Voter Rights: The New Civil Rights Movement

It has occurred to me recently that the Tea Party folks missed the point somewhat when they chose their name.  The Boston Tea Party was not a protest about taxes.  It was a protest about being taxed without representation.  The Bostonians were complaining that the British oligarchs had imposed a tea tax on the colonies without colonists having any valid representation in Parliament, so that their needs would be considered in the process of making laws that affected them.

I was reminded of this important distinction as we celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.   These remarkable laws enfranchised millions of Americans to fully participate in our society by allowing them to fully participate in the election process.   Half a century later, I fear we have already taken big steps backward to disenfranchise our citizens.  In the process, we run the risk of creating a new oligarchy at a scale and rate that will destroy American democracy.   Three examples illustrate the problem:

1.            Gerrymandering.   I live in Central Pennsylvania, where my university town has been divided up so that it is part of several conservative, rural state assembly districts, essentially nullifying any liberal tendencies of the university community.   This idea—of re-engineering district borders in order to ensure conservative majorities—has been a national conservative strategy for years. 

2.            Voter  Disenfranchisement.    Throughout the Obama administration, we have seen states attempting to limit access to the poor and racial minorities by requiring visual ID, limiting voting hours, etc.  The impact here is to disenfranchise specific classes of individual voters entirely.  This year, for instance, the Huffington Post reported that Ohio reduced early voting and decided that voting places will close at 5 p.m. on Election Day.  The result is to effectively block access for many working-class citizens, minorities, and seniors.

3.             The Influence of Special Interests.   The Citizens United and, most recently, McCutcheon rulings give corporations and other “associations of individuals” the ability to give huge amounts of money to political candidates.   The impact is to essentially compromise our elected officials, leaving individual citizens with no real power as citizens and no real representation in government.  This is today’s equivalent of the tea tax that led to the Boston tea party.

The result is that, 50 years after the passage of the Voter Rights Act, many American citizens no longer have full access to representation.  Some have been denied the opportunity through redistricting that puts them in a permanent minority position; others have been denied access to the voting booth.  And, regardless of who wins, many candidates are compromised by the huge amounts of money invested in their elections by corporations and other special interests, leaving individual citizens with no practical representation.

What we need is not a Tea Party focused on eliminating government services for citizens, but a new Civil Rights movement that is committed to ensuring that all Citizens have equal and effective access to representation at the State and Federal levels.  

The Third Industrial Revolution and the Future of Public Research Universities

In The Third Industrial Revolution, Jeremy Rifkin argues that we are now in the midst of a new industrial revolution—one that is significantly different from the previous ones and that already is transforming the economy and daily life.  Rifkin’s analysis of the new social order has significant implications for higher education that potentially are as far-reaching as the original industrial revolution of the 19^th century, which stimulated the development and growth of the public college and university system in the United States.

            The first Industrial Revolution, in the late 18^th century through the 19^th century, was built on coal and oil.  It fueled a revolution in transportation and manufacturing.  In the United States, one implication was urbanization, as manufacturing centers were created in cities like Pittsburgh and Chicago.  Another was immigration, as working class people came from across Europe to seek new industrial jobs.   One response was the land grant university, created to increase the supply of professionals in the “practical and mechanical” arts and to enhance agricultural productivity in order to sustain urbanization.  Another response was the system of “normal schools”—teacher education institutions that became the foundation of our state college and university system—created to ensure the supply of teachers to educate the millions of immigrant children.

            The second industrial revolution began in the early 20^th century and was driven by gas and communications, both of which required highly centralized top-down structures.  This revolutionized transportation and created the mass media that dominated the latter half of the 20^th century.

            The third industrial revolution began after World War II.   It, too, is driven by energy and communications.   As Rifkin notes, “Communication technology is the nervous system that oversees, coordinates, and manages the economic organism, and energy is the blood that circulates through the body politic, providing the nourishment to convert nature’s endowment into goods and services to keep the economy alive and growing” (p. 35).   However, unlike the previous revolutions, neither energy nor communications are organized as centralized, top-down ventures.   Communications are dominated by the Internet, with its multiple sources of input and access; energy, increasingly, is dominated not by oil and gas but by renewable sources—solar and wind, for instance—that enter the system at multiple points, such as the solar panels on a suburban residential roof.  Today’s electrical grid, increasingly, is a network in which users are also providers.  People subscribe to an electrical provider, but also produce their own solar and wind energy, some of which is sold back to the provider.   As Rifkin notes, “The democratization of energy will bring with it a fundamental reordering of human relationships, impacting the very way we conduct business, govern society, educate our children, and engage in civic life” (p. 2).

            At the same time, this Third Industrial Revolution is increasingly dominated by the Internet, which is redefining how individuals identify themselves in association with others.  "Today,” writes Rifkin, “distributed information and communication technologies are converging with distributed renewable energies, creating the infrastructure for a Third Industrial Revolution and paving the way for biosphere consciousness” (p. 234).  One of the implications, he notes, is an increasing awareness that individuals are part of a global community: 

“For a younger, educated generation that is becoming part of a global community and is as likely to identify with Facebook as with traditional tribal loyalties, the old ways are an anathema.  The patriarchal thinking, rigid social norms, and xenophobic behavior of their elders is so utterly alien to the generation that has grown up in social media networks, with an emphasis on transparency, collaborative behavior, and peer-to-peer relations, that it marks a historic divide in consciousness itself” (p. 17).

            This networked social environment is fostering a new economy marked by collaboration that is “fundamentally at odds with classical economic theory, which puts great store on the assumption that individual self-interest in the marketplace is the only effective way to drive economic growth” (p. 126).  Instead, Rifkin argues, “The new model favors lateral ventures, both in social commons and in the market place, on the assumption that mutual interest, pursued jointly, is the best route to sustainable economic development” (ibid.).

            Rifkin identifies five pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution, which he maintains are tools that “can enable us to re-integrate into the natural world” (p. 238):

• Shifting to renewable energy;
• Transforming the building stock of every continent into micro-power plans to collect renewable energies on site;
•  Deploying hydrogen and other storage technologies in every building and throughout the infrastructure to store intermittent energies;
• Using Internet technology to transform the power grid of every continent into an energy-sharing intergrid that acts just like the Internet (when millions of buildings are generating a small amount of energy locally, on site, they can sell surplus back); and
• Transitioning the transport fleet to elect plug-in and fuel cell vehicles that can buy and sell electricity on a smart, continental, interactive power grid.

The TIR and Education

The idea of a Third Industrial Revolution has been building for several decades.  As far back as 1970, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock suggested that things were changing in some of the same directions that Rifkin reports.  For instance, Future Shock predicted a new “ad hoc” generation that would be less willing to affiliate.  He also worried about the dangers of a glut of information.  We were still two decades away from the Internet and a clearer vision of where the Information Revolution might take us.  It was not long, however, before experts began to worry about the role of education in this new age.  As early as 1986, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching reported, “The undergraduate college, the very heard of higher learning, is a troubled institution . . . Colleges appear to be searching for meaning in a world where diversity, not commonality, is the guiding vision” (p.16).

            Today—with two decades the first Internet browser introduced the World Wide Web—the issues are much clearer.  Rifkin’s analysis suggests that the Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) will be as important to the future of public higher education as was the first.   To see the full potential, we need to look at all three legs of the public higher education stool:  instruction, research, and engagement.

TIR and Instruction

Rifkin argues that the Third Industrial Revolution calls for what he dubs a “lateral” approach to education.  He notes that, “the dominant, top-down approach to teaching, the aim of which is to create a competitive autonomous being, is beginning to give way to a distributed and collaborative educational experience with an eye to instilling a sense of the social nature of knowledge” (p.241).

            I discussed the impact of the Information Revolution on general education in a blog posting in 2011.  However, we need to think more broadly about how to adapt the curriculum to meet the needs of a new society. The roots of this approach can be traced back John Dewey’s early progressive education philosophy.  However, more recently, the move to a more learner-centered, inquiry-based collaborative learning environment has arisen out of two decades of experience with online learning.   We are seeing pedagogical innovations like blended learning, which mixes online and classroom experiences; the flipped classroom, which uses out-of-class media for knowledge transfer, leaving classroom time for discussion and collaboration; and communities of inquiry, which build the educational experience through the integration of the learners’ social presence,  teaching presence, and cognitive presence.

            Recently, the Ontario Online Learning Portal published on its website an article entitled “A New Pedagogy is Emerging . . . and Online Learning is a Key ContributingFactor”  that describes an emerging pedagogical model emphasizes the development of seven dynamics in the learning environment:

1. A commitment to blended learning. 
2.  Collaboration and building communities of practice that encourage students to share experiences, discuss ideas, learn from each other, and otherwise collaborate to build knowledge around information. 
3. The flipped classroom—using multimedia and open education resources, rather than classroom sessions, to deliver organized. 
4. Increased learner control, choice, and independence. 
5. Anywhere, anytime, any size learning, such as the development of smaller “just-in-time” mobile learning modules that can be aggregated into courses, certificates, degrees. 
6. New forms of assessment, including e-portfolios, peer assessment, and the use of learning analytics. 
7. Self-directed and non-formal online learning

Institutions must both encourage and support faculty innovation by providing instructional designers and professional development opportunities that will allow these innovations to move more quickly into the mainstream so that our institutions can better serve students.

TIR and the Research Mission

The lateral quality of the new environment can also have significant impacts on research.  The Internet makes it easier for researchers to collaborate across institutions and to maintain connection with practitioners and users of their research results throughout the research and development process.  One example of this at work is the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) .  Now in its second decade, this network of 17 research universities on five continents is committed to creating

. . . new, multilateral opportunities for international collaboration in research and graduate education. It is a flexible, dynamic organisation that uses the combined resources and intellectual power of its membership to achieve collective international objectives and to stretch international ambitions.

WUN uses a variety of technologies—from email discussion lists to desktop videoconferencing—to bring researchers together into communities and to share resources and files within a community.

            The new environment encourages the creation of lateral research communities.  These can be cross-university collaborations among researchers, inter-disciplinary collaborations that attack multiple aspects of a single problem, international or cross-cultural partnerships, or multi-faceted collaborations that bring together academic researchers, professional/practitioner communities, and other agencies—industries, government agencies, community organizations, etc.—to contribute problems, possible solutions, theories, data, etc., all directed toward continuous improvement.

TIR and University Engagement

The idea of lateral connections is a perfect match to the University’s public engagement mission.  At the end of the 19^th century, a major focus of engagement was the need to help farmers increase the agricultural productivity in order to sustain the combined forces of immigration and urbanization that were essential to large-scale industrialization.  The Cooperative Extension Service was formed to ensure that research expertise was present in every county to assist farmers.  Today’s technology allows us to be much more effective in reaching and serving communities—themselves often distributed thinly across a state (or across multiple states).  MOOCs and other digital resources allow us to create communities that include both academics and practitioners and to share knowledge, practical problems, success stories, and other experiences within the community.  This can be applied well beyond agriculture—think rural community sustainability, urban redevelopment, small business development, environmental safety, etc.  The user communities need no longer be defined by geography.  Nor must we be limited to local faculty capacity in order to bring the best knowledge to the community. 

            I wrote about this opportunity in a recent blog posting.  There are many opportunities here for the University to engage the community in this new environment.  Lateral engagement means developing meaningful, multi-point relationships—true communities—among faculty, community organizations, and individuals for training, research and technology transfer, and community/organizational development.

Next Steps

            Most public colleges and universities can already point to some examples of these new lateral relationships in teaching/learning, research, or engagement.  The challenge facing us as a field is to think and act more strategically—to embrace the Third Industrial Revolution and organize our resources to support it in our states and regions.   Higher education is an inherently decentralized social organization.  The key to succeeding in this new environment is not simply to mandate top-down changes, but to create an organizational and policy framework that will encourage and support new lateral relationships in each of the three main missions of teaching/learning, research, and engagement. 

Big Data and the Rights of Students

In December 2013, the Times Higher Education website in Great Britain published an article about the use of big data in higher education. 

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, professor of internet governance and regulation at the University of Oxford’s Oxford Internet Institute, was interviewed on the eve of the Online Educa Berlin conference about the increasing use of “big data” by higher education.  He cautioned against using big data to track students and narrow their choices as they begin their academic careers.  Quoting from the article:

“Until the beginning of the big data age, a student could write in his or her application…an argument outlining why the data might not be complete enough, and might not give a comprehensive prediction,” he said.

“I fear that as we move into the big data age…this argument will not hold much currency any more. Then I worry that the predictions will take over, and schools, universities and college swill not take any risks any more.”

The concern that use of big data will make it harder for students to chart their own educational—and, by extension, professional and societal—futures is important.  Institutions need to make sure that, in the process of trying to optimize student success, they don’t deny students choice.  At the same time, we need to make sure that we honor our other commitments to students.  Some points for discussion:

·      It is important that students know what data is being collected and how it will be used, individually or in aggregate.  Given the ways that big data can be used to guide the student’s experience in the curriculum, it is essential that students be aware of how their actions are being captured and used by the institution. 

·      Institutions need policies regarding how they use data they collect.  For instance, can the data be used to disqualify a student from a direction the student clearly wants to take? 

·      Institutions need to control the use of data.   What is the student's right to privacy in this environment?   For instance, should institutions be able to use student data for purposes other than helping the student succeed?  Should they be able to use it, in aggregate, for recruiting?  Should institutions be able to sell data or use it to promote non-academic products and services to students?  If a third-party is used to collect information, what use, if any, can the third party make of the data? 

·      Who, besides an individual faculty member, should have access to student data gathered during a course?  Historically, universities have protected communications in a course.  Should institutions that collect student data in courses be able to share that data—individually or in aggregate—with other faculty, with advisors and other student services professionals, or with third parties (parents, potential employers, etc.)?

·      At the recent UPCEA/ACE conference on online learning, one presenter described how big data was being used within courses to track how students use online content.  The presenter described a case in which the course allowed students to request a “hint” when they were having difficulty with a problem.  She noted that one student always used the “hint” as a first resort, which raised the question of whether the student was actually learning the course content.  This raises two broad ethical questions:  (1) In cases like this, should students be made aware of how over-use of a feature like hints will be seen by the instructor and encouraged to use the feature sparingly? and (2) If help is provided, should using that help be seen by faculty as a sign of weakness on the part of the student?  It is an area that calls out for new rules and better communication about expectations.

Clearly, big data has great potential to help institutions better understand their students and, potentially, to help them guide students to success.  However, for this benefit to be fully realized, institutions—and individual faculty—need to integrate the collection and use of this data into its culture and into the relationships that exist with students at the course level, the program level, and the institutional level.  At the process, institutions must ensure that students are made aware of and are empowered by the data that the institution is collecting.

MOOCs Arrive in Harper's Index

The March 2014 issue of  Harper's Magazine came today and had these items in the "Index":

*Percentage of students enrolled in a massive open online course who view no more than one lecture:  49.
*Percentage who complete the course:  4.
*Percentage of students enrolled in such courses at UPenn last year who had already earned a college degree:  79.

Interestingly, the "Index" also has these items:

*Percentage of U.S. students who started college in 2007 who have not completed their degrees: 1/2.
*Percentage change since 1980 in the rate of labor-force participation among U.S. women: +5.7

Clearly, we have not yet found the best role for MOOCs here in the U.S.  However, it is also clear that there is a significant societal demand to help adults complete their college degrees so that they can be more competitive in the workforce and so that our society can better compete in the new global economy.

At the same time, it is clear that we need to greatly increase the impact of agricultural and other research in developing countries so that they can participate more equally in the new economy.  Here, perhaps, is a way that America's research universities--and, especially, our land grant institutions with their long history of research transfer and extension--can make good use of MOOCs.

The "Index" also had some bad news from the K-12 realm:

*Portion of white U.S. students taking AP math exams last year who received passing scores: 2/3.
*Of black U.S. students: 1/3.
*Number of 882 SAT takers from Camden, New Jersey, in 2012, who were scored "college ready": 3.

If we are to meet the workforce needs of the new economy, we desperately need to produce more high school graduates who are prepared to go on to college.  Here, again, MOOCs might help by making available to teachers open educational resources in critical disciplines and developing the teacher's ability to effectively use them.

There is a future for MOOCs in the U.S.  We just need to focus on the societal need.

Responding to the New Student Revolution

This week, "Inside Higher Education" carried an article -- 
 Ready or Not, Change is Coming | Inside Higher Ed --
about the dramatic shift in student circumstances and student expectations of higher education. 

The author, Marni Baker Stein, notes that not only is this generation of students more likely to work while attending college, they have very specific expectations of higher education, including that they (quoting Ms. Stein here):

• attend, perhaps more than ever before, to the outcomes of their education; 

• expect a return on their investment and increasingly demand

• internships, practical experience and direct windows into possible
  employment paths from the very start of their post-secondary careers;

• value personalization that is embedded in their day-to-day experiences

• and that responds to both their weaknesses and strengths;

• prefer optimized pathways that recognize and credit prior knowledge and experience and allow them to move at their own pace;

• opt to work across multiple institutions and multiple instructional contexts to get to goal; and

• demand a student experience accessible anytime, anywhere, and on any device.

This suggests to me that colleges and universities must begin to pay more attention to the unique opportunities that online technology provides to not only increase access and convenience for students, but to meet their expectations that an education is more than taking lecture notes and passing tests.  Specifically:

*Increasing the use of competency-based learning

*Integrate learning with practical experience, building on the fact that online learning eliminates geography as a defining factor in the student's experience, allowing them to mix formal learning and practical experience.

*Creating learning communities and adopting a pedagogy that encourages collaborative and active learning based on inquiry, research, and problem solving.

*Facilitating collaboration across institutions (such as the Great Plains IDEA and CIC CourseShare) so that all students have access to the best possible courses and experiences.

*Encouraging use of mobile devices to sustain active learning communities.

In short, online learning must evolve beyond simply providing access to ensuring a learning environment that will help today's students--on-campus, off-campus, and in between--be successful in a globalized information society.   This is the real challenge for the second generation of online learning.

Thanks to the Beatles on their 50th Anniversary in the US

Tonight marks the 50^th anniversary of the Beatles’ premiere on American television—The Ed Sullivan Show—back in 1964. 

I was working at Little Italy, a family-owned restaurant in Hermitage, at the time.  The owners, Mr. and Mrs. Bishop, brought in a TV and we watched it there.   

I saw the Beatles in 1966.  They were playing at the Cleveland baseball stadium.  That was the year I graduated from high school.  I was working at the local Arby’s, and a group of us drove up to Cleveland for the concert.  We parked outside the city and took a trolley into town.  We had lunch and then went over to the hotel where the Beatles were staying.  Saw nothing, but enjoyed the crowd.

In those days, the amplification systems were not yet powerful enough for full-stadium concerts, so the stage was set on second base and the seating went around from first base to third base.  Our seats were close to first base.  The Beatles were great.  But, when the opening guitar riff for “Day Tripper” started, the crowd went wild and kids stormed the stage.  Police had set up snow fence around the track and tried to hold back the crowd, but to no avail.  The Beatles retreated to a trailer set behind the stage until things got settled down and then came out and finished their set.  On the trolley back to our car, we saw several people who carried souvenirs of the concert.  One had one the first (or third) base bag.  Another had the neck of a guitar.

The Beatles—along with Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and a few others—continued to provide social markers for us through college.  I remember the day the White Album came out, for instance, and we gathered in a friend’s apartment to listen to it for the first time.  Many thanks to them all for giving a soundtrack to our generation.

Putting the Social Mission First

Last week, at a conference for online learning leaders, I was reminded of a tendency of many in and around the online learning community to see our work in corporate/industrial terms.  The idea of defining everything we do in business terms is unsettling for someone whose entire professional career has been in the service of public institutions.

Public and most private higher education institutions do not operate by “free market” principles.  Instead, our colleges and universities—excepting the small number of for-profit companies that offer accredited degrees (often to students who fund their tuition with public funds)—are complex organizations that are largely funded by the public and serve a public purpose.  Some are owned by their states; others are nonprofit corporations.  All operate with significant financial support from the public through a combination of direct government funding and tax-supported financial aid for students.  In doing so, they fulfill a social contract that they will address the public’s need for educated citizens and professionals in many walks of life.  To speak of these institutions as if they were for-profit businesses denies the fundamental social purpose and values that define them.

There are undoubtedly many reasons why this perception has some to the fore.  One is a broad array of for-profit companies have arisen that sell services to institutions that want to offer online programs but that lack the technical and support infrastructure to quickly achieve scale without help. 

Another part of the problem is that, typically, these operations are expected to be “self-supporting.”  I put that in quotation marks because very little of higher education is truly self-supporting.  What I mean when I say that online learning is self-supporting is that, for the most part, they do not benefit from direct state subsidies.  As a result, they typically are expected by their institutions to pay their own way and not divert public funds from other aspects of their institution’s mission.  Because they represent a new expense, they must generate new revenue.  That said, many of the students that they attract may be funded by taxpayers through public scholarships or loans.  The public mission is maintained. 

As a new mission at many institutions, there has been a need to isolate the online learning initiative so that it does not, in the attempt to serve new students, take resources away from existing programs serving more traditional students.   Similarly, in most institutions (again excluding a small number of for-profit companies) after-cost revenue from tuition and fees is re-invested in the institution.  Typically, this is what funds new program development, technological enhancements, professional development for faculty, expanded student services, etc.  In some cases, excess revenue is distributed to academic units, where it can be used to support faculty research or other academic unit projects or returned to the central administration to support the institution in general.  There is no “profit” involved. 

Why do we offer online higher education?  For many of us, online learning is a simple extension of a mission that we have pursued since 1892, when three relatively new American universities—Penn State, the University of Chicago, and the University of Wisconsin—launched correspondence study, the first generation of American distance education.  Our purpose—then as now—was to extend access to higher education to adult students who otherwise could not practically pursue higher education.  Over the years, distance education has adopted many new technologies—from radio and film in the 1920s to broadcast television in the 1970s, satellite and interactive video in the 1980s and, since the mid-1990s, the Internet. 

Today, the need for colleges and universities to extend access to adult students has never been greater.  Our society is changing. The U.S. Department of Education has noted that, to ensure that our society can thrive in a global information economy, we need to increase the percentage of high school graduates who go on to higher education from the current rate of 39 percent to 60 percent.  Currently, most high school students who are qualified for higher education do, indeed, go to college.  In order to meet the societal need, then, we must reach out to adults were not able to pursue higher education at the traditional 18-22 age or who find themselves needing additional education in order to grow professionally.  This is our social mission:  to empower adult Americans to meet the demands of a changing society.  To see online learning only in profit/loss terms only diminishes that critical mission.

Online learning often began, by necessity, on the fringes of our institutions.  However, it is clear that this innovation will find its proper place in the institutional mainstream as the long-term societal need--and our ability to respond to it--become better defined.  At this critical juncture—when we are no longer an experiment but are not yet accepted as part of the core mission—it is essential that we maintain our sense of purpose and not be distracted by corporate thinking.  Innovations with online learning are not about how best to exploit a market but how to realize a mission and to serve the greater good.  It is time for those of us who have championed online learning innovations at our universities to stand proudly for our real mission: to structure higher education so that it can best serve the needs of new populations and, ultimately, the communities in which they live.