICDE has been the single global organization of institutions and individuals involved in open and distance education using a wide range of technologies. Its membership is truly international. The policy forum focused on ICDE's role in ensuring quality as institutions collaborate to deliver distance education programs and resources across national borders.

The Policy Forum preceded the ICDE Standing Council of Presidents meeting, which focused on the role of distance education in the new economy.

It was great to be a part of this global dialog, which provided a look over the horizon at the future of higher education in a globalized information society.

If 60 Is the New 18 . . . --Higher Education for the "New" Adult

2011-06-14T16:18:00.001-04:00

In the May 15, 2011 issue of Newsweek, Susan Cheever wrote, “If 50 is the new 30, 60-ish is in many ways a new kind of 18. We are coming of old age in a way that parallels our first coming of age. As we head for 60 we know that statistically we are old. But we don’t feel old, and we may even be more physically active than we were at 18 when we had never heard of Core Fusion or Bikram Yoga.” She adds, “We joke about being carded when we ask for the senior rate. Our desire to obey the rules can fall away. Life is suddenly very short and very precious. We are coming to the end of this wonderful ride. Now is the time! If we are not going to speak out and act out at 60, when will we?”

Cheever was writing about the marital woes of Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger. However, her comment raises a different question for those of us interested in the intersection of education and society: How do our educational institutions prepare people to be productive citizens, professionals, and individuals when, for most, life will extend well beyond the traditional “three score and ten”?

Just as our educational system itself was designed for an agricultural and industrial society, it also assumes that the goal is to prepare young people for a single career. Now, a generation into the Information Revolution, as we adapt our institutions to the needs of this new society, we also need to figure out how best to prepare our citizenry for a live that has a much longer—and more active—third act, one that (as Jeremy Rifkin suggested in The End of Work) could allow mature adults who are past their parenting roles to engage in new ways with their community and the broader society.

Certainly, this could be one aspect of revitalizing the general education curriculum: helping undergraduate students develop a sense of themselves as citizens of both a civil and a professional community. And, certainly, this could be a sub-goal of a new societal expectation—a nonmilitary kind of Selective Service (perhaps integrating Vista, Peace Corps, and related services)—that young people would complete a year of public service before they enter the adult workforce—to prepare them, as they enter the workforce, to think about what role they might play in society after their working years are over.

While those ideas may be dramatic enough—difficult enough to get our institutions and our state and federal governments to envision and implement—we should ask: What else can we do to prepare adults for an active, service-oriented third act? If Rifkin’s ideas come to pass, employers may well want to work with colleges/universities to prepare their mid-career staff for an effective transition to public service in order to make headroom for younger employees. We may even want to envision a new kind of degree or certificate that helps adults prepare for the transition.

It will take time for a very different view of higher education’s role in society to catch hold. It is worth thinking about now. What do you think?

Being an Adult Student

2011-05-19T09:29:00.002-04:00

On May 13, I was honored and delighted to give some remarks at the induction ceremony for Penn State's chapter of Alpha Sigma Lambda, the honorary society for adult learners. Most of my career has been focused on creating access for adult learners through continuing and distance education, so I was especially pleased that my colleagues invited me back to meet with this year's inductees on graduation weekend. Here are my remarks:

Let me add my welcome to the inductees who are able to be with us tonight and those who are not with us. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to see the progress that Alpha Sigma Lambda has made over the past few years and the growth in adult learners here at Penn State. For you, it is an incredible personal achievement—only those of us who have been adult learners know just how powerful this experience can be—but it also gives me a great deal of professional satisfaction, as someone who has spent many years advocating and organizing continuing and distance education programs, to see how the adult learner has moved into the mainstream of Penn State.

I recently interviewed Karen Cator, the director of educational technology for the U.S. Department of Education. She noted that the Administration has set a goal of increasing the percentage of high school graduates who go on to earn a college degree from the current 39% to 60% by the year 2020. That means greatly increasing the number of high school graduates who are prepared to enter college, but it also means doing a much better job of serving high school grads who have already entered the workforce and started their families. In short, we are about to enter an era where the traditional boundaries between higher education and K-12 education and between higher education and the workplace will be blurred and where helping adult learners will be central to the societal strategy of creating and sustaining the talent that our communities need to compete in the information society. So, tonight, we are celebrating both your personal achievement and your role as a pioneer in a new era of adult learning.

For me, this is an exciting development because, like you, I have been an adult student, too. We can argue over when one starts to be an adult, but I thought of myself as an adult learner from pretty early on. I had not originally thought I would be able to go to college, but I got the chance when Penn State opened a campus—the Shenango Campus—in my home community. That meant that I could live at home, work at night, and go to college during the day. I had started working at our local Arby’s while still in high school. By the time I started at Penn State, I was working as a shift manager, and, for one summer, travelled to Denver to open two new restaurants there. I thought that might be my future. So, when I knew I would be coming to State College to finish my baccalaureate, I suggested to the company that they open a store here and I could manage it while I finished my undergrad degree. They, in their wisdom, told me—this was in 1968—that they had done the research and there was no market for fast food in State College!

It was, for me, a fortunate market research mistake. When I got here I needed a job, and a fellow student at East Halls suggested that, since I was a journalism major (I later switched to English), I should go across the street to Wagner Building and get a job at the university’s public TV station—what is now WPSU-TV—writing press releases. As it turned out, they didn’t have any writing jobs, but they did hire me as a part-time production assistant. I learned all about television production during those two years—running camera, doing lighting and audio, painting sets—we did just about everything—and, when I graduated, they hired me as a full time production assistant. I had something that few of my fellow English students had when we graduated in 1970: a union job with benefits.

Eventually, I moved out of the studio and into Programming where, first, I did on-air promotion. Then, a couple of years after graduation, I became the public information director for the station. Finally, I got to write press releases! And handle all sorts of other PR and publications work. When I decided to work on a master’s degree, my first thought was to get a Master’s in Journalism, since I was working in both television and in public information. I talked with the Department Head, who told me—much to my surprise—that I didn’t need a master’s in journalism, since by then I had several years of good professional experience under my belt. His advice—some of the best I got in my education—was to get a degree, but get it in something I loved. So, I got my master’s in English, too.

In those days, our philosophy in public broadcasting was that the role of public information was to create an informed viewer—the first step in engaging the viewer in our programs. Over time, we developed other kinds of engagement: providing supplementary materials for local shows (for instance, for our “TV Quarterbacks” show with Joe Paterno, I interviewed all the coaches and did a poster on the roles of the different positions), organizing community activities with local social service organizations, sending faculty out to libraries to discuss programs, and, ultimately, organizing credit and noncredit courses around our programs. We also produced programs designed specifically for use in K-12 classrooms. Eventually, these were all gathered into a “Viewer Services” unit, which I was asked to head. Then, in the early 1980s, we combined WPSU with our on-campus instructional media group, and I focused exclusively on instructional activities as Director of Instructional Media.

It was an exciting period of technical innovation. In a very short period of time, we moved from being able to serve only our 29-country broadcast area to having a statewide educational cable TV channel and, starting in the late 1970s, experimenting with satellite delivery throughout the Appalachian region. By the 1980s, we were offering national live satellite teleconferences. Our very first satellite conference gave nuclear science faculty around the country their first chance to look at video from the damaged core inside the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. By the mid 1980s, we were using videoconferencing to extend a master’s degree in education from University Park to campuses in Western Pennsylvania and were producing video courses for national delivery through PBS. At the same time—while the World Wide Web was not yet upon us—we were experimenting with creating digital content and simulations on videodisc.

Throughout this period, our emphasis as an organization was not on a particular technology, but on how we could use various technologies to extend access to education both for young people and for adults in both formal and informal settings, in groups and individually.

By this time, I had decided that I wanted to stay in higher education. That meant getting a doctorate, so I enrolled part-time—taking one course per semester—in the doctoral program in Higher Education (we didn’t have a separate program in Adult Education at that time). The first course I took was a survey of American higher education, and I decided during that course that I would focus my research on the topic of general education. For most of us, general education is the “distribution” component of an undergraduate education—the stuff we need to take before we get to our major courses. Over the years, however, general education has meant many things to many people. I decided to write a history of general education, which brought me into a circle of educational philosophers from John Dewey to Robert Hutchins and, by extension, pioneering social educators like Jane Addams. It was quite a wonderful journey on its own. It was also, on hindsight, nice to be able to work on the cutting edge of technology during the day, but, at night, be able to retreat into a century of philosophy and educational innovation. My advisor, Hans Flexner, took me under his wing and encouraged me to develop my dissertation into a book, which eventually was published by Teachers College Press at Columbia University.

The interesting thing is that the two parts of my life were never quite separated. What we were doing with technology in both K-12 and higher education was, it turned out, simply a part of the next phase of educational innovation, the history of which I had been studying in my doctoral program. The two perspectives worked pretty well together, as things turned out. My doctoral work gave me a new perspective on the role of what we were by then calling “distance education”—a perspective I might not have developed if I had specialized in an area closer to my daily work environment. I was able to focus not so much on technology or public media per se, but on the social drivers that were stimulating innovation and on the broader implications for universities. This became very helpful when we launched the World Campus.

So, if there is one lesson that I can pass along from my experience as an adult learner, it is the advice that the Journalism Department Head gave me back in the 1970s and which I discovered again as I researched the history of general education: Study what you love and then apply that to your work.

The way higher education is structured, we have a tendency, as we advance in education, to become ever more narrow in our scope. We move from a very general high school education to an undergraduate education where we start, typically, by becoming generally acquainted with a lot of different disciplines (introductory biology, college algebra, surveys of American history and English literature, introductions to psychology and sociology), etc. in our first two years to a strong focus on one discipline in our junior and senior years. When we move on to graduate school, we tend to narrow our focus even further within our own discipline. By the time we get to a doctoral program, we are encouraged to specialize even further.

This is not a practical approach for us adult learners. Because we already have experience as workers, as heads of families, and as citizens who are involved in many ways in our communities, the challenge for us is not necessarily to specialize—I acknowledge that we all need a focus in our work—but to develop a new dimension, a new facet to our lives that puts our personal and professional experiences into a new context and that allows us to bring all of our experiences and knowledge to new situations.

This is especially important today. In many ways, the Information Society is also the Innovation Society. Things are changing pretty quickly out there, and our employers—regardless of the field—need people who can innovate on the front lines to help our organizations be competitive in this new society.

So, let me leave you with this idea. As you move ahead and continue your education after this weekend’s graduations, look for opportunities not only to develop specialized knowledge and skills, but also to expand your horizons, to add new perspectives that will allow you to be successful in the unknown territory that lies ahead.

Congratulations, again, and my thanks to Dr. Rubba for inviting me to join you tonight.

Engagement: A Vision for the Land Grant Mission in the Information Era

2011-04-15T16:53:00.000-04:00

In the opening pages of The Americans: The Democratic Experience, Daniel Boorstin describes the national spirit in which the land grant university developed:

The century after the Civil War was to be an Age of Revolution—of countless, little-noticed revolutions, which occurred not in the halls of legislatures or on battlefields or on the barricades, but in homes and farms and factories and schools and stores, across the landscape and in the air – so little noticed because they came so swiftly, because they touched Americans everywhere and every day. Not merely the continent, but human experience itself, the very meaning of community, of time and space, of present and future, was being revised again and again; a new democratic world was being invented and was being discovered by Americans wherever they lived.

Educating for Democratization and Industrialization

The land grant university can be understood as a response to both democratization and industrialization. Boorstin describes one of the early advocates for the land grant concept—Jonathan Turner of Illinois—who argued for “A State University for the Industrial Classes.”

All civilized society [Turner noted] was “necessarily divided into two distinct cooperative, not antagonistic, classes”; the “professional” class (doctors, lawyers, men of letters, and preachers) comprised only about 5 percent of the people, while the “industrial” class included all the rest. . . . To build a true democracy, Turner proclaimed, the industrial classes must also have their universities, at least one in each state. . . .The new universities would teach agriculture, manufacturing processes, and bookkeeping; they would provide experimental farms and orchards and herds of stock; and they would be “open to all classes of students above a fixed age, and for any length of time.” (p. 483)

The land grant university gave the “industrial classes” the opportunity to gain a higher education and fill new professional roles as engineers, scientists, and educators in an industrializing society. At the same time, the land grant university responded to a significant issue in society: how to maintain the pace of industrialization in light of massive immigration and urbanization that were essential to new industries. The land grant university became a center for research into agricultural productivity and, through the Cooperative Extension Service, took its findings directly to farmers in their fields. This transformed agriculture and ensured that the growing cities would be able to feed their burgeoning populations. At the same time, land grant institutions—along with state-owned “normal” schools—provided public school teachers to staff a critical workforce development need: to ensure that immigrants were acculturated to American life and that more could graduate from high school and move on to higher education.

The Need for a New Covenant

Two centuries after the first inklings of the democratic and industrial revolutions, we find ourselves a generation into a new transformation—the Information Revolution—and a vastly different set of social needs. Some comparisons illustrate the need for refreshing our vision of the role of the land grant university:

· Where the Industrial Revolution was concerned with immigration, the Information Revolution is concerned with globalization; people no longer need to come to the United States to participate in its economy.

· Where urbanization drove industrialization and public policy in the 19^th century, the trend at the beginning of the 21^st century is ex-urbanization, as technology makes it possible for people to live in geographically dispersed professional communities.

· While the need for engineers, business professionals, and new social professionals (educators, health care professionals, etc.) drove higher education in the Industrial Revolution, the Information Revolution requires a larger, more diverse cadre of “knowledge workers” with some level of higher education and the ability to adapt easily to rapid change; the emphasis is less on specific professional training than on innovation.

It is becoming increasingly clear that one area where we may see profound change is the workplace itself. A May 14, 2009, Time Magazine report on “The Future of Work” noted:

Ten years ago, Facebook didn't exist. Ten years before that, we didn't have the Web. So who knows what jobs will be born a decade from now? Though unemployment is at a 25‑year high, work will eventually return. But it won't look the same. No one is going to pay you just to show up. We will see a more flexible, more freelance, more collaborative and far less secure work world.

As early as 2001, a National Academies of Science report, Building a Workforce for the Knowledge Economy, reporting on the “tightness” of the available workforce among trained information technology professionals, noted:

. . . because the underlying information technologies change so rapidly, there is concern that the labor market does not work as efficiently in this arena as economic theory would predict—i.e., that rising wages will not relieve the tightness, at least not “in time.” (p. xiii).

One reason why labor market ideas created during the industrial period might not work in the information era is that jobs will be distributed well beyond national borders. Another is that much work is increasingly automated, requiring less intensive human activity. The number of “jobless recoveries” that we’ve seen in the past few economic turndowns might be one signal of a trend toward a less intensive workforce. A trend like this could threaten basic democratic foundations of our society by creating a permanent underclass of under-employed workers. Such a trend would require a significant social policy change to ensure that all Americans were able to support themselves and their families.

Several social policy options could be envisioned. For example, instead of having fewer people with jobs, social policy could be directed at having all people work fewer years, somewhat easing entry of young people into the job market. One way to achieve this goal would be to make national service part of an early retirement system, making room more quickly for younger workers to come into the workforce during the years when they need money to raise their families and allowing older workers to move into volunteer or social-service work through a kind of national pre-retirement service system after their children are raised, allowing them to apply the lessons learned during their working days to the problems facing their communities.

What, then, are the implications for the land grant university?

Engaging Society

The first step is to re-envision the land grant mission to engage the new society that it serves. Given the diverse—and often competing—cultures that have evolved in our institutions, the land grant mission must co-exist with other powerful missions. Over the past century—and especially during the transitional period since World War II—the land grant university has been transformed. Our land grant universities are now comprehensive research universities. Their impact—and source of funding for research—often reaches well beyond their state boundaries. The institutional culture has become more diverse in the process.

The comprehensive research university is typically seen as having three components: teaching, research, and service. The land-grant mission is often viewed as part of the service component. There may a tendency, therefore, to isolate the land grant mission from the other competing goals. That, in my view, would be a mistake. The land grant mission must be seen as the means by which the university engages with the community across all three components: Engaged teaching, engaged research, and engaged service. The land grant mission is thus infused throughout the university. That said, however, there must also be a champion for this mission within the university leadership. Typically, that role falls to the Vice President for Extension or Outreach, which typically works on the financial and political periphery of the institution. In the Information Age land grant university, leadership for the land grant mission should be positioned so that it can champion engagement across all three dimensions of the mission. Each land grant university has a somewhat different set of cultural and political issues, so there is no single organizational solution. Nevertheless, finding the right place for the leader who will champion the land grant mission in the diverse culture of our institutions is essential.

It also is clear that, in the Information Society, the land grant mission must push the boundaries of the institution in at least two directions. First, higher education needs to engage better with the K-12 segment, helping to improve access to courses that high school graduates will need in order to get into college and, especially, to majors that are important in the Information economy. This engagement should blur the old boundaries between K-12 and higher education and could lead to accelerated degrees and other innovations at a scale needed to create and maintain the new workforce. Second, higher education needs to take a lead in creating post-retirement skills for older adults, preparing them to play new roles in their communities after retirement. Thirdly, higher education needs to build new collaborative relationships—new forms of engagement among universities, communities, and employers that encompass all three dimensions of the higher education mission: engaged teaching to create and maintain a competitive workforce; engaged research to help businesses, farms, and other employers innovate and stay competitive; and engaged service support communities and families in this new social era.

State Education Budgets: Stimulate Innovation

2011-03-21T13:12:00.000-04:00

This is turning into a tough year for public higher education in the United States. Since a raft of new Republican Governors took office in state houses around the nation, cuts in higher education have been seen as a special target to help states deal with deficits. In Pennsylvania, for instance, Republican Governor Tom Corbett has proposed that the Commonwealth cut the state appropriation for its four state-related institutions—Penn State University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Temple University, and Lincoln University—by more than 50%. That would reduce Pennsylvania’s appropriation for its land grant university—which maintains 24 campuses around the state in addition to the statewide Cooperative Extension Service—to a mere 4 % of the University’s total budget.

My purpose here is not to explore in any depth why Republican Governors seem to be so anti-education. My purpose is to suggest that this is, at best, a wrong-headed solution. The challenge to Pennsylvania and other states is not simply to cut costs, but to re-position education so that their economies can thrive in a new era—the so-called Information Society or Knowledge Society.

Most of our educational system is organized to support the an industrial economy. In fact, our system of public universities and public schools is a direct response to the Industrial Revolution. In those days, policy makers felt that 25% of high school graduates needed to go on to a college degree in order to provide society with the engineers, scientists, teachers, and business managers needed to sustain an industrial economy. And, in fact, public education has done a great job in meeting that challenge.

Today, however, we no longer live in an industrial economy. We live in a globalized, information economy. In this economy, education has become critically important not only to provide managers and professionals, but to enable the broader workforce to compete in a global workforce and to help their employers innovate from the bottom up in a very competitive, constantly changing technology-driven economy.

The federal government has recognized the realities of this new environment by challenging both K-12 and higher education to increase the percentage of high school graduates who go on to get a college degree from the current rate of 39% to 60% by the year 2020. Within this vision is a two-fold challenge: (1) to expand access to higher education so that it can absorb an almost 50% increase in undergraduate students and (2) to expand by about the same percentage the number of high school graduates who are qualified to enter higher education.

While some cuts to state education appropriations may be needed in the short run, the real challenge to state government is not to vilify teachers and public education in general, but instead to engage educators in how to address this and related education challenges that are intricately connected to economic well-being. Cutting budgets will not necessarily result in innovation. Without a new engagement in innovation, cutting school budgets just means larger classes and fewer specialized courses—often, the same courses that students need in order to get into college.

Rather than simply cut budgets or undercut the role that teachers can play in the lives of our young citizens, let’s acknowledge the need to trim in the short run, but balance that by stimulating innovation in several key areas:

1. Invest in Dual Enrollment Courses – Many students find themselves in school districts that are either to small or too poorly funded to maintain courses that students need in order to get into college. Dual enrollment courses are courses offered by colleges and universities that can be taken by high school students and that count toward high school graduation and college credit. A strategic commitment to dual enrollment will mean that more students will graduate from college not only prepared to move onto higher education, but with some college credits already under their belts. A long-term dual enrollment strategy could also result in accelerated degree programs that combine high school study with summer internships, bringing better educated employees into the workforce faster.

2. Invest in STEM – The need for renewed emphasis on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) curricula has been long recognized at the national and state levels. These programs are an essential ingredient to creating an Information Age workforce that can attract new industry to a state or help existing companies adapt to the new economy. A STEM investment could be directly tied to a dual enrollment strategy or could be part of a refocused general education program in the undergraduate curriculum. It is also an important component to teacher preparation.

3. School/Community/Employer Collaborations – One way that higher education can directly serve local communities is by creating collaborative degree programs with local employers in order to build a sustainable workforce. These collaborations may involve local school districts, employers, and unions and involve a mix of dual enrollment courses, on-campus courses, community service, and workplace internships. Ultimately, these programs would fund themselves, but state funds would be useful in creating models.

4. Revitalize Cooperative Extension – The Cooperative Extension Service was created at the height of the Industrial Revolution out of a fear at state and federal government level that the United States would not be able to sustain industrialization—and the urbanization and immigration that went with it—if we could not also improve agricultural production and make farm life more attractive to new generations of farm families. Today, there is a similar concern that, at the height of the Information Revolution, we need to revitalize our smaller communities in order to bring new knowledge-based businesses that can thrive in smaller communities. One challenge here is to bring broadband Internet access to our smaller communities so that companies can maintain their global presence while taking advantage of the stability of small town culture. We need to re-envision the ideals of Cooperative Extension for this new environment.

In March 2011, we are facing an important turning point. New governors, brought into power by fear and frustration caused by the Great Recession, have aggressively moved to cut spending as the quickest way to reduce deficits. With less than four months remaining until the new fiscal year begins, our educational institutions have little time to respond creatively to a significant budget reduction. The result will be to pull back, rather than to engage around a new agenda. State governments have an alternative: engage educators at all levels to save dollars where we can, but also to re-envision the institutional mission of public education in light of the Information Revolution and get us started down the road toward long-term sustainability in a globalized knowledge economy.

Rethinking General Education in Tight Economic Times

2011-03-02T16:31:00.001-05:00

Today’s newspaper reported on the second Penn State undergraduate program to be evaluated for closure through the curriculum review process that is now underway. Both programs—Science, Technology, and Society Program and Integrative Arts—share some important traits: (1) they are both interdisciplinary (STS is also inter-college) and (2) they began as general education initiatives that evolved into undergraduate majors.

It probably is natural that this evolution would take place. A research university is a highly decentralized culture where the academic department is the basic family unit. Faculty members who create these initiatives tend to be broad thinkers who identify with the broader culture outside academia rather than with the family unit. However, after the initial wave of innovation, faculty members in programs like these tend to create a new family unit within the culture of the institution. Interdisciplinary initiatives become their own departments; once-radical views adjust, however uncomfortably, to the older culture. Some ideas—area studies programs are a good example—find long-term homes in a college. Others never quite fit in.

Perhaps the part of the curriculum that suffers most from this is general education, for which these programs were launched in the first place. One solution might be to focus more attention on interdisciplinarity in general education. This has been done at Penn State several times over the years. As an undergraduate student in the 1960s, some of my best general education courses were interdisciplinary courses in the Humanities. There were also a series of interdisciplinary courses in the sciences: Physical Sciences 07 and 08, Biological Sciences 01, 02, and 03, and others. These courses provided a good overview of the liberal arts and science worldviews for nonmajors. They were focused on understanding humanistic and scientific thinking, but not necessarily how those ways of thinking could help us live a better life. The old idea of general education as the “distribution” part of the undergraduate curriculum was reinforced: general education was about getting to know something about disciplines that were not in your major.

There is another view of general education. In this view, the majors and minors prepare students for the professions, but general education prepares students to be productive citizens and happy individuals. This kind of general education is naturally interdisciplinary, because it is focused on the external world and its problems, rather than on the traditional structure of the institution. This approach took root in the first half of the twentieth century. Columbia’s Contemporary Civilizations Program and Chicago’s Great Books Program are two examples. A truly interdisciplinary general education program would follow in the path of these groundbreaking programs and, at the same time, provide an environment in which new ideas could flourish across disciplines.

As institutions revisit their curricula to find savings, they should also step back and look more broadly at the purpose of the curriculum. General education serves a different purpose than do the majors and minors. An interdisciplinary general education, envisioned as preparing students to be productive citizens, would allow institutions to protect some space for innovation while also avoiding the creation of un-productive majors. Perhaps this economy gives us an occasion for a fresh look at general education.

Penn State's STS Pogram: A Future in General Education?

2011-01-20T09:40:00.000-05:00

In September, I posted on this blog a piece about the death of Dr. Rustum Roy, who was, among other achievements, one of the founders of the interdisciplinary Science, Technology, and Society curriculum at Penn State. Recently, I was sad to read in the Centre Daily Times that Penn State is considering closing this program, pending Faculty Senate approval. I am sad not only for Dr. Roy’s memory, but for the lost potential to Penn State’s general education program.

A Wikipedia entry about STS indicates that more than two dozen universities worldwide have developed baccalaureate programs in STS. Since 2005, four U.S. institutions have launched new STS programs. Penn State’s STS curriculum—a collaboration between the colleges of Engineering and Liberal Arts—is positioned as an undergraduate minor. Here, perhaps, lies the problem. STS developed in an era that launched a number of “area studies” programs—Women’s Studies, Asian Studies, African-American Studies, etc. Many of these area studies have become established as academic departments in their own right. STS, however, might better be structured not as a separate research and teaching area, but as a component of general education.

Wikipedia defines STS as “the study of how social, political, and cultural values affect scientific research and technological innovation, and how these in turn affect society, politics, and culture.” It emerged as an interdisciplinary innovation in the 1960s, a time up general social upheaval, but also a time when we were just becoming aware that a new dynamic was forming. Call it the Information Age or the Knowledge Society, or whatever, this new age required citizens who could see the intricate interactions among scientific research, technological innovation, and social values. We are now a generation into this new era, but I don’t think we are past the point where we need to educate citizens about the interactions among science, technology, and society. If anything, this kind of interdisciplinary curriculum is more urgent than ever.

The ultimate value of STS, then, may not be as a separate research and teaching specialty. Instead, its real value may be as part of a general education curriculum. One can imagine (as I suggested in my earlier posting about STS) a complete general education curriculum structured around STS as a theme, similar to the old Contemporary Civilizations program at Columbia. However, STS is more likely to gain acceptance as an option within a more traditional distribution-style general education curriculum. It is easy to visualize STS courses that would meet general education distribution requirements in science, social sciences, and humanities. The interdisciplinary nature of STS courses would facilitate cross-posting over several distribution areas. In addition, institutions could develop upper-division STS courses that serve as interdisciplinary, issues-focused baccalaureate capstone courses that send new professionals out into the workplace better prepared to deal with STS-related issues in their fields.

I fully understand why Science, Technology, and Society as a minor area would be considered for closure. However, re-conceiving the STS vision within the general education curriculum would be a great way to maintain the heart of the program and prepare undergraduates to engage in a society that continues to be transformed by science and technology.

Restoring the Covenant

2011-01-05T11:05:00.000-05:00

At breakfast the other day, a British colleague reported that the UK is considering a new funding plan for higher education. Under the plan, students would pay no fees to attend college; instead, they would pay after they graduate and, one supposes, are employed and making money. I don’t know the details of this plan. However, I can imagine consequences—unintended or not—that are worth discussion.

First, I can imagine that it would further increase the utilitarian bent of most college curricula, since institutions would be rewarded when their students become gainfully employed. Curricula that cost the student as much as other professional programs, but that do not result in good-paying jobs for most alums (journalism comes quickly to mind), might find a hard time getting internal support, even if there are students who want to study these areas.

Second, one might ask what the impact would be on the student’s perception of the general education curriculum? This part of the curriculum (at least in institutions that take general education seriously) is designed less to prepare one for a career than to prepare one for life as a member of the broader society. If costs are too closely aligned with the ability of a student to make money, will the student be willing to pay for this part of his/her education?

It also led me to think more broadly about how about higher education is perceived these days. Is higher education a “public good” or a “private good?” When the general population—through tax dollars—invests in the education of individual citizens, are we doing it solely for economic development reasons (to build a professional leadership force that can make us competitive and create jobs for less-skilled workers), or do we provide public funding to higher education because we want our professional and business leaders to be able to function – to make informed judgments, for example – in ways that benefit society as a whole? Or both?

Now I have a bias on this issue. I believe that higher education and, indeed, all levels of education from pre-school onward, are essential to maintaining a free and democratic society. This is not just for its relatively short-term economic impact, but because, in a globalized, information-based society, we cannot afford to have separate classes based on educational attainment. Nor can we afford to have a society in which everyone is trained in a specialty, but with no common culture to hold us together and to make us want to have our work serve the community as a whole.

Massey: Honoring the Trust

This is not a new issue. Writing in 2003, William F. Massey noted, “College may be the ticket to the good life, but its benefits for democracy and culture no longer command a top priority for the public purse. Higher education increasingly is viewed as a private rather than a public good: very important for those who get it, but something most government officials can safely take for granted” (Honoring the Trust, p. 4). He summarizes the problem as follows:

Participation rates have soared, but schools have not fully embraced the educational needs and competencies of their broadened constituencies. Institutional behavior has become increasingly market driven, but the markets generally reward prestige—they don’t gauge the true quality of education, and therefore they produce a perverse set of incentives” (p. 5). He argues that “Colleges and universities are not all they can be, that they can improve the quality of education without spending more, dismantling the research enterprise, or undermining essential academic values” (ibid.).

Massy posits seven “core quality principles” that can help an institution restore public trust:

· Define educational quality in terms of student outcomes

· Focus on the processes of teaching, learning, and student assessment

· Strive for coherence in curricula, educational processes, and assessment

· Work collaboratively to achieve mutual involvement and support

· Base decisions on facts whenever possible

· Identify and learn from best practice

· Make continuous quality improvement a top priority

Kellogg: Returning To Our Roots

While Massey’s principles focus on basic operational principles, a more far-reaching response was articulated by the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land Grant Universities. From 1996 to 2000, the Commission studied different aspects of the university’s role in a transforming society and called for a transformation in the relationship between the university and the community it serves. Like Massey, the Commission noted “growing public frustration with what is seen to be our unresponsiveness” and “a perception that we are out of touch and out of date” (Returning to Our Roots: Executive Summaries of the Reports of the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land Grant Universities, p. 14). The Commission’s response was that state and land grant universities must go beyond traditional “outreach” and “service” missions and instead aim for “engagement:”

Engagement goes well beyond extension, conventional outreach, and even most conceptions of public service. Inherited concepts emphasize a one-way process in which the university transfers its expertise to key constituents. Embedded in the engagement ideal is a commitment to sharing and reciprocity. By engagement, the Commission envisions partnerships, two-way streets defined by mutual respect among the partners for what each brings to the table (ibid.).

Spanier: Restoring the Covenant

Penn State President Graham Spanier, who chaired the Kellogg Commission, recently described five strategies that land grant universities should consider in response to the Commission’s charge to “restore the covenant.” In remarks delivered at the National Outreach Scholarship Conference on October 4, 2010, President Spanier noted the following:

· First, focus on activities that play to their particular strengths, pruning those that don’t have a measurable impact or are not aligned with academic strengths.

· Second, increase access for non-traditional students, who are the most rapidly growing segment of the higher education population.

· Third, leverage technology to expand the reach, foster new kinds of communities, and engage students.

· Fourth, push for the inclusion of engaged scholarship in the promotion and tenure process.

· Fifth, find new ways to engage the public to fund engagement work and become more entrepreneurial in seeking out other sources of support.

These strategies are especially important today, as public universities struggle to maintain quality and services while living with less public financial support in light of the continuing recession. While some would see this as a time to pull back from the commitment to public engagement, I believe this is a good time to consider how the university can more effectively reach out, to not only restore the trust and covenant with the public, but to re-invent it for new social and economic times: to make the land grant university as relevant to today’s globalized knowledge society as it was to the industrial society that gave it birth.

Getting Started

Where do we start to implement changes that will not only restore the covenant but refresh it for a new era?

New University-School Collaborations Certainly one opportunity is to build new linkages between the land grant university and the K-12 sector. There is a general agreement that the Knowledge Society will require that a higher percentage of workers have some higher education experience than was the case in the Industrial Age. With that in mind, the Obama Administration has set a goal of increasing the percentage of high school graduates who earn a college degree from the current 39% to a target of 60% by the year 2020. This will require not only that we improve the success rate of high school graduates who currently go on to college, but that our high schools produce more graduates who are prepared to enter college. Engagement between universities and high schools seems like an obvious strategy.

This strategy might take several forms—none of which are mutually exclusive:

· We are already beginning to see dual enrollment initiatives in which students earn high school and college credit simultaneously in courses taught by university faculty members.

· Universities can create virtual high school programs, directly teaching high school students the skills they will need to successfully enter a university program. This could be another path toward dual enrollment.

· These kinds of initiatives not only increase the number of high school graduates who are ready to enter college, they offer an opportunity—especially when combined with service learning and internships—students to complete a degree sooner, contributing to accelerated degree programs that allow students to more quick enter the workforce.

Discipline-based Engagement Strategies Graham Spanier noted that each institution should build on its strengths in the process of building new engagement strategies. One way to ensure this would be to ask each academic college (and, in some cases, individual departments) to establish an Engagement Vision that would drive the engagement strategy. This would help overcome a perception that, within academic units, faculty members tend to define success in terms of academic research rather than societal engagement. A college/department level engagement vision will provide a means by which to evaluate strategies and to measure progress over time.

Community Engagement Strategies A key to establishing public trust and creating a true covenant would be for public universities to directly engage their communities (for land-grant universities, this would mean a statewide effort) to identify needs and to collaborate on strategies by which the university can directly engage with the community, using public media—television, radio, the Internet—to address the broad public and partnering with community organizations to help address needs.

An Extension Service for the Knowledge Society In the Industrial Era, land grant universities created the Cooperative Extension system to improve agricultural production—a vital issue in a time when we needed a solid agricultural base to support our rapidly urbanizing, immigration-focused industrial economy. A key element of Cooperative Extension is that faculty members were expected to spend time in the field, directly helping agriculturalists to improve their products. This concept needs to be re-envisioned for the Knowledge Society.

The Need for an Institution-wide Strategy

Typically, when ideas like this are raised, the response is: “We’re already doing this.” What that usually means is that some individual faculty members or individual units are doing something in one or more of these arenas. This is wonderful. These faculty members and individual units should be recognized and rewarded for their commitment to engagement. However, the real need is for these activities to be part of a visible institution-wide strategy and commitment. This is the long-term leadership challenge for our public universities.

IACE Hall of Fame: Helping Across Generations

2010-12-23T09:24:00.000-05:00

I am just completing my term as Chair of the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame. This fall, we held our annual induction ceremony at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara. Below is an article about that event that I wrote for the Hall of Fame Newsletter:

After this year’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Guadalajara, I was invited to participate in a panel discussion on the Role of Continuing and Distance Education in the Knowledge Society at the Mexican Association for Continuing and Distance Education. Jose Morales Gonzales (HOF 2002) offered an opening statement that addressed the many ways in which technology and globalization are affecting society and, in turn, education. He then asked each panelist to respond briefly to a question targeted at their special role in the field.

I was asked about how continuing and distance education respond to the needs of the Information Revolution and what role can the Hall of Fame and its members can play in this new era.

I noted that we are already a generation into the Information Revolution. There are many ways to define the beginning of this new era. However, my personal milestone is the publication, in 1970, of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, the book that first planted in the popular mind the idea that things had changed and would continue to change dramatically. The careers of many Hall of Famers span this period. They are the first generation of adult and continuing education scholars and practitioners whose total careers were spent helping our institutions, our students, and our policy agencies adapt to the new reality that was emerging in the first generation of the Knowledge Society. That experience can provide an invaluable roadmap for today’s emerging leaders, who will spend their careers shaping the second generation of the Knowledge Society.

Several of the societal needs created by the Knowledge Society strike to the core competencies of adult and continuing educators. Most will agree that the Knowledge Society will require more individuals to have some level of postsecondary education. This will require that our colleges and universities dramatically increase access to both recent high school graduates and to current workers. This necessity will move continuing and distance education closer to the mainstream of higher education. It will also stimulate new collaborations between institutions—an area where many Hall of Fame members have been innovators.

In short, adult and continuing education has much to offer in the Knowledge Society, and members of the International Adult and Continuing Education can play an important role in helping emerging Second Generation leaders transform the mainstream of higher education in our countries around the world.

Continuing and Distance Education in the Knowledge Society

2010-11-02T16:48:00.000-04:00

In October 2010, I had the honor of chairing the 15th annual induction ceremony of the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame. The ceremony was held in at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara in conjunction with the Mexican Association for Continuing and Distance Education conference. It was a delightful event, in which nine leaders from six nations on four continents were brought into the Hall of Fame’s increasingly global community. My thanks to Jose Morales Gonzales (HOF 2002) for hosting the event.

After the ceremony, I was invited to participate in an AMECYD conference panel discussion on the Role of Continuing and Distance Education in the Knowledge Society at the Mexican Association for Continuing and Distance Education. Jose Morales offered an opening statement that addressed the many ways in which technology and globalization are affecting society and, in turn, education. He then asked each panelist to respond briefly to a question targeted at their special role in the field.

I was asked about how continuing and distance education respond to the needs of the Information Revolution and what role can the Hall of Fame and its members can play in this new era. I noted that we are already a generation into the Information Revolution. There are many ways to define the beginning of this new era. However, my personal milestone is the publication, in 1970, of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, the book that first planted in the popular mind the idea that things had changed and would continue to change dramatically. The careers of many Hall of Famers span this period. They are the first generation of adult and continuing education scholars and practitioners whose total careers were spent helping our institutions, our students, and our policy agencies adapt to the new reality that was emerging in the first generation of the Knowledge Society. That experience can provide an invaluable roadmap for today’s emerging leaders, who will spend their careers shaping the second generation of the Knowledge Society.

Several of the societal needs created by the Knowledge Society strike to the core competencies of adult and continuing educators. Most will agree that the Knowledge Society will require more individuals to have some level of postsecondary education. The Obama Administration, for example, has set a goal of increasing the percentage of high school graduates who go on to earn a college degree from the current 39 percent to 60 percent by 2020. This will require that our colleges and universities dramatically increase access to both recent high school graduates and to current workers. It will also require that a higher percentage produce high school students graduate with the skills needed to move onto higher education. Around the country, continuing and distance education units have been at the forefront of innovation in this arena. They have dramatically increased the number and diversity of college degrees available to working adults through online learning, evening programs, and blended programs. They have also pioneered the use of “dual enrollment” courses that allow students to simultaneously earn high school and college credit. The importance of these innovations to the national education and economic development strategy will move continuing and distance education closer to the mainstream of higher education.

The Knowledge Society will also stimulate new collaborations between institutions,as technology eliminates geography as a defining factor in the relationship between the institution and its students and between institutions and faculty in a discipline. Increasingly, online learning allows location-bound students are able to choose to study anywhere in the world. Institutions no longer are restricted to programs that can be taught by local, in-residence faculty members, but can collaborate with other institutions to offer the degrees most relevant to their students, wherever they are located. Examples of this kind of collaboration date back to content sharing consortia of the 1980s, such as the University of Mid-America and the International University Consortium. Today, the online environment has stimulated many new collaborations, such as the American Distance Education Consortium, the Great Plains Inter-Institutional Distance Education Association (IDEA), and smaller collaborations focused on specific professional communities, from nursing to nuclear power.

Many of these collaborations were stimulated and managed within an institution’s continuing education unit. In many institutions, the continuing/distance education unit is one of the few central administrative units that is positioned to work across all academic units to meet the needs of non-traditional constituencies. As such, it historically has been a seedbed for innovation—especially if that innovation requires self-sufficiency. This makes it a potentially powerful force for strategic growth in times of social and institutional transformation.

Unfortunately, much of the work of continuing and distance education units has been done on the periphery of their institutions. Because they have had to be self-sufficient, they are often seen more as cash cows than as strategic resources. As the work of continuing and distance education focuses more on degree programs and on meeting strategic societal needs, it is inevitable that it will move more into the mainstream of our institutions. Some institutions have seen this as an opportunity to decentralize the central C&DE administrative unit, in an attempt to reduce overhead and to integrate C&DE functions within academic departments. This is a shortsighted move, however. Just as campus-based education requires that academic units be supported by a strong administrative infrastructure, off-campus education requires similar support for academic units. A more strategic move would be to develop the professional skills of C&DE leadership so that they can function effectively in a more integrated environment in which they serve as members of strategy-focused teams in the mainstream rather than as individual entrepreneurs on the periphery.

Continuing and distance education units have helped higher education innovate throughout the first generation of the Information Revolution. Now, it is time to move this capacity for innovation into the mainstream.

Rifkin and Levine: Two Views of the Transformation of Education

2010-09-06T16:45:00.000-04:00

NOTE: I also posted this on my Sloan Consortium blog in July 2010.

Today, there are increasingly powerful signs that education is on the verge of being transformed as the Knowledge Society matures and as a generation of digital natives shapes a new social dynamic. This came into sharp focus recently in articles by two veteran public thinkers about education and society—Jeremy Rifkin, the author of The End of Work and founder of the Foundation on Economic Trends, and Arthur Levine, president emeritus of Teachers College at Columbia University and currently president of the Woodrow Wilson National Foundation.

In a May 10, 2010, Chronicle of Higher Education commentary Jeremy Rifkin wrote about “Empathic Education: The Transformation of Learning in an Interconnected World.” Given the changes happening worldwide, he writes, “Maybe it’s time to ask the question of whether simply becoming economically productive ought to be the primary mission of American education.” He proposes that, instead, educators put more emphasis on “developing students’ innate empathic drives, so that we can prepare the next generation to think and act as part of a global family in a shared biosphere.”

Today, he notes, “New teaching models designed to transform education from a competitive contest to a collaborative and empathic learning experience are emerging as schools and colleges try to reach a generation that has grown up on the Internet and is used to interacting in open social networks where information is shared rather than hoarded.” This is accompanied by a new view of teaching, a shift from the top-down expert-based system to “a distributed and collaborative educational experience designed to instill a sense of the shared nature of knowledge.”

Arthur Levine articulated his own view of transformation in a June 14, 2010, Inside Higher Education article entitled “Digital Students, Industrial-Era Universities.” Levine observes that, while our institutions were designed to meet the needs of the industrial revolution, our students are now “digital natives” – children of the Information Revolution. While institutions are focused on the process of instruction—defined by semesters—“digital natives are more concerned with the outcomes of education—learning and the mastery of content, achieves in the manner of games” where the issues is not how long one has played but what level one has mastered.

Interestingly, Levine and Rifkin have similar ideas about where this transformation (the over-used notion of a paradigm shift seems perfectly appropriate here) will take higher education. “What must change, “ says Levine, “ . . . is the means by which we educate the digital natives who are and will be sitting in our classrooms—employing calendars, locations, pedagogies, and learning materials consistent with ways our students learn most effectively. It means that the curriculum must meet our students where they are, not where we hope they might be or where we are.” He adds, “. . . higher education must in the years ahead move away from its emphasis on teaching to learning, from its focus on common processes to common outcomes.” Similarly, in Rifkin’s model of distributed and collaborative learning environments, “Learning becomes less about pounding facts into individual students’ brains and more about how to think collaboratively and critically.”

Where will online learning fit into the transformed university? While increasing access will continue to be critical need, it is important that we also emphasize how online learning can help higher education institutions create a new pedagogy for both on-campus and distant students. As Levine notes, “In an information economy, there is no more important social institution than the university in its capacity to fuel our economy, our society and our minds.”

Science, Technology, and Society: General Education for the Information Age

2010-09-03T09:53:00.000-04:00

This has been a year of loss for me. Earlier this spring, we lost Marlowe Froke, who founded educational/public television at Penn State and did much to move media into the educational mainstream. Then, John Buck—one of the true teachers at Penn State, who taught English literature to me, my wife, and, most important, my son—died after a long struggle with diabetes. Most recently, Rustum Roy, founder of Penn State’s Materials Research Center and one of the University's great interdisciplinary thinkers, died.

Marlowe, Rustum, and I came together around one of Rustum’s innovations: the inter-disciplinary Science, Technology, and Society Program at Penn State. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, we were already well into the Information Revolution. Rustum and other visionary faculty realized that higher education needed not only to help people understand the importance of science and technology, but to prepare them as citizens and professionals to deal with the impact of science and technology on society. This required a curriculum—the STS Program—that would bring together scientists, social scientists, and humanists explore the issues. Marlowe and Rustum collaborated to build a partnership among Penn State, the University of Pittsburgh, and Temple University (Pennsylvania’s three state-related public universities) to expand the impact of STS through distance education.

We created several distance education STS courses, each of which included a series of television documentaries, as well as a study guide and text. The first course, “The Behavioral Revolution,” looked at how behavior modification was being used by marketers and social planners to change consumer behavior. Examples in the television series included the use of random free rides to encourage people to use mass transit and, in the new planned community of Columbia, Maryland, the use of bicycle paths and clustered mailboxes to build a sense of village life in the midst of a sprawling suburb.

Another course, “The Finite Earth,” examined the limits to resources—a big issue in the early eighties—and the ethical implications of social policy decisions related to the environment and natural resources. The course introduced the idea of an “ethical community”—the group of people who are affected by a decision and who, as a result, should be at the table when the decision is made.

The STS Program is still very active at Penn State. The fall 2010 semester, for instance, includes 20 STS courses on topics such as “Technology and Human Values,” “Medical and Health Care Ethics,” “Ethics in Science and Engineering,” “Science, Technology, and Human Values,” “Energy and Modern Society,” and “Global Food Strategies: Problems and Prospects for Reducing World Hunger.” Several courses meet general education requirements; these have titles like “Modern Science, Technology, and Human Values” and “The Politics of the Ecological Crisis.” More on the STS Program at Penn State can be found at: http://www.sts.psu.edu/

The original vision for STS at some institutions was that it would become fully integrated into the institution’s general education curriculum, not unlike the “Contemporary Civilizations” curriculum at Columbia University in the 1920s or the Great Books program at the University of Chicago in the 1930s. Today, a full generation into the Information Revolution, it is essential that STS be fully mainstreamed. An ideal STS program—Penn State’s curriculum has elements of this—is to include STS courses in the lower division general education curriculum, but also to have capstone STS experiences in key majors.

Just as educational media—in the form of public television—helped to extend access to STS courses in the 1970s and 1980s, the online environment provides an excellent medium not only to extend access but to foster inter-institutional collaborations that will globalize discussions of STS issues.

There is much that we can do to build on the pioneering work of Rustum Roy, Marlowe Froke, and their colleagues at research universities around the nation who were—and continue to be—concerned about Science, Technology, and Society.

Collaboration versus Competition: Trends in Online Learning for Workforce Development

2010-05-18T19:04:00.000-04:00

This paper was presented on April 27, 2010, as part of an IACE Hall of Fame Symposium at the Third International Conference on Adult Education at Alexandru Ioan Cusa University of Iasi, Romania.

Since its inception early in the Industrial Revolution, distance education has been one of the ways that higher education institutions have adapted to radical changes in the social and economic environment in which they operate. In turn, it has been shaped by changes in society and, especially, changing workforce needs. Today, online learning is moving distance education into the mainstream, blurring distinctions between on-campus and off-campus instruction as higher education transforms itself to respond to the forces for changes that are being wrought by the Information Revolution. Institutions, freed of geographic boundaries, increasingly are collaborating to serve both traditional students and the current workforce.

Some Historical Parallels

University-level distance education in the United States began in 1892, when the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin, and The Pennsylvania State University launched the first U.S. college-based correspondence study programs. These were times of great change in the United States. The Western frontier had closed in 1891. The nation was absorbing several massive waves of immigrants. At the same time, it was shifting from an agrarian to an industrial economy, accompanied by large-scale urbanization and the development of transcontinental railroads and other innovations. As industry attracted more people to the cities, there was an urgent need to improve the productivity of the nation’s agricultural base and, simultaneously, to create professionals—engineers, chemists, managers, etc.—to support industrial growth and to develop a cadre of teachers to serve the children of new Americans. Universities—especially the new state “land grant” universities that had been created specifically to respond to the needs of the new industrial economy – initially used the new Rural Free Delivery postal service to deliver correspondence courses designed to improve rural life and help secure the country’s agricultural base.

For much of the next century, most American distance education was housed in public state universities. By the 1970s, the first impact of the Information Revolution was being felt, and other institutions—community colleges and professional schools began to use distance education via broadcast, cable, and satellite television to reach adult students locally and to serve specific workforce populations on a regional or national level. Consortia like the National Technological University developed to better coordinate delivery of professional graduate degrees at a distance to employees of major companies. A variety of other collaborations—such as the International University Consortium, which adapted British Open University materials for use by other institutions, and the National University Teleconference Network, which delivered satellite teleconferences at college and university sites nationally—developed to allow institutions to share media-based course materials and to expand the market for their programs.

The Information Revolution and the Need for Transformation

Today, a generation into the Information Revolution, education is again being transformed to meet changing social needs. Distance education is being redefined by the dramatic changes not only in technology but also in the social, political, and economic forces that are driving what has been called by various thinkers the Conversation Economy, the Age of Cognition, the Knowledge Society, and the Global Information Society.

We can identify several broad forces that are driving this transformation:

The Societal Demand for Education The Industrial Age required that about 25 percent of secondary school graduates moved on to higher education to provide society with managers and professionals needed to drive an urbanized industrial economy. In contrast, a March 2010 draft of the National Educational Technology Plan in the U.S. Department of Education stated a goal of increasing the proportion of college graduates to 60 percent by 2020[1]. This goal requires that access to education be extended not only to traditional-age students but to larger numbers of working adults than has been the case in the past. It also suggests that larger numbers of high school students must leave school prepared to go on to higher education and, in turn, that society must provide more equitable access to education at all levels.

The Changing Work Environment The need for a more educated workforce is only one of several ways in which the work environment is being transformed in the Information Age. Today’s workforce is less geographically defined—knowledge-based companies are less reliant on local workforce more on access to a distributed workforce. As companies rely more on continuous, bottoms-up innovation and problem-solving to remain competitive, collaboration within working teams is becoming more important than individual performance. Moreover, it is increasingly clear that education for work must continue throughout one’s working life, as people increasingly have multiple careers.

The Changing Role of Knowledge Throughout the agricultural period and well into the industrial period, the primary roles of education were to conserve knowledge and to pass it on to new generations. In the industrial period, higher education assumed a new role: the creation of new knowledge through research; this translated into a new pedagogy that included laboratory and experiential learning. In a rapidly changing, information-rich environment, the role of knowledge in education is again transforming. Increasingly, the role of education is to develop in students the ability to critically analyze information, transform that information into usable knowledge and to apply that knowledge to solve problems and to create innovations.

A New Workforce Education Mandate

These forces are shaping a new workforce education mandate. People have begun to notice that the Information Revolution is not so much about how quickly information is broadcast, but about how it brings people and ideas together in new ways. We are beginning to realize that the Knowledge Society, in reality, is a “Skills Society.” Education in this environment centers around the need to create functional communities in a new working and social environment, to educate workers who can innovate and shape change in the workplace and in the broader society, and to develop new critical workplace skills of inquiry, information validation, knowledge creation, problem solving, and collaboration through virtual teams. Providing access, convenience, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness will continue to be important issues, but the emerging question for the next decade or so is: how can we help individuals learn how to build and sustain new communities built around collaboration and sharing of knowledge to solve both local and, increasingly, global problems?

An Emerging Pedagogy A new pedagogy is emerging as higher education responds to these demands. This pedagogy recognizes that how we learn should reflect how we live and learning should be an active process that is resource-centered and inquiry-based and that develops the student’s skill in collaborative problem solving. Called the Community of Inquiry (http://communitiesofinquiry.com/), this approach centers education at the intersection of three forces: the ability of the student to identify with others in a trusted learning community, the ability of students to construct knowledge and confirm it’s meaning, and the teaching process. Online social networking applications like wikis and blogs are essential to helping institutions use the Community of Inquiry pedagogy at the scale needed to serve workforce education needs. The online environment allows institutions to provide the same pedagogy to both on-campus and distant students.

A Changing Sense of Community In the agrarian and industrial periods, “community” was defined largely by geography. A community was a village or a neighborhood of people who lived inter-dependent lives. In a globalized economy that kind of highly localized interdependence is harder to find. Online learning further removes geographic and time as defining characteristics of interaction among students and between students and the institution. We need to re-perceive the whole idea of community to understand how we are inter-dependent in today’s world and to develop the skills needed to work together in a new environment.

For higher education, new ways of thinking about community have implications on at least two levels. At the institutional level, we need to re-define the communities we serve and re-articulate our mission in those communities. For most of us, distance education has meant reaching very far beyond our local campus community in order to aggregate markets for specialized programs or serve widely dispersed professional groups. Today, we are starting to see institutions also use online distance education to more effectively serve local commuting students who cannot always come to campus. At the faculty level, new kinds of academic communities are emerging that may, in the long run, redefine the relationship between faculty members and their institutions—and, as this paper will explore, define new relationships among institutions.

Implications of Online Learning for Transformation For the past decade, online learning—mostly conducted as a new mode of distance education—has been evolving from experiments to a sustainable innovation in many traditional institutions. Online learning is both a symptom of the changes in the broader society and a tool of transformation. Its growth has several implications for educators if higher education is to meet the workforce needs of the Information Society.

· Just as universities incorporated laboratories into the curriculum during the industrial period, they must mainstream the use of web-based technology to meet today’s needs.

· The adult student—long treated as a secondary constituency by traditional universities—must move into the mainstream.

· Institutions must recognize that geography no longer defines their students or the resources that the institution can bring to meet student needs. Fourthly, institutions must adapt to a blurring of traditional distinctions between teaching and research and between on-campus and off-campus teaching.

These implications were reinforced in a national survey conducted by I. Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman and in 2006. Their report, Growing by Degrees, noted a trend toward the convergence of distance education and campus-based instruction. They found that 44 percent of institutions that offer on-campus master’s degrees also offer master’s degrees online[2], and 65 percent of institutions that teach online use primarily core faculty to teach their online courses[3].

A New Era of Collaboration

Just as communications technologies led to institutional partnerships for distance education in the 1970s and 1980s, we can now see that information technologies—generally grouped under the umbrella of online distance education – are stimulating new institutional collaborations designed to serve workforce needs. Four examples will illustrate the growing range of collaboration that is emerging.

Collaborations to Share Students The elimination of geography as a barrier between working adults and the academic resources they need is a significant change in the overall educational ecology. In response, institutions increasingly are partnering to share resources in order to meet demand. One example in the United States is the Great Plains Inter-Institutional Distance Education Alliance—the Great Plains IDEA (http://www.hsidea.org/). In this alliance, eleven institutions in the American mid-West have collaborated to develop and deliver professional graduate programs that no one of the institutions could do effectively using solely its own resources. Each participating institution develops and delivers online specific courses that meet the degree requirements. Since 1999, the alliance has fostered degree programs in Community Development, Dietetics, Family Financial Planning, Merchandising, and Agriculture. Programs are developed by inter-institutional faculty teams. Students matriculate at the institution of their choice, but take courses from all of the institutions involved in the program.

Collaborations to Share Courses The online environment allows institutions to share specialized courses with students at other institutions. In the United States, the Committee on Inter-Institutional Cooperation—a group of public universities Eastern and Midwestern states—created CourseShare (http://www.cic.net/Home/Projects/SharedCourses/CourseShare/Introduction.aspx), a collaboration that uses online delivery to aggregate students from multiple institutions into courses in seldom-taught languages, chemical informatics, speech and hearing sciences, and other disciplines.

Collaborations to Serve a Mutual Client The University of Manchester in the United Kingdom and The Pennsylvania State University in the United States combined resources to serve two multinational companies with a collaborative Master’s Degree in Project Management. The two institutions agreed on a common curriculum and shared online content materials. Courses are offered online, with two company-sponsored residencies. Employees in North America can get a degree from Penn State; employees in Europe can get their degree from the University of Manchester.

Collaborations to Share Materials As the number and variety of online courses grows, the opportunity for faculty members and institutions to openly share content beyond traditional institutional boundaries has also grown into an international movement. The spirit of the Open Educational Resources movement was captured in the Cape Town Declaration. Developed in 2007, the declaration has since by signed by more than 2,000 individuals representing 220 organizations worldwide. It reads, in part:

. . . we call on educators, authors, publishers and institutions to release their resources openly. These open educational resources should be freely shared through open licenses which facilitate use, revision, translation, improvement and sharing by anyone. Resources should be published in formats that facilitate both use and editing, and that accommodate a diversity of technical platforms. Whenever possible, they should also be available in formats that are accessible to people with disabilities and people who do not yet have access to the Internet.

One example of how OERs are encouraging collaboration is the AgShare Open Educational Resources Project at Michigan State University. Funded by a $1 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the project aims “ . . . to enable institutions of higher education in Africa to provide free, open access to agriculture education materials in order to improve agricultural practices on the continent and help build sustainable economies.” Specifically:

The program will enable faculty and student researchers, NGO representatives, farmers, and others to form learning networks and share content modules, textbook materials, and videos via the Internet. In remote areas where the Internet is less accessible, information will be distributed through DVDs and printed materials.[4]

The Open Educational Resources movement promises to revitalize the vision of faculty members as participants in international academic communities. It also requires that faculty members who create OERs be consciously aware of the cultural context in which the content operates. On one hand, inadvertent and unnecessary references to local culture could lead to concerns about cultural imperialism and make the OER less valuable to other faculty members. On the other hand, educators should not avoid providing appropriate cultural context to content in online courses. An teaching perspective that looks beyond the initial use of content is needed to make OERs truly powerful educational tools.

Collaborating Through Corporate Partnerships

Online learning has implications for how institutions engage with employers to develop employees. In today’s online distance education environment, geography is no longer a barrier to educating a distributed workforce. Online education has few geographical or time boundaries. All companies conceivably have access to national and international providers to educate their workforce at all levels without losing personnel while they are being educated. They can choose between open enrollment or contract programs. In this new environment, many companies have created internal online training capabilities. In addition, many are developing new relationships with colleges and universities to provide instructor-led noncredit training and degree programs to their employees. Multi-institution partnerships with companies are increasingly common, so curricula can still be tailored to employer needs. Two examples from the United States may illustrate the potential impact of online industry/education collaborations for workforce development.

National Coalition for Education and Learning (http://www.nactel.org/) This U.S.-based coalition, managed by the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, involves six major telecommunications companies, the Communications Workers of America, Pace University and other online education providers. It offers an associate degree in Applied Information Technology with specializations in video technology, wireless networking, and two other fields, plus a Bachelor of Science in Telecommunications.

Energy Providers Coalition for Education (http://www.epceonline.org/index.html) This collaboration includes 24 energy companies, four professional associations, two unions, five colleges and universities, and a virtual high school that use online distance education to develop the workforce in the energy industry. It offers industry employees associate and baccalaureate degrees and credit certificate programs in electric and nuclear power, natural gas, and electrical engineering. The coalition lists among its goals the following:

· Employers gain immediate access to online education programs that help meet workforce needs by providing the knowledge and skills necessary for new workers to enter the industry and existing utility employees to move forward in their career.

· As a coalition, members influence EPCE's strategic direction and determine how to best leverage industry sponsored online education to meet current and future workforce challenges.

· Members review and influence the content of the programs, ensuring they are up-to-date and change as the industry changes.

· Employees receive substantial tuition discounts, which can translate into reduced tuition assistance and training expenses.

· Members will have access to a source pool of trained potential employees as the program matures.

· The EPCE programs serve as a solid education platform for further company-specific training[5]

Guiding Principles for Collaboration

Several guiding principles can be gleaned from these examples. First, such coalitions require a clear statement of purpose and benefit for each partner. The working relationship between educational institutions and employers must be marked by collaboration rather than a more traditional customer/supplier relationship. Concrete statements about benefits and expectations define the collaborative nature of the relationship and provide a basis for resolving differences when they arise.

Second, collaboration assumes shared responsibility among participating institutions and employers for program identification and support and for quality control. These should be stated for each partner. The governance structure also should include a clear statement of curricular authority and a formalized, but open oversight structure.

When the coalition includes multiple employers and multiple institutions, members of each sector must function as colleagues rather than competitors. In other environments, the employers often compete, just as the institutions compete for students. However, they must work as colleagues within the context of the collaboration; the parameters for this should be explicated in the agreement.

The online environment also blurs the distinctions between the three primary missions of most higher education institutions: research, teaching, and service. In developing partnerships, institutions and employers should consider the interactions among these three missions and, where appropriate, encourage collaboration in all three areas.

A variety of other policy issues may need to be addressed, depending on the situation. For instance, if institutions expect to share course content, copyright issues should be addressed at the outset of the collaboration to ensure that all parties understand the ways in which content may be shared – either with other institutions in the partnership or with partner employers – and the limitations on sharing. Similarly, if the collaboration involves sharing students (in a multi-institution degree program, for instance) students who are matriculated at one institution may need access to computer-based services at other partner institutions. Other programs may require cost or revenue sharing mechanisms. These kinds of policy issues should be identified early and addressed explicitly.

As online distance education moves into the mainstream of academic life, special attention should be paid to the development of quality standards to guide inter-institutional partnerships. In past generations of distance education, the tendency was to create quality standards and practices that were specific to the distance delivery environment. As distinctions blur, institutions will need to decide whether to maintain separate standards between classroom and distance delivery or to develop new standards that can be applied equitably in both environments. Similarly new institutional policies and practices will need to be developed on a wide range of issues, from copyright to faculty promotion and tenure to workload. Without these, future innovation may be hindered.

Conclusion

Over the past decade, online distance education has helped higher education institutions respond to a dramatic increase in the demand for continuing education among working adults. Distance education, which for decades has flourished in specialized institutions or on the periphery of traditional institutions, is moving into the mainstream of our institutions. Traditional distinctions between campus-based and distance education are blurring, as geography ceases to serve as a natural boundary between institutions and students. Increasingly, the online learning environment offers opportunities for institutions to collaborate to share content, share faculty expertise, and share students in order to better serve the workforce. As the examples presented in this paper suggest, the new environment encourages institutions to form partnerships to serve common workforce communities. At the international level, specifically, the challenge will be to develop true institutional partnerships, with shared authority and quality control, especially when the partnerships bring together institutions from both developed and developing countries or countries with different educational cultures.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, I. E., and Seaman, J., 2007, Growing by Degrees: Online Education in the United States,2005, Sloan Consortium, Needham, Massachusetts, USA.

Cape Town Declaration. Retrieved on March 26, 2010, from http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/read-the-declaration.

Energy Providers Coalition for Education, Benefits of Membership. Retrieved on March 27, 2010, from http://www.epceonline.org/membership/benefits.html.

Philanthropy Digest, Michigan State University Receives $1 Million From Gates Foundation for Open Education Project in Africa. Retrieved March 26, 2010, from http://foundationcenter.org/pnd/news/story.jhtml;jsessionid=Z5RKTJPVGPYFRLAQBQ4CGW15AAAACI2F?id=280200004.

Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology (Draft), 2010. United States Department of Education, Washington, D.C., USA.

[1] Transforming American Education, p.3.

[2] Growing by Degrees, p. 1.

[3] Ibid., p. 2.

[4] Philanthropy Digest Website

[5] Energy Providers Coalition for Education website, Benefits of Membership.

The Land Grant University and Workforce Needs

2010-04-11T11:40:00.000-04:00

In the opening pages of The Americans: The Democratic Experience, Daniel Boorstin describes the national spirit in which the land grant university developed:

The century after the Civil War was to be an Age of Revolution—of countless, little-noticed revolutions, which occurred not in the halls of legislatures or on battlefields or on the barricades, but in homes and farms and factories and schools and stores, across the landscape and in the air – so little noticed because they came so swiftly, because they touched Americans everywhere and every day. Not merely the continent, but human experience itself, the very meaning of community, of time and space, of present and future, was being revised again and again; a new democratic world was being invented and was being discovered by Americans wherever they lived.

Higher education has been part of that ongoing revolution, as human society made the final shift from an agrarian culture to an industrial culture and from a culture based in hereditary aristocracy to one based in democracy. These transformations began in the late 1800s, gathered momentum in the mid and late 19th century, and reached their full power in the first half of the 20th century. The transformation of higher education was, in part, a response to these broader societal changes and, ultimately, a stimulus for further change.

The land grant university can be understood as a response to both democratization and industrialization. Boorstin describes one of the early advocates for the land grant concept—Jonathan Turner of Illinois—who argued for “A State University for the Industrial Classes.” All civilized society, Turner noted, was “necessarily divided into two distinct cooperative, not antagonistic, classes”; the “professional” class (doctors, lawyers, men of letters, and preachers) comprised only about 5 percent of the people, while the “industrial” class included all the rest. . . . To build a true democracy, Turner proclaimed, the industrial classes must also have their universities, at least one in each state. . . .The new universities would teach agriculture, manufacturing processes, and bookkeeping; they would provide experimental farms and orchards and herds of stock; and they would be “open to all classes of students above a fixed age, and for any length of time.” (p. 483)

The land grant university gave the “industrial classes” the opportunity to gain a higher education and fill new professional roles as engineers, scientists, and educators in an industrializing society. At the same time, the land grant university responded to a significant issue in society: how to maintain the pace of industrialization in light of massive immigration and urbanization that were essential to new industries. The land grant university became a center for research into agricultural productivity and, through the Cooperative Extension Service, took its findings directly to farmers in their fields. This transformed agriculture and ensured that the growing cities would be able to feed their burgeoning populations. At the same time, land grant institutions—along with state-owned “normal” schools—provided public school teachers to staff a critical workforce development need: to ensure that immigrants were acculturated to American life and that more could graduate from high school and move on to higher education.

Two centuries after the first inklings of the democratic and industrial revolutions, we find ourselves a generation into a new transformation—the Information Revolution—and a vastly different set of social needs. Some comparisons illustrate the need for refreshing our vision of the role of the land grant university:

• Where the Industrial Revolution was concerned with immigration, the Information Revolution is concerned with globalization; people no longer need to come to the United States to participate in its economy.
• Where urbanization drove industrialization and public policy in the 19th century, the trend at the beginning of the 21st century is ex-urbanization, as technology makes it possible for people to live in geographically dispersed professional communities.
• While the need for engineers, business professionals, and new social professionals (educators, health care professionals, etc.) drove higher education in the Industrial Revolution, the Information Revolution requires a larger cadre of “knowledge workers” with some level of higher education and the ability to adapt easily to rapid change; the emphasis is less on specific professional training than on innovation.

A variety of specific societal issues have emerged in the national awareness as signs of change. Global warming, globalization of the economy, health care access and quality are only a few examples. Most of these are already being addressed in our institutions. However, we might also ask whether there are more subtle, underlying needs that should drive innovation in the land grant institution.

It is becoming increasingly clear that one area where we may see profound change is the workplace itself. A May 14, 2009, Time Magazine report on “The Future of Work” noted:

Ten years ago, Facebook didn't exist. Ten years before that, we didn't have the Web. So who knows what jobs will be born a decade from now? Though unemployment is at a 25‑year high, work will eventually return. But it won't look the same. No one is going to pay you just to show up. We will see a more flexible, more freelance, more collaborative and far less secure work world.

As early as 2001, a National Academies of Science report, Building a Workforce for the Knowledge Economy, reporting on the “tightness” of the available workforce among trained information technology professionals, noted, ". . . because the underlying information technologies change so rapidly, there is concern that the labor market does not work as efficiently in this arena as economic theory would predict—i.e., that rising wages will not relieve the tightness, at least not “in time.” (p. xiii).

One reason why labor market ideas created during the industrial period might not work in the information era is that jobs will be distributed well beyond national borders. Another is that much work is increasingly automated, requiring less intensive human activity. The number of “jobless recoveries” that we’ve seen in the past few economic turndowns might be one signal of a trend toward a less intensive workforce. A trend like this could threaten basic democratic foundations of our society by creating a permanent underclass of under-employed workers. Such a trend would require a significant social policy change to ensure that all Americans were able to support themselves and their families.

Several social policy options could be envisioned. For example, instead of having fewer people with jobs, social policy could be directed at having all people work fewer years, somewhat easing entry of young people into the job market. One approach would be to make national service part of an early retirement system, making room more quickly for younger workers to come into the workforce during the years when they need money to raise their families and allowing older workers to move into volunteer or social-service work through a kind of national pre-retirement service system after their children are raised.

What, then, are the implications for a land grant university? Clearly, new undergraduate curriculum models are needed, perhaps ones that incorporate a more significant service component. In addition, institutions should explore new ways to engage adult learners to help them with life and career transitions throughout their working lives and to prepare them for service careers in retirement.

If readers have comments, they would be much appreciated.

Educating for Democracy

2010-01-27T16:31:00.000-05:00

In Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Demoracy, Louise Knight describes three often competing and, in ways, contradictory aspects of democracy that defined the social reform issues of the 1880s and 1890s—the Gilded Age. Today, after more than a century of change, we once again find that many of the issues facing social reformers in the Gilded Age are still very much alive. The various ways in which we define democracy continue to shape—and, in some ways, confuse—the public conversation about the future of the United States.

The three aspects of democracy are:

· Political Democracy – The right of individuals to vote

· Economic Democracy – The right of individuals to work in their own best interest, to compete, to be one’s own boss.

· Social Democracy – The right of individuals to expect equal treatment

In the 1880s and 1890s, each of these dimensions was controversial and, to some extent, there were opposing definitions of the terms. In the area of political democracy, for instance, women did not have the right to vote, but there was an active suffrage movement. In the area of economic democracy, there were competing visions, with one group arguing that capitalists had the right to become rich at the expense of workers and another arguing for a “democracy of wealth.” In the area of social democracy, the issue had to do with the treatment of the poor and of immigrants; as John Dewey put it, Democracy is a social, that is to say, an ethical conception.”

Today, the issues have changed only on the surface. While political democracy extends to almost everyone these days, every election sees attempts to disqualify whole classes of people at the voting site, especially the homeless and otherwise disenfranchised.

Economic democracy received a setback just this week, when the Supreme Court ruled that corporations—which are not citizens as defined by the Constitution—have been given the right to spend as much money as they wish on political campaigns. The potential result is that voices of non-corporations will simply be crowded out of a public discourse that increasingly is dominated by commercial media. Not only will be poor be challenged at the polls, they will be silenced in the campaigns leading up to November.

Social democracy—the idea of our society as an ethical concept—is constantly stressed by the intrusion of corporate and commercial influence and by the way in which communications media have replaced thoughtful discourse with radicalized ideology. Increasingly we live in a society in which common ground is harder to find and where the common good is harder to define. The United State Congress has failed utterly to find a middle path. Too many special interests keep the focus on the extremes rather than on the common good.

There has been significant progress in political democracy over the past century. Women and minorities now have the right to vote, for instance. In the area of economic democracy, we’ve seen great stride forward with Social Security, Medicare, and improved access to education. However, the underlying tensions between pure self-interest and a social ethic are still there and, increasingly, raw. We have not achieved social democracy and that limits our ability to truly achieve political and economic democracy.

What does this have to do with education? It suggests to me that, as our society becomes transformed by information technology and global economics, we need to put renewed emphasis on “civics” education. When I was in high school, we had a full year of “Civics” in ninth grade and another full year of “Problems of Democracy” as seniors. However, that is not always the case. The Pennsylvania Board of Education standards lists the following standard:

Civics and Government. Study of United States constitutional democracy, its values and principles, study of the Constitution of the Commonwealth and government including the study of principles, operations, and documents of government, rights and responsibilities of citizenship, how governments work and international relations.

However, this is one of four subsets of “Social Studies,” which is one of eight academic standards. Not exactly a priority.

Higher education appears to assume that students have had a good grounding in Civics before they come to college. While most curricula require some American history as part of the general undergraduate course distribution, there are few courses that give students an understanding of issues and their impact on the student as citizen.

As public discourse becomes increasingly controlled by corporations, it is essential that we educated citizens to be critical consumers of this discourse and develop in them the skills of citizenship. In the 1920s, Columbia University experimented with a first-year “Contemporary Civilizations” curriculum designed as a response to the changing social conditions after World War I. As the 1919 course catalog noted:

“The chief features of the intellectual, economic, and political life of today are treated and considered in their dependence on and difference from the past. The great events of the last century in the history of the countries now more closely linked in international relations are reviewed, and the insistent problems, internal and international, which they are now facing are given detailed consideration. By thus giving the student, early in his college course, objective material on which to base his own judgment, it is thought he will be aided in intelligent participation in the civilization of his own day (The Meaning of General Education, p. 36).

Contemporary Civilizations was one of several very innovative general education curricula to emerge in the aftermath of World War I. These innovations suggest that American higher education can, indeed, innovate when faced with dramatically changed social context. Such is the case today. The question—one that I hope readers of this will comment on—is what can we do today, when social, economic, and technological changes are transforming the context in which our students learn.

Leading Change

2010-01-19T12:57:00.000-05:00

Introduction

There was a time when Continuing Education professionals worked comfortably on the periphery of our institutions. The continuing education function was seen (by others in our institutions and often by Continuing Education unit leaders themselves) as cash cows – “sales” units whose staff often were more comfortable out in the community than with our academic colleagues. However, several external factors are driving the Continuing Education function more into the mainstream of our institutions and, at the same time, expanding the traditional scope of Continuing Education. Increasingly—but not without some tension—Continuing Education leaders are being invited to the university leadership table with our counterparts in research, graduate study, and pedagogy.

Just as the societal needs of the Industrial Revolution drove the birth of continuing and distance education at the end of the nineteenth century, the current transformation of the field is being driven by social, economic, and cultural changes associated with the Information Revolution. These include the rapid evolution of the Worldwide Web from a publishing environment to a communications, transaction, and collaboration environment—a change that has affected the way we work as well as how adults gain access to education and training; globalization, which has transformed longstanding local commitments to community and economic development into state and national political priorities, while fostering new international collaborations; and, equally important, demographic change—a decline in traditional-aged higher education student cohort—which has made the adult learner more visible and important to our institutions at a time when educating the existing workforce has become necessary for community competitiveness and put more emphasis on youth programs, as universities try to attract more young people to traditional programs.

Continuing education professionals, who long have served as entrepreneurs operating on the periphery of academe, must develop the new skills needed to succeed and to lead as innovators in the academic mainstream. While many Continuing Education leaders traditionally have looked to the business world for their professional skills, business thinking cannot fully prepare continuing education professionals for this new role.

What is Continuing Education?

Over the past decade or so, it has become more difficult to define “continuing education” in a way that is both inclusive of everything done in “continuing education” organizations as their scope expands and exclusive of those activities that are the province of other, more traditional corners of higher education. “Continuing Education” no longer can be defined easily as “programs that provide access for part-time adult learners.” For one thing, Continuing Education units also serve youth; for another, many adults study part-time as traditional “day” students. New terms—“outreach” and “engagement” are examples—have arisen as universities attempt to corral new activities within an expanded mission. This paper will use “continuing education” as a catchall phrase for a range of activities that, at any particular institution, may include some or all of the following:

· Providing access to credit courses and programs to nontraditional students outside the traditional daytime campus curriculum (i.e., adults who prefer to study part-time and high school students taking advanced placement courses). This includes evening and weekend offerings, off-campus offerings, and online and other distance education offerings to students not otherwise matriculated at the institution.

· Noncredit workforce and professional training and certification.

· Avocational courses for life enrichment.

· Professional development and research conferences for which participants pay a registration fee.

· Youth camps and after-school programs.

· Workforce and economic development programs offered in the community.

· Credit programs delivered internationally to otherwise non-matriculated students.

· Public service and community engagement programs, such as public lectures, programs delivered on radio and television, etc.

In addition, Continuing Education leaders are taking responsibility for broader institution-wide policy and developmental leadership tied these activities. Some continuing education units have taken the institutional lead on economic development; others have coordinated new international partnerships and outreach activities; still others are leading in establishing new multi-dimensional relationships with industries, professional organizations, and other colleges and universities or serve as the university-wide advocate for the new adult learner. As our understanding of “lifelong learning” shifts from a focus primarily on adults to a concern with true lifespan learning, Continuing Education is also taking the lead on youth programs and on creating dual enrollment relationships with school districts. And, of course, the online learning movement has added a new dimension to many continuing education units that are now offering undergraduate and graduate degree programs nationally, while helping to expand the use of technology in the on-campus curriculum.

The core value of the Continuing Education organization to all of these activities is that it serves to connect the university and the community. Continuing Education sits on the doorstep of the University. It simultaneously looks out into the community to identify needs that the university can serve and inward to academe to identify interests and expertise that can address those needs. Then, it makes the match between community needs and academic resources, and organizes programs and services to deliver the program or service. Continuing Education professionals are translators and diplomats, negotiating between these two communities. This is a sometimes precarious, but exciting role that demands a unique set of leadership skills.

The Emerging Challenge for Continuing Education Leadership

As noted earlier, three broad social factors are driving change in Continuing Education:

The Worldwide Web Online learning has emerged over the past decade as both a cause of change and a symptom of change. Within a very brief period of time, online learning has replaced most other media in distance education. It also has dramatically increased the number of institutions involved in distance education and, in the process, greatly expanded the number and diversity of baccalaureate and graduate degree programs available to nontraditional students through Continuing Education. This truly has been a revolutionary change for higher education and for Continuing Education leaders, one whose potential long-term impact on the institution is just becoming visible. While the first generation of the Web focused on publishing—making vast amounts of information accessible to individuals worldwide, Web 2.0 has emerged as a primarily a communication environment, on that brings people together with other people. This new environment—with its wikis, blogs, and other social networking applications—encourages collaboration around problems that allows self-directed communities to create shared knowledge. The implications for pedagogy, research, and for engagement of the university with external constituencies are vast.

Transformations like this do not happen in isolation, nor can they be compartmentalized within an open social organization like a university. In this sense, online learning is also a symptom of a broader adaptation by higher education to the new economic, social, and technical environment created by the Internet. While online learning has its roots in distance education at some institutions, in other universities it took first root in resident instruction, where the concern was not with access but with quality and cost-efficiency. Regardless of the starting point, online learning is no longer restricted to adult students studying through Continuing Education; it is transforming undergraduate and graduate education. Increasingly, the strategic issue is not simply how to bring more students to the institution, but how to position the institution’s policies so that geography is no longer the defining factor in the relationship between the student and the campus. This transformation challenges fundamental assumptions that underlie many university policies and requires that Continuing Education leaders work more closely with deans for undergraduate and graduate education, the Chief Information Officer, the Registrar, and the Treasurer.

Globalization Universities increasingly are being called on to play an active role in economic development as their communities struggle to respond to globalization, the movement from an industrial to an information/knowledge/services economy, and the urgent need to re-train the current adult workforce for these new economic conditions. Continuing Education leaders, who are practiced at selling noncredit training programs to individual companies, are now asked to lead their institution’s relationship with state and regional Workforce Investment Boards (WIBs). Employers have begun to turn to their WIB not only for guidance but also for training funds. As a result, program decisions—once the province of individual employers—are now being made at the state and regional level by Workforce Investment Boards. This, historically one of the most entrepreneurial aspects of Continuing Education, requires that leaders be not just effective educational sales people, but diplomats connecting statewide needs identified by WIBs with the interests of local employers and, of course, the resources of their universities. At the same time, Continuing Education leaders are expected to successfully negotiate the complex politics and policies of public/private collaboratives and federal/state inter-agency partnerships.

Another impact of globalization and the Internet is an increased interest in operational partnerships between U.S. universities and their counterparts in other countries. These can be one-on-one partnerships or multi-institution collaborations (such as the Worldwide Universities Network). They may be focused on sharing or capacity-building in undergraduate or graduate degree programs, collaborative research, sharing students through study-abroad initiatives, reaching out to new international adult learner populations, or a combination of the above. It is not unusual for Continuing Education units—with their experience in managing external client contracts and with online distance education—to be tapped to coordinate the administrative arrangements for these international relationships. As with already-mentioned changes in the scope of Continuing Education, this requires new internal alliances for the Continuing Education leader, as well as a new role as international culture translator and diplomat, helping the partner institutions find their way through vastly different academic cultures, quality assurance requirements, and priorities.

Changing Demographics A related factor moving Continuing Education into the mainstream is the changing demographics in many parts of the United States. As the “echo boom” generation ages, the number of new 18-22-year-olds is declining or projected to decline, depending on the region. This has made colleges and universities more aware of the adult learner as one means to offset the decline in younger students. One consequence has been a trend toward creating adult degree completion programs offered through Continuing Education units—either as face-to-face evening/weekend programs, online programs, or programs designed for blended online/on-campus delivery. At the same time, veterans’ benefits and workforce changes pushed by globalization are driving more adults into daytime programs. The adult learner is no longer the sole province of Continuing Education.

These developments bring the Continuing Education unit into greater contact with a wide range of mainstream units—from the Faculty Senate to the Registrar to Student Life—on issues ranging from financial aid to faculty workload and reward and curricular coherence.

At the other end of the spectrum, Continuing Education units are being asked to help institutions bring young people to campus through summer youth camps, after-school programs, dual-enrollment courses, and advance placement courses for high school students. Continuing Education is no longer only about adults; “lifelong learning” has taken a new, more inclusive strategic meaning at our institutions, and Continuing Education leaders are now at the table with their counterparts in recruiting and enrollment management.

A Broader Role All of these changes can be seen as part of a new commitment by universities to be engaged in their communities—the local communities served by the campus, the broader community represented by state and regional governments, a variety of professional communities, and international institutional communities. This reflects a new spirit of “engagement” that was articulated by the Kellogg Commission on the Future of Universities and Land-Grant Universities in its report Returning to Our Roots: The Engaged Institution. The report noted that engagement reflects a new ideal for the institution:

Engagement is not a synonym for Continuing Education. This new ideal requires that the Continuing Education leader share responsibility for engagement with other university leaders. That, in turn, requires that the Continuing Education leader must be actively involved in discussion of issues not operationally part of Continuing Education. Conversely, the leader must be willing to involve other peers in engagement issues that fall within the purview of Continuing Education. In short, Continuing Education can no longer thrive in isolation from the academic mainstream.

Increasingly, continuing education professionals are at the table with their counterparts in research, graduate education, international programs, and undergraduate education. Increasingly, their work has an impact on promotion and tenure and other faculty policies and on policies affecting admissions, financial aid, intellectual property, and the university’s technical infrastructure. Never before has the need been greater for continuing education professionals to understand the broader academic environment in which they work and for other academics to become familiar with what continuing education can offer as academic units struggle to meet the challenge of change. However, continuing education is not always welcome at the academic table; nor are Continuing Education professionals always prepared for the challenge of working from within the mainstream instead of on the periphery. Continuing Education professionals must learn to be a part of the broader institution.

The challenge of leading continuing education within the mainstream requires a new way of thinking about leadership. Unfortunately, most of the management and leadership literature that has been used in continuing education is derived from the commercial sector, perhaps because continuing education often is seen as a self-standing “business” arm of the university. Ultimately, higher education is more of a social organization than a traditional business organization. If continuing education is to take its proper place within the academic mainstream, continuing education professionals will need to see themselves in a new light: as academic innovators rather than as cash cow generators. This monograph will look at a somewhat different set of literature to provide a new context within which Continuing Education professionals can see their leadership roles.

Focus on Mission

Jim Collins is one business thinker who realized the differences between the needs of commercial organizations and social organizations. He begins Good to Great in the Social Sectors with the observation, “We must reject the idea—well-intentioned but dead wrong—that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become ‘more like a business’” (p.1). A key difference is that, in business, money is the end goal, while in the social sectors, money is a means to an end. As Collins puts it, money is an input rather than an output. Clearly, most continuing education units are expected to sustain themselves and to generate revenue that can be reinvested in new academic programs, but the activities that generate this revenue can be sustainable only to the extent that they first contribute to a larger mission of the institution. Many institutional experiments in online learning foundered on that basic issue: the online experiment was not sufficiently tied to the institutional mission to carry it beyond the financial startup risks. “The whole purpose of the social sectors,” Collins notes, “is to meet social objectives, human needs, and national priorities that cannot be priced at a profit” (p.19). Having a meaningful mission that is clear and well understood across the institution—and that is congruent with the overall institutional mission—is critical. Collins defines greatness, in this context, by three criteria:

Superior Performance – This can be measured in many ways. In a continuing education operation, the measures might relate to student satisfaction and achievement, faculty satisfaction (perhaps measured by the number of faculty who work in multiple Continuing Education delivery environments—conferences, evening courses, online courses, etc.—or client response. It might also be measured by the revenue that the Continuing Education unit returns to academic units that sponsor programs. Regardless, it is safe to say that Continuing Education units can no longer expect to provide “superior performance” in isolation from other parts of the university that increasingly depend on their performance for revenue, students, and opportunity for innovation.
Distinctive Impact – Are the continuing education programs seen as models for other academic units or for peer institutions? Are your policies and procedures widely accepted and cited? Do graduate students study the programs? Do employers seek out opportunities to work with Continuing Education? In effect, what is the “brand reputation” of Continuing Education at the institution and how does that brand reflect on the overall institutional reputation?
Lasting Endurance – This might be measured by the long-term impact of innovation through sustainable programs, one-time conferences that create sustainable professional communities, full-time faculty who have continuing education projects as part of their regular workload, etc.

Collins developed, as a “pivot point” for planning around these goals, what he dubbed the “hedgehog concept” – a means by which a unit can define itself in order to focus on long-term results. He describes the hedgehog concept for social organizations as a ven diagram in which the three elements are:

What you are deeply passionate about. This speaks to the core purpose of Continuing Education within the university. As such, it should be inclusive (defining what is within your purview) and exclusive (enabling the unit to say “no” when necessary). It is how you want the Continuing Education mission to be regarded within the university and the community. It defines the area in which the Continuing Education unit is the champion across the institution. The response will vary by institution. In some cases, it might be the connector role itself; in others, it might be the adult learner (which would then exclude a Continuing Education role in youth education). It is important that the definition of the unit’s passionate focus be carefully articulated.
What you can be best in the world at. This represents the areas in which the unit should be expected to excel, with the understanding that activities that are not within this circle might be done outside the unit—by an academic unit or by another administrative unit. In this sense, defining what you are also entails defining what you are not, so it is important to take care not to be overly restrictive, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, to be too inclusive that you lose definition. This also helps to identify other University units whose involvement and support are essential for Continuing Education success.
What drives your resource engine. This defines how the unit plans to recover its costs, return revenue to the university or individual academic units, and provide investment funds for future projects.

In a changing institutional environment, a “hedgehog” as described above can help communicate—to staff and to others within the institution—the unique role and scope of authority for the Continuing Education unit and be the basis for establishing enduring, trusting relationships with other units. The hedgehog should be fully discussed within the unit so that there is strong loyalty to these three core, defining dimensions of Continuing Education within the institution. At the same time, it is essential that the hedgehog not be focused entirely on internal issues, but that it reflect the “connector” function and include the role of Continuing Education in bringing university resources to meet external needs.

Leading in the Mainstream: “Ethical Realism” and the University

Defining the “hedgehog” helps set the stage for Continuing Education, but real work begins as units implement their vision and mission. Here, operating in the mainstream during times of great change presents very complex challenges. Given all of the changes occurring in the communities that we serve, in our institutions, and in the means by which we develop and deliver programs, Continuing Education leaders find themselves facing a world that is often chaotic, where the old rules no longer fit and where comfortable assumptions are no longer valid. The challenge facing university leaders in times of great change are very similar to the challenges facing international leaders. In this sense, higher education is best seen not as a traditional business, but as a social organization in which there are multiple points of formal authority and informal influences that often lead to competing views about how to accomplish the institution’s mission. In their book, Ethical Realism, Anatole Lieven and John Hulsman looked at these issues in terms of international affairs, attempting to return international thinking “to the everyday world where Americans and others do their best to lead ethical lives while facing all the hard choices and ambiguous problems that are the common stuff of our daily existence” (p. 53). Their findings—which are rooted in the “realism” movement developed in the mid-twentieth century by Niebuhr, Morganthau, and Kennan, are instructive to Continuing Education leaders who find themselves thrust into a complex and shifting leadership community. As I read this book, I saw more connections to my work as a Continuing Education professional than I had ever seen in typical business-based leadership literature.

Ethical realism argues that leadership should be based in a set of principles or values that guide action: prudence, patriotism (better stated for our purposes as “institutional loyalty”), responsibility, study, humility, and a decent respect of the views and interests of others (p. 53). These are the values that allow a leader in a complex social organization to set a vision-based strategy for the future:

Prudence Lieven and Hulsman note that prudence is especially important when launching radical and dangerous new ventures. Prudence, as they use the term, is about the underlying moral duty of leadership—the virtue of shaping goals making decisions that don’t require perfection, but instead result in sustainable decency. It involves ensuring that leaders consider the consequences of their actions on the community and that they have a Plan B, in case things don’t turn out according to Plan A (p. 67). In other words, prudence requires that we not be wedded to one particular mechanism, but to the goal and to a workable and institutionally reasonable path toward the goal.

This is especially important in today’s Continuing Education arena. With the old organizational boundaries fading, Continuing Education leaders increasingly are asked to innovate in areas that have potentially dramatic impact on other parts of the university community. Prudent leadership demands that Continuing Education leaders not act in isolation, but instead bring together representatives of the university units who might be affected by an innovation to build a change community that looks at the total impact of a program. That community should develop a “hedgehog” description of the innovation and, focusing on the mission and goals as the constant, explore multiple scenarios and alternative course of action, and then decide on a path forward.

Humility Reinhold Niehbur, one of the founders of ethical realism, authored the Serenity Prayer, which was later adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous. It goes like this: “Grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” This is epitomizes how ethical realists think about the need for humility in our leaders.

This principle presents an interesting dilemma for Continuing Education leaders. On one hand, Continuing Education leaders are expected to innovative, to take risks, and to change how the University interacts with the community. On the other hand, many aspects of the university lie outside the Continuing Education leader’s formal authority and, in many cases, beyond its informal influence. The principle of humility encourages the leader to recognize the need to work with others and to create—and to invite into Continuing Education decision-making processes others who have the power to change those things that are beyond the reach of Continuing Education but that may be essential to success. Humility also allows us to see our organizations as other see it, with its flaws and limitations as well as it strengths, so that we can improve those things that must be changed. To operate in an uncertain world, people needed to be able to re-perceive—to question their assumptions about the way the world works, so that they could see the changing world more clearly. (long view p. 9). This cannot be achieved from one corner of the institution; it requires collaboration, communication, and, ultimately, a shared vision of what must be conserved and what must be changed.

Study One side-effect of prudence is that it forces us to recognize that we may not fully understand the environment in which we are trying to lead. Leuven and Hulsman, paraphrasing Hans Morgenthau, note that “reason is like a lamp that cannot move anywhere by its own power, but is carried around on the back of our prejudices” (p. 74). This mandates that we not only collect information, but that we learn from it--that we not take information at face value. Continuing Educators are in a rare situation in our institutions. We work directly with external constituents and across all academic units on programs and services that are at the heart of the university’s three-fold mission of teaching, research, and service. To be effective change leaders, we must be become scholars both of the communities we serve and of the higher education environment in which we work. The key to this principle goes back to “humility”—it is essential that leaders respect and listen to opposing views and that they build plans on the real facts, not the common wisdom and be open to the idea that innovation takes place in the “white space” where we have little experience.

Responsibility Lieven and Hulsman describe the “ethic of responsibility” as being opposed to an “ethic of convictions.” It is, they assert, the difference between “a morality of results and a morality of intentions” (p. 77). It is not enough to be “right” or to act on good intentions. Instead, actions must be geared to what is truly necessary to reach the goal.

One critical responsibility of Continuing Educators as change leaders is to anticipate and minimize, to the extent possible, the negative impact of unintended consequences—the reminders of our limited understanding that show up in any innovation of consequence. While we are prone to action, we must also be willing to reflect, so that we act on clear knowledge rather than on prejudice, habit, or hubris.

Loyalty Lieven and Hulsman, who were writing within the context of international affairs, called this value “Patriotism.” What applies to a nation also applies to an institution. Loyalty, they note, “ is attached to the interests, the values, and the honor” of the organization (p. 80). Loyalty to the organization means appreciating the institution, its culture, history, process, and community of members as they actually exist, warts and all” (p.81). It “fuses with the other virtues of ethical realism to produce the flexibility, calm, and perspective necessary” (p.82) for long-term success.

Respect for Others Taken together, the principles of ethical realism add up to a willingness to acknowledge and respect the views and interests of others within the institution. Increasingly, Continuing Education innovations will have implications for other parts of the institution; for them to succeed, they will need to be seen as successful within the context of the other institutional cultures and interests that are affected by the innovation. Success does not necessarily mean the same thing to everyone. While the Continuing Education unit may define success as financial sustainability, an academic unit may be more concerned about faculty access to research opportunities or the reputation of the department. A financial success that does not address these others perspectives will be short-lived.

Many of these values were reinforced by 30 international open and distance education pioneers who shared their experiences with Canadian researcher Elizabeth Burge in Flexible Higher Education: Reflections from Expert Experience (2007). Among the “hard-won lessons” that they report are the need to respect learners, one’s colleagues, and one’s self as a professional and, equally important, to respond to those things that deserve respect (p 61). These leaders noted, among other virtues:

The importance of self-awareness and self-respect – as one respondent said, “It’s about being professional in a profession. . it’s something about self-accountability as well as enforced accountability” (p 84).
Having humility and grace – Burge defines “humility” as “an attitude of mind and knowledge about how innovations are best adopted, as well as respectful listening and thinking strategies that acknowledge the limits of one’s skills” (p. 84). Raj Danarajan cautioned leaders not to be tempted “with that arrogance of being far ahead of your time . . . you owe it to yourself, especially, to slow down and address the concerns of the people of whom you find your self being ahead” (p. 85).
Being knowledgeable – The interviewees suggested three strategies: (1) “avoid thinking that nothing older than five years is worth reading,” (2) “read the literature jumping into action” and (3) avoid dismissing the work of earlier generations as irrelevant” (p. 85). They also agreed that, within one’s institution, it is important to understand the complex dynamics—political, financial, and educational—understanding, as Dan Granger noted, that “being right doesn’t win the day” (p. 86).
Being a creative and critical thinker – The pioneers interviewed advised leaders to be compulsive about the details that underpin operational success, be skeptical at all times, and not look for panaceas. While being critical and skeptical, Chere Gibson from Wisconsin noted, “We need to keep learners and learning to the fore; they really are central to the enterprise.”

Ethical Realism in Practice

How do these principles come to life in the real life of a Continuing Education unit? Each institution has its own history and culture, so there are no simple answers to these questions. However, the principles do provide starting points that apply to most situations:

1. Define mission and vision. This is a leadership responsibility. It may be developed initially by the Continuing Education leadership team or by a small University-wide leadership group. However, once it is developed, it should be tested with Continuing Education staff, to be sure they all understand it and can buy into it. A final version should be shared and discussed with the broader University leadership.

2. Create a diverse, university-wide change community to plan a strategy around the hedgehog. Don’t use them as an “advisory” committee, but as a “planning and implementation” committee. An early task would be to develop the “hedgehog” for Continuing Education, using Jim Collins’ work as a guide. This would begin with the vision statement (the passion that will drive the unit). The team would focus on the other two dimensions: in what areas the unit should excel and how it will sustain itself.

3. Study the environment in which the hedgehog concept will be applied. What are the societal factors that should drive decisions on programs and services—i.e., what problem are we trying to solve? What are the institutional needs that may drive tactical responses to external needs (i.e., budget, faculty workload, accreditation issues, the fit with the broader institutional mission and strategic plan)? What academic programs are prepared to collaborate? Meet with each dean and key academic leaders to identify areas where there is strong interest; then, test those interests against external need, funding opportunities, and market interest.

4. Develop Plan A and Plan B—and other alternatives if needed. Here, a scenario planning process may be helpful. Peter Schwartz (1996) notes that scenarios use individual needs as a way to filter to identify driving forces and optional responses in complex, even chaotic times. “By imagining where we are going,” he writes, “we reduce this complexity, this unpredictability which . . . encroaches upon our lives” (p 15). The key is to develop scenarios that are informed by “real world” dynamics and not simply by our internal action biases or institutional cultures. Engaging the change community (as well as key staff) in scenario development will help ensure that new ideas and perspectives are part of the process. At the end, it is important to communicate the results widely and listen to reactions.

Schwartz notes that scenario building is an art, not a science. “We started by isolating the decision we wanted to make. . . As thinking and exploration continued, the questions were constantly refined. . . W e thought about the key factors that would affect decisions . . . trying to decide which factors were critical. The true work took place in the last step, rehearsing the implications” (pp. 26-27).

5. Be alert for unintended consequences—and unanticipated opportunities—for the larger institution. Early in the innovation, ask all affected parties to articulate how they will define the success of the innovation and what they would see as failure. Try to imagine consequences in the planning scenarios that will contribute to success or to failure. Once the project is underway, be alert for unplanned negatives and act on them.

6. Evaluate what is really happening and respond accordingly. Take time to set metrics that will give the University a realistic assessment of impact. Be the champion of actual accomplishment, not of an ideal or aspiration. Maintain a persistent long-term vision, but be willing to move to Plan B if that will get the University to it the vision more effectively.

References

Burge, E. (editor). Flexible Higher Education: Reflections from Expert Experience. Society for Research into Higher Education. Berkshire, England: Open University Press, 2007.

Collins, J. Good to Great in the Social Sectors: Why Business Thinking is Not the Answer. Boulder, Colorado: Jim Collins, 2005.

Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities. Returning to Our Roots: The Engaged Institution. Washington, D.C.: National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges, 1999.

Lieven, A. and Hulsman, J. Ethical Realism: A vision for America’s Role in the World. New York: Random House, 2007.

Schwartz, P. The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World. New York: Doubleday, 1996.

Rediscovering Higher Education as a Public Good

2009-12-14T11:40:00.000-05:00

A recent Time magazine headline –“College Degrees More Expensive, Worth Less in the Job Market”—prompted a wide-ranging discussion on the LinkedIn “Metacognition” group about the nature of higher education in today’s world. It got me thinking about how higher education is perceived in today’s corporate economy-focused environment.

Certainly one reason why college degrees are more expensive these days is that state governments are funding less and less of the total cost of higher education. In part, that is due to a general perception that higher education is a “private good” rather than a “public good.” That is, if our purpose is simply to prepare individuals to get good jobs, then why should taxpayers underwrite an individual benefit? As taxpayer support declines, cost to the individuals goes up. The result: a more expense college degree to the individual graduate with no appreciable change in quality.

The societal role of higher education was addressed by UNESCO this year in the final communique of the 2009 World Conference on Higher Education, which noted: "Faced with the complexity of current and future global challenges, higher education has the social responsibility to advance our understanding of multifaceted issues, which involve social, economic, scientific, and cultural dimensions and our ability to respond to them. It should lead society in generating global knowledge to address global challenges, inter alia food security, climate change, water management, intercultural dialogue, renewable energy and public health." In short, higher education does not end with preparing individuals for jobs; it must, in addition, prepare them to address the broader issues facing society.

That raises a fundamental question for those of us in public higher education: How do we rebuild—in the public perception, in our own sense of mission as institutions and as individual educators, and in practice—the ideal of higher education as a public good in a rapidly changing social environment. In other words, how do we prepare our students to be good citizens in a globalized information society? Part of the problem here is that our curriculum has not adapted significantly to the needs of individuals and communities in this new environment. General education—the part of the curriculum that traditionally has prepared people for citizenship—tends still to be dominated by a distribution of courses that introduce students to the academic disciplines and provide some basic skills (writing, math, basic science, etc.).

One thought would be to move toward a “sandwich” general education curriculum in which general courses are sandwiched around the student’s major/professional curriculum. The first part would provide basic concepts in the key academic disciplines—science, humanities, social sciences—along with critical skills. These might include writing, math, public speaking, but also new skills needed in an information society: collaboration, innovation, finding and evaluating information, team problem solving, inter-cultural understanding, etc. The general education curriculum should also incorporate the technology that drives both professional and personal life—wikis, blogs, online social networking, etc.—so that students develop a sense of the effective (and ethical) uses of these technologies. Student would then move to their professional studies. The final general education component—the top of the sandwich—would be during the student’s senior year, when interdisciplinary courses put their professional studies into the context of life in a global information society. The goal of this upper division general education would be to ensure that individuals enter the workforce with an understanding of ethics, cultural understanding and communications, and the societal implications of their profession.

Early in the Information Society, the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) movement attempted to address these issues through interdisciplinary courses that looked at the interactions among science, technology, and society. Penn State was an early leader in this movement and developed several media-based STS courses in collaboration with faculty at the University of Pittsburgh and Temple University. One, “The Finite Earth,” dealt with the limits to resources. One lesson focused on how to identify and engage the “ethical community” of people who would be affected by science/technology actions and who should be involved in major decisions. Similar courses—ideally conducted as senior seminars—could be constructed in every major as a way to match the private benefits of higher education to the public good.

Re-Perceiving the Land Grant University: Engaging Communities

2009-10-06T10:44:00.000-04:00

The original mission of the Land Grant university was very much a response to social and economic needs that arose as a generation into the Industrial Revolution in the late 19^th century and early 20^th centuries. Today, a generation into the Information Revolution, we again must ask: What are the needs of society to which we can respond?

Among the critical problems that the land grant university addressed—and that defined its position in American life for several generations—was the need to greatly improve agricultural production. In the 1880s and 1890s, the United States was undergoing a two-front social revolution: rapid urbanization, as industry located near existing population and transportation centers, growing small river towns into major cities; and mass immigration, as millions came from Europe and elsewhere to find new opportunities and, in the process, provide the manpower for growing industries. A critical concern was that the nation maintain—and improve—its agricultural base in order to support urbanization and immigration.

The problem was partly one for science: how to improve agricultural productivity and sustainability of farms in order to produce more food for the cities. However, there was another dimension: literally, “how to keep them down on the farm.” Rural life was hard. Farm families did not have access to modern conveniences such as electricity and telephones. Even mail delivery was a problem until Rural Free Delivery was created in the 1890s—itself a response to the concern about improving the quality of rural life.

Land grant universities addressed these issues with a series of remarkable innovations (many of which we now take for granted, but that were radical changes in higher education in their day). These included:

Cooperative Extension Service, which coordinated funding from county, state, and federal sources to bring university expertise directly into communities. The result was the ideal of the Country Agent standing with the farmer in the field, working together on problems.
Four-H and Home Life programs that improved the quality of family life in rural areas and encouraged young people to stay in agriculture.
Correspondence study, which took advantage of Rural Free Delivery to extend both noncredit and credit courses to individuals in rural areas.
Management Development services that provided training to small business owners.

Over the years, other innovations built on these early departures, including the application of the extension concept to energy and environmental issues in the late 20^th century, investments in educational broadcasting to better reach homes and schools, and impact research as a way of integrating the faculty member’s teaching, service, and research functions.

Engaging Communities in the Information Society

A generation into the Information Society, we must ask at least two questions:

(1) What are the problems to which the resources of our land grant universities should be directed?

(2) What innovations are needed to ensure an effective long-term response?

Several broad social issues come immediately to mind:

· Climate Change – How will climate change affect the productivity and viability of communities in our individual states? This issue is at least as important to the health of our society as was agricultural production in the early 20^th century.
Globalization – What must our communities to do remain economically viable in a global community?
· Innovation – Given the move of heavy industry off shore, we need to create the capacity for innovation at the community level so that new ideas can take root and grow locally.
· Inter-Cultural Education – Increasingly, immigration will be replaced by networking that allows people to stay in their home countries while participating in the American economy. The United States will be less of a nation of immigrants and more of a networked culture, with each of us working with people from different cultures on a regular basis. Just as we created a K-12 education sector to respond to immigration, we now need schools that will produce local citizens who can participate in this new environment.

What other issues should the land grant university address in order to be relevant to the Information Society? What radical innovations are needed today?

General Education and the Information Society

2009-08-28T15:51:00.000-04:00

The general education curriculum, as it evolved through most of the 20^th century, is a product of higher education’s adaptation to the Industrial Revolution. The question today is whether that curriculum will meet the needs of individuals and society a generation into the Information Revolution. Does the changing societal context demand that we re-perceive General Education for what various writers have dubbed the Information Society, the Knowledge Society, the Skills Society, or Conversation Society?

The Industrial Revolution required a higher level of education for professionals who would create industrial innovations. At the same time, America was becoming urbanized and, due to waves of new immigrants, much more diverse. Recognizing that higher education increasingly was serving a spectrum of students much broader demographically and vocationally than were served by the classical curriculum, innovators like Dewey, Meiklejohn, and Hutchins determined that General Education was not just about liberating the individual, but about preparing individual students from a broad spectrum of backgrounds to function effectively in society as professionals and citizens.

By the 1950s, the idea of General Education as a purposeful and comprehensive curriculum intimately involved in the needs of a democratic society were firmly rooted. The Truman Commission on Higher Education listed eleven principles or goals for General Education that summed up the function of General Education at mid-century:

· An ethical code of behavior
· Informed and responsible citizen solving problems
· 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

Still, by the 1980s—when the first impact of the Information Revolution on daily life was beginning to be felt—several national reports decried the disarray in the undergraduate curriculum. One, sponsored by the National Institutes on Education argued that excessive vocationalism had weakened the ability of a baccalaureate degree to “foster the shared values and knowledge that bind us together as a society” (Scully, 1984, p. 1).

A quarter of a century later, the concerns are just as real, but we have a better sense of how the revolution in information and communications technology is affecting the problem. We are now a generation into the Information Revolution. And, just as educators a generation into the Information Revolution grappled with the rise of the “utilitarian university,” we are struggling to understand just what it takes to prepare individuals to thrive as citizens and professionals in a globalized knowledge society.

Drivers of Pedagogical Change

Several societal factors are driving the need for changes in our approach to General Education. Prime among these is how the Information Revolution has changed the way we think about knowledge and information. Today, information is ubiquitously available on the web. In this environment, education is less about the transfer of already organized knowledge than about how to find and evaluate information and turn it into useable knowledge that can be used to solve problems and provide meaningful insights. Active inquiry, as a result, becomes both a means and an end of General Education--a core skill of the new curriculum.

The rapidity of change in a global economy is also changing how we work. Increasingly, work tends to get done by teams—often virtual—teams with members at multiple locations. This work environment puts greater emphasis on collaboration rather than individual competition. Similarly, rapid changes in knowledge require an environment of continual, bottom-up innovation. Collaboration and innovation are both professional and civic skills that need to be taught. Even on the most informal level—as evidenced by Facebook and Twitter today—students need to develop a social ethos to guide how they interact with social networks so that they can develop and sustain professional, civic, and personal relationships through both face-to-face and virtual networks.

An underlying feature of the Information Society is that technology has removed geography as a delimiting factor in how we live and work in communities. Members of an Information Society live and work in “distributed communities” (we may need a better term to describe this phenomenon) that accomplish much of their work through technology. This includes virtual working teams, professional associations, and a wide variety of social networks. The boundaries of these communities tend to blur, as people include both social and professional contacts in the same network. Inter-cultural understanding takes on a new immediacy: every culture is potentially present in our virtual communities. General Education, with its emphasis on educating the student for success within the context of his/her society, can help individuals define how to conduct themselves in these new communities.

Knowledge creation, collaboration, innovation, and community building are workplace and civic skills that should be incorporated into General Education for the Information Society. The challenge of General Education in this new environment is:

· To create lifelong learners who can create knowledge
· To instill problem-solving and innovation as both workplace and civic skills
· To develop the skills of collaboration across cultures and across geography
· To help students understand the nature of the communities in which they live and work so that they can become effective members of these communities.

This suggests a new General Education pedagogy that is resource-centered, inquiry-based, and problem-oriented and, perhaps, one that is better integrated with the professional studies part of the undergraduate curriculum.

Re-Perceiving the Land Grant University for the Information Age

2009-07-27T12:14:00.000-04:00

Many Pennsylvanians were surprised this summer when Governor Ed Rendell attempted to make the state’s land grant university ineligible for federal incentive funds by declaring that The Pennsylvania State University, the State’s Land Grant university, is not a public university. Presumably, this was justified because Penn State is not owned by the Commonwealth, but operates as a separate non-profit organization. The Governor later added Penn State to the list of eligible institutions. However, the Governor’s actions suggest the need to re-articulate the land grant mission in light of the dramatic changes confronting industrial/agricultural states like Pennsylvania as they adapt themselves to the new economy of a globalized Information Society.

Land Grant universities were a direct response to the Industrial Revolution. They were created by the Morrill Act of 1862, which allowed states to sell public lands in order to create institutions that would, in the words of the Act, “. . . .teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.”

The question for today’s land grant educators is: How do we articulate this mission so that, looking forward, the land grant university can continue to be relevant to both individuals and the community in the Information Society? A 21^st century strategy should encompass several dimensions of the Land Grant mission. These include (among others): (1) improving access to education, (2) ensuring a strong economic base for communities—a dimension that includes a focus on innovation—and (3) creating professionals who can thrive as both professionals and citizens in a global, networked society.

Access and Success

Susan Patrick, president of the North American Council for Online Learning (NACOL), reported at a Sloan Consortium conference that, while policy makers at the beginning of the 20^th century anticipated that the Industrial Revolution would require that 25 percent of high school graduates move on to a college education, the Information Society would require that 80 percent of high school graduates gain at least some postsecondary education. This thinking is reflected in the Obama Administration’s new Graduation Initiative.

The goal of creating graduates for the Information Society requires a three-fold strategy: (1) educating the current workforce, (2) improving the number of high school students who graduate prepared to continue onto higher education, and (3) expanding the capacity of higher education to produce significantly greater numbers of college graduates. While the Administration initiative is focused on community colleges, there are several ways in which our land grant university can contribute to this long-term strategic goal:

· Open Educational Resources – Universities can enrich the resources available to local school teachers by making some of the content in their online courses available for high school teachers to use in their own classrooms. This has a historical precedent in the early days of educational broadcasting, when land grants like the University of Nebraska and Penn State created video-based teaching materials that were then broadcast into the schools for use by teachers.

· Dual Enrollment – Many land grant universities have both online degree programs and smaller, community-based campuses that offer undergraduate programs. Universities can use both online and locally delivered undergraduate courses as dual enrollment courses with state high schools. This will accomplish two goals: (1) it will fill gaps in the local high school curriculum, helping to prepare high school graduates to enter college and (2) it will give high school graduates a head start on a college degree.

· Accelerated Degree Programs Dual enrollment courses could be part of accelerated degree programs that allow people to complete an undergraduate degree in three years through a combination of on campus and online courses, internships, and independent study.

· Virtual High School Programs In areas of critical need—where local resources may not be adequate—Land Grant institutions can assist by providing virtual high school programs, so that students graduate ready to start work in specialized areas. This also has a historical precedent in high school correspondence courses offered by a number of land grant institutions.

Other aspects of re-conceiving the Land Grant mission for the Information Society will be explored in future posts.