Thinking about Culture in International Online Learning

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

Historically, it is fair to assume that most U.S. institutions expected that international students came to their campuses to immerse themselves not only in their disciplines, but also in the American professional culture and, more broadly, in the American social culture.  In return, the presence of international 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 different environment, however—one in which the cultural intent of education becomes much more visible as a practical issue.  For the most part, international students in online programs are not expatriates.  They tend to be working adults, living and working in their home cultures and wanting to apply their learning to their lives in their home countries.   Online learning has also sparked a new movement—the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement—through which faculty developers of online materials can share their online content with colleagues at other institutions worldwide; this focuses the 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 education involves immersing the student in the academic culture.  This has been the rationale for required residencies in graduate programs that prepare students for academic careers.  However, immersion in academic life has proven not to be as relevant in programs that prepare students for careers in non-academic professions; in this case, the better argument is that students should be immersed in the professional culture in which they will work after graduation.  The problem, until very recently has been that, aside from internships and practica, institutions could not provide this kind of immersion.

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

While it is safe to say that most online programs have not addressed this issue, two approaches have begun to emerge.  One—the multicultural approach—uses both content and pedagogy to create a context in which students see themselves and their professional studies in the context of a broader regional or global context.  This option has been an issue in Europe, where there has been a backlash against an approach that welcomes all cultures, at the perceived expense of the student’s home culture.   The second option is to use the online environment to help students contextualize the curriculum within their own local culture. 

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

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

Online learning is transforming how colleges and universities reach out internationally, both to other institutions and directly to students.  Collaborative international degree programs and Open Educational Resources are two examples.   Addressing the issue of culture is the next step in this transformation.  Needed now are best practices and models to guide both content and pedagogy.

Truth versus Power

On Friday, August 5, MSNBC had this headline in its Business section:  “No double dip, but economy stuck in low gear.”  Right next to it was this headline, “NYT analysis:  We’re probably in a double dip recession.”  Directly under that was another headline: “Why recession fears are overblown.”   And, of course, at the very top of the site was the breaking news:  “US Loses Top Credit Rating.”

So, what did we learn from MSNBC on this particular day?  Not much, it appears.  Now, I am a big fan of MSNBC.  This website is my home page on my web browser.  However, we have to question the value of their reportage on this issue, this particular day.

In a recent Rolling Stone article, former Vice President Al Gore wrote, "After World War II, a philosopher studying the impact of organized propaganda on the quality of democratic debate wrote, 'The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false'."  The task today, is to push our politicians to move past propaganda--the always evident "talking points" on each side--and to demand that they tell us what they think is true.   

The 24-hour news channels have given us a “talking-point versus talking-point” approach to the news, instead of reportage based on fact-finding and analysis.  In this radicalized political climate, it simply is not enough to invite to the table a liberal and a conservative and elicit their talking points on an issue.  Rather, we should expect the reporter to dig out the facts personally and present an analysis that they can support as the truth as they see it.   That is, we should ask journalists to pursue questions of truth rather than questions of power. Otherwise, propaganda will win out and, when that happens, a democratic society will always lose.

Jane Addams and the Tea Party

I am re-reading Jane Addams’ wonderful memoir, Twenty Years at Hull-House.  In explaining the spirit with which she founded her settlement house in 1890s Chicago, she wrote that it was driven, in part by “the conviction, in the words of Canon Barnett, that the things which make men alike are finer and better than the things that keep them apart, and that these basic likenesses, if they are properly accentuated, easily transcend the less essential differences of race, language, creed, and tradition.”  Addams, of course, was speaking about the importance of integrating into American life the millions of immigrants who had been attracted to the United States at the height of the Industrial Revolution.  However, her words also set an expectation for us today.

American-style democracy thrives on our ability to find a workable middle—a place where are “basic likenesses” outweigh the things that keep us apart enough for us to fulfill the purpose of our federal government as declared in the opening sentence of the Constitution: “. . . to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity . . .” I would like to think that I could identify some “basic likenesses” with the Tea Party members of Congress.  However, it does not come easily.

The Tea Party, which declared its purpose during the last election as being “to take back our country” (they did not say from whom), can be expected to become even more radical and less prone to compromise now that they have won a big victory.  These rightwing extremists have set themselves so arrogantly apart from the mainstream of our country, that, right now at least, I cannot find common ground with them.  They, in turn, seek no common ground with anyone who does not share their ideology.

I hope that our politicians are able to find a way to build a workable middle ground in this environment.

Public vs Private Good: Options for the Public University

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

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.

From the Typewriter to the Cloud: The Impact of Technology on Writing

One of this year’s finds at the annual AAUW book sale at Penn State was “The Writer’s Chapbook,” a collection of reflections about writing by top authors, drawn from their interviews in “The Paris Review.”   Reading it the other day, I stumbled over several authors commenting on the impact of the typewriter on writing. 

The biographer Leon Edel talked about Henry James, who must have been one of the early adopters of this new technology.  Here’s what he said:  “He began dictating directly to the typewriter.  It’s a case of the medium being the message and with dictation he ran into longer sentences, and parenthetical remarks, and when he revised what he had dictated he tended to add further flourishes.  In the old days, when he wrote in longhand he was much briefer and crisper, but now he luxuriated in fine phrases and he was exquisitely baroque.”

Conrad Aiken, noting that he never used a carbon copy “because that made me self-conscious,” wrote, “I can remember discussing the effect of the typewriter on our work with Tom Eliot because he was moving to the typewriter about the time I was.  And I remember our agreeing that it made for a slight change of style in the prose-that you tended to use more periodic sentences, a little shorter, and a rather choppier style—and that one must be careful about that . . . But that was a passing phase only.  We both soon discovered that we were just as free to let the style throw itself into the air as we had been writing manually.”

I suspect it is too bad that Henry James dictated rather than take to the keyboard himself. 

These couple of examples also made me wonder:  how has word processing changed style over the past two decades?  One imagines that the ability for infinite self-correction should free the imagination and allow writers to be more spontaneous, on one hand, and more precise on the other hand.  Then, add the Internet as a publishing environment.  I have to think that the ability to immediately publish one’s thoughts would lead to shorter pieces more focused on the immediacy of insight rather than on long, complexly woven pieces—a tendency reinforced by the limitations on length imposed by Twitter.  However, there is also the inevitable temptation to constantly revisit and revise—to not let good enough alone in this environment.  This suggests the need for a new artistic ethos:  that the writer, having written, must move on.   But it also raises a question about the relationship between writer and reader and how readers engage with the writer in the creative process.   In this new environment, is writing about the finished product or does the reader gain artistic insight in the process itself?

Worth exploring more.  Any thoughts?

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

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?