Free College: Implications for the Curricluum

Over the past few months, national politicians have begun to propose important changes in our public education system.  Specifically, they have proposed that some aspects of higher education be funded in ways similar to how we fund K-12 schooling.  The Obama Administration, for instance, has proposed that community college education—essentially the first two years of a baccalaureate degree—be funded through tax dollars and made available at no additional cost to the student.  Some have expanded this to suggest that all four years of the undergraduate degree at state colleges and universities shoudl be free to the student.

            This is not as revolutionary an idea as it may sound.  At the beginning of the 20^th century, it was not unusual for students to leave school at the end of the 8^th grade.  In many cases, students were required to pay tuition to attend high school.   However, recognizing that the skills needed for citizens to succeed in the industrial economy, the U.S. made high school universally available—funded by local property taxes—and, soon after, began to require it.  A high school degree became the minimum qualification for many entry-level jobs.

            Let’s assume, then, that the current call to make at least the first two years of college available free to the student will result in at least half of the baccalaureate degree being available as part of basic citizen education.  Over time, then, most American teenagers will continue past twelfth grade to get a two-year postsecondary education—a technical certification, an associate degree, or the first half of a baccalaureate degree. 

            How might this change how we organize education?  Some thoughts:

There already is a fair amount of overlap between the high school and undergraduate general education curricula. If the majority of high school graduates go on to the first two years of college, we should take a fresh look at what both schools and colleges are teaching and strengthen the curricula.  The curriculum overlap is evident in the number of high school grads who can test out of college general education courses and in the increasingly common practice of “dual enrollment” courses that grant both high school and college credit.  In the short run, it would make sense to build a stronger system to support dual enrollment, reducing both the cost of college and the time to degree.  What we need, as I have noted in an earlier posting, is to organize a system that encourages sharing of courses for dual enrollment and to share open educational resources across institutions.

In the long run, though, the movement of more high school students on to free postsecondary education calls for the field to take a fresh look at the combined high school and college general education curricula to see how they can be streamlined and made more effective.  The history/civics curriculum is a good case in point.   Using my local school district as an example, students study civics and basic economic concepts in eighth grade, world history in ninth and tenth, American history in eleventh, and choose two courses from a list of options (Democracy in Action, Current Issues, Economics, Sociology, and Psychology, along with a list of other courses for advanced students) in twelfth grade.  Then, when they move on to college (using Penn State as an example), they may choose from a wide range of humanities and social/behavioral sciences courses as part of the general education distribution requirement.  The challenge, as increasing numbers of students move directly on to college, will be make the entire scope of this requirement more efficient, but also more coherent.  For instance, it would be essential to ensure that “civics”—citizen education in American history, the Constitution, etc.—be included in the first twelve years, so that students are prepared to become voters when they turn 18.  That said, the need to revisit the structure and continuity of the curriculum applies equally to literature and the humanities, math, the sciences, social sciences, and the arts. 

The mid-twentieth century high school curriculum included required courses in home economics (for the girls) and shop (for the boys).  The assumption, I suspect, was that young people needed to have these practical skills in order to take on their adult roles in the home.   While the old model assumed social roles that were already out of date by the 1960s, we might ask:  what practical skills must students have today to be effective adults, regardless of their vocational/professional choices?  

            In the process, curriculum policy makers might also consider the role of service in universal education.  One implication of the free college movement is that many, if not most, young people will continue their role as students into their adult years.  The new curriculum might consider how to give students the opportunity to explore life options.  Perhaps a year of service—or other kinds of extended practical experiences that get students involved in their communities—should be built into the new curriculum.

            It may be many years before college becomes a societal expectation for most students.  However, we should begin exploring the implications today. 

"Melting Pot" or "Mosaic"?

A few years ago, I was honored to chair the annual conference of the University Professional and Continuing Education Association.  The meeting was to be held in Vancouver, British Columbia.  As a result, the planning committee included colleagues from both Canada and the U.S.  As we talked about the focus of the conference, an interesting distinction arose between how Canadian and U.S. continuing education professionals perceived the population they served.  Americans on the committee used the term “melting pot” to describe how the U.S. understands our immigration-based society.  The Canadians, on the other hand, talked about their equally diverse culture as a “cultural mosaic.”  The different perspectives led to some interesting conversations about the role of continuing higher education in our communities.   

            That distinction has come again into sharp focus in light of the recent killings—by police and against police—in the United States.  After the Dallas, Texas, killing of five police officers former Illinois Congressman—now a radio talk host—Joe Walsh tweeted a warning to President Obama, declaring that “This is now war” and that “Real America is coming after you.”  His tweet was a reminder that much of the cultural turmoil that we are seeing in our politics today can be traced back to the election of our first mixed-race President.  What started with the Tea Party’s pledge to “take back America” and the “birther” campaign against President Obama has contributed to what has emerged as a broad racial and cultural divide, despite the fact that the President is popular among the majority of Americans.

            The problem with the “melting pot” image is that we don’t all melt in at the same rate. In the end, it turns out, those who melted in more quickly see themselves as “real Americans” while others remain, in the eyes of these self-appointed “real” Americans, outsiders.  

The Canadians have it right.  It is better to see our immigration-based society as a mosaic, with each new group bringing unique strengths and cultural characteristics to a community the identity of which lies in the texture, color, and shape of each individual piece, without which the “real” America would be incomplete.

Thinking Strategically About the Second Generation of Online Learning

I was privileged to participate in the first generation of online learning.  The shift from print and broadcast television to satellite to online delivery was a true revolution in how colleges and universities define distance education and engagement in the 21^st century.  Today, as a new cadre of leaders step forward to guide the field into its second generation, I’d like to share some thoughts on where the field might go. 

What follows is not about technology.  I am sure we will continue to see technological advances in the coming decade, as we saw in every decade since the 1960s.  Instead, I want to focus on the larger issue of how the second generation of online learning can contribute to an institution’s traditional mission of community outreach, service, and engagement.   The first generation of online learning made every institution capable of reaching well beyond its physical campus to serve individuals with undergraduate and graduate courses, certificates, and degree programs.  This is now a mature function at many of the pioneering institutions.  However, other aspects of outreach and engagement have suffered.  Noncredit professional development and research and technology transfer, for example, have lost what once was a central position in the outreach mission at many institutions.  The strategic question for the next generation is:  how can the strategic use of online learning revitalize—perhaps even revolutionize – the institution’s engagement with important communities that it serves?   I’ll focus on three kinds of engagement that can be strengthened by online learning.

1.         Supporting K-12 Education

            For three decades during the Cold War—from the 1960s into the 1990s—colleges and universities—especially university public TV licensees—supported K-12 education by creating video lessons at all grade levels that were then broadcast over both university-owned and community-owned public television stations.  At Penn State, for instance, we developed instructional series such as Investigative Science in Elementary Education (ISEE), which offered video demonstrations of various natural phenomena; What’s in the News, a weekly social sciences series for middle grades; and Art for the Day, a series on artistic expression.  We broadcast these and many other series that we acquired from other sources, every weekday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. during the school year and supported those broadcasts with teacher guides and in-service professional development programs for teachers.  That service faded as nonbroadcast media—videocassette and videodisc, primarily—became easily available for teachers, obviating the need for a centralized distribution system.

            Today, the issue is not the Cold War but technology-driven globalization, which is bringing new social and economic challenges to communities that now have to compete in a global information society that has made it essential for young people to leave high school with skills in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—the STEM disciplines—that they will need in order to move into careers that require these skills.  We can envision several ways in which colleges and universities can use online learning to help K-12 schools address these curricular needs and, in the process, produce graduates who can move on to advanced study in the areas most needed by the new global information economy:

            Dual Enrollment Courses  Online learning makes it relatively easy for high school students to take online courses from a college/university and simultaneously earn both college credit and credit toward high school graduation.  It requires an agreement between the two institutions.  Students benefit by earning advance credit toward their college careers, reducing the time to degree and reducing the overall cost.  Some states provide funds to support the cost of tuition and fees.  The offering college/university benefits by filling vacant “seats” in an online class, by creating a relationship with potential future undergraduates, and by visibly serving the needs of their local communities.

            Curriculum Support through Open Educational Resources  In addition to offering full courses, colleges and universities can support K-12 education by providing curriculum support through OERs—online lectures, demonstrations, simulations, experiments, etc.—much as they did in the days of broadcast instructional TV.  In some cases, these could be excerpted from full courses.  In other cases, faculty (with support from the same instructional media design teams that work with them on full courses) could prepare material that address specific instructional needs at different grade levels.  When done at scale, this kind of effort requires a close working relationship between schools and the university, to identify needs, to evaluate available OERs, and to organize online delivery and support for the final products.  In the days of ITV, production of new materials was often funded by the state Department of Education, while delivery costs were shared by the schools and the originating public TV station.  While online learning has become a source of new revenue for many institutions, this service would be self-supporting but not necessarily a source of net revenue, unless the institution could tap into a national system for distribution of OERs.

2.         Engaging Professionals and Employers  One advantage of online learning is that it allows us to build communities, to bring together people of similar interests across wide geographic areas.  This offers a special opportunity for universities to engage employers to ensure that all employees, regardless of location, have access to professional development opportunities.  This can operate at the state level or nationally and internationally.  It can bring together specialists who otherwise would be too sparsely distributed to be able to justify a traditional classroom activity.  Online learning has already been well used to deliver undergraduate and, especially, postbaccalaureate certificates and degree programs that target dispersed professional specialties in a particular employer or group of employers.  It can also include more targeted services—OERs, TED-type presentations, and webinars that communicate new research findings and technology transfer opportunities, noncredit management or process training, updates on new regulatory policies, etc.   The range of services and delivery modes can be grounded in an agreement between the university and the employer or group.

3.         Promoting Inter-Institutional Collaborations

Both of the initiatives described above can benefit from inter-institutional collaborations.  In fact, institutional cooperation and collaboration may be critical to achieving sustained success.   In the K-12 area, for instance, collaborations that allow one institution to bring to its local schools OER resources from multiple institutions around the country, making it easier for the institution to meet curricular needs across grades and disciplines.  Equally important, working within a network of institutions also will help to reduce cost and duplication of effort, while building quality standards and opening opportunities for collaborative content development, bringing faculty from multiple institutions together to improve the K-12 curriculum and to respond to regional needs.

Inter-institutional collaborations built around the needs of specific professions and/or employers can also provide additional value to both the participating universities and the client organizations.   Such collaborations can help faculty from participating institutions identify opportunities for collaborative research and consulting with the client, as well as opportunities to develop courses that complement those of other institutions, so that a student can work toward a major at one institution and a minor at another.  The opportunities for collaborative teaching, research, and technology transfer targeted to real needs in the profession are significant.

Similarly, multi-national collaboration among universities offering online programs can serve to internationalize the students’ experiences, providing new insights on subject matter, better preparing students to succeed in a global, multi-cultural workplace.  At the same time, employers will come to know that their local university will meet their needs by bringing the best expertise available, not just what is available locally.

Collaboration is not a new idea in our field.  Over the decades there have been several important inter-institutional collaborations around media-based distance education.  Examples include the National Technological University (NTU), the American Distance Education Consortium, the To Educate the People Consortium, etc.  The early days of the online era saw collaborations around the needs of the nuclear power industry and other industry groups.  The Great Plains Inter-Institutional Distance Education Alliance (IDEA) stands as a model for institutional collaboration to improve access to needed disciplines across state lines.  The Worldwide University Network (WUN) is an excellent example of research universities that have come together to collaborate around applied research needs in areas such as climate change, public health, and understanding cultures.  It is not difficult to identify institutions that are innovating in one area or another.   What is missing today, however, is a national organizational infrastructure that encourages and supports innovation by providing policy structures and business models for collaboration.   The K-12 OER environment, for instance, would greatly benefit from national partnerships among producing universities to coordinate access to OERs from different institutions and manage the sharing process.  We need a system that is focused specifically on K-12 curriculum needs and through which we can help teachers identify needs, evaluate materials, share lesson plans and support materials within the community and, perhaps, offer professional development opportunities.  In the days of video, PBS and several regional networks provided that umbrella.  We need to build an infrastructure to support different kinds of collaboration today. 

Developing a Strategy 

A useful first step would be for a foundation or other recognized leadership organization to convene interested institutions to explore the internal and inter-institutional policy, planning, and business issues that must be resolved in order to develop successful collaborations at the national level.  The result would be a community of institutions committed to working together to use our now mature online learning systems to meet the needs of schools and employers at a scale that will open new opportunities for innovation.    

The Future of General Education, Part Three: The Sciences

The role of the physical and social sciences in a general education program is a knotty issue for curriculum planners.  On one hand, higher education has become sensitized to the need for graduates to have a better foundation in disciplines that contribute to STEM—Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics—skills that are increasingly needed in today’s workplace.  On the other hand, the current distribution curriculum—which typically allows students to meet their general education requirements by taking basic introductory courses in math and various science and social science disciplines—often fails to either prepare students for advanced study in these disciplines or to develop knowledge and skills that allow them to be more effective citizens in a technology-oriented society.  In fact, many students are able to avoid taking these courses because they simply duplicate materials learned in high school.

            Institutions are thus faced with two curricular issues: (1) how to prepare students with the scientific knowledge and skills needed to be successful in more advanced courses in the science disciplines and (2) how to prepare students to be effective citizens in a technological information society.   Both are important to the undergraduate curriculum, but it is the second issue that is essential for how an institution defines general education.

STS:  The Sciences in General Education

As I noted in the first posting in this series, the purpose of general education is to help students learn how to live and prosper in a highly inter-reliant global society and economy in which technology and mass migration and inter-dependent international supply chains are redefining “community.”   The science education community has experimented for several decades with an interdisciplinary approach that addresses this goal:  the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) movement.  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.”   Harvard University notes that STS merges two kinds of scholarship:

The first consists of research on the nature and practices of science and technology (S&T). Studies in this genre approach S&T as social institutions possessing distinctive structures, commitments, practices, and discourses that vary across cultures and change over time. This line of work addresses questions like the following: is there a scientific method; what makes scientific facts credible; how do new disciplines emerge; and how does science relate to religion? The second stream concerns itself more with the impacts and control of science and technology, with particular focus on the risks that S&T may pose to peace, security, community, democracy, environmental sustainability, and human values. Driving this body of research are questions like the following: how should states set priorities for research funding; who should participate, and how, in technological decisionmaking; should life forms be patented; how should societies measure risks and set safety standards; and how should experts communicate the reasons for their judgments to the public?

The goal of STS teaching, notes the Harvard website, “seeks to promote cross-disciplinary integration, civic engagement, and critical thinking.”

In the 1970s and 1980s, Penn State University was a leader in STS innovation, under the guidance of Dr. Rustum Roy.  I was involved in several courses that used television documentaries as the basis for discussion of the inter-relationships among several disciplines.  One course, The Behavioral Revolution, looked how behavior modification can be applied at the societal level.  For instance, one of the documentaries look at how the then-new “planned community” of Columbia, Maryland, was using behavior modification to encourage bicycling and walking rather than automobile traffic.  Another course, The Finite Earth, examined limits to resources and the ethical dimensions of social policy.  Central to the course was the idea of an “ethical community,” which examined how a community defines who is affected by a decision and, thus, who should be at the table when decisions are made.

The STS approach to general education brings together both the hard sciences and the social sciences around specific societal issues to help students learn how to address problems in society.  It is a model that would seem also to have potential for the humanities. 

Some Advice to the News Media this Election Year

As the Presidential race moves from the primary elections to the general election, this might be a good time to say a few words about media coverage of the candidates.  Media—especially the cable news networks—coverage of the primary elections raised some questions about journalism in this era.  One of the candidates, Donald Trump, has noted that the heavy media coverage that he has received as an outspoken celebrity essentially served as free advertising, allowing him to save a great deal of money on paid advertising.  Similarly, CNN, in particular, seemed to favor Trump in the primaries by always ensuring that a Trump campaign surrogate was at the table when his candidacy was discussed.   

The challenge for the general election period—from now through November—is to ensure that the news media function as journalists and not as either purposeful or accidental advocates of one campaign or another.  Some thoughts:

·      News media should refrain from showing images of the candidates every time they are being discussed.  This is free advertising for the candidate, regardless of what is being said.  It also distracts the viewer from attending to what the journalist or experts are saying.  Keep the focus on the journalistic process and the speakers.  If you must show images of the candidates in the background, given them equal time on the screen.

·       CNN’s fairly regular practice of always having a candidate’s surrogate on set during analysis discussions should be avoided.  The result of having surrogates constantly on set is to destroy any sense of journalistic objectivity.  Instead, focus on what journalists or objective analysts have to say about the news.

·       Honor the ideal of equal time.

·      Refrain from carrying speeches “live.”  Instead, record them, fact-check them, and then report on them.  Otherwise, the news simply becomes a promotional channel for whichever candidate is talking.

·      Fact-checking is a critical role for the news media in this election, given the lack of trust the the public has for either candidate.  Reporters must see themselves as giving the public the truth, not just passing on gossip or name-calling.  I was glad to see a bit of this on MSNBC today.

·      Do side-by-side comparisons of proposed policies and positions.  Show people where the candidates differ—and how they differ—and where they are the same.  In other words, make policy positions important to viewers by taking them seriously.

There was a time—when network news operated within the structure of large entertainment networks—when corporate bosses kept a distance from their news operations in order to give them some credibility.  This seems to have faded in today’s cable environment.  This year, though, we need, more than ever, serious journalism that educates voters.  Here’s hoping . . .

The Future of General Education, Part Two: The Humanities

Defining the role of the humanities may be one of the most difficult parts of designing a general education curriculum, for the humanities have played differing roles in the undergraduate curriculum over the past two hundred years.  Originally, of course, the humanities were the foundation of the liberal arts curriculum.  In 1824, the Yale College faculty defined the goal of this curriculum as “the discipline and furniture of the mind.”   As the 19^th century advanced, research took a dominant role in the lives of faculty and the university began to organize itself around disciplines.  At the same time, the university became focused on preparing students for an increasingly broad range of professions.  The result was the “distribution” approach to the undergraduate curriculum, with humanities being taught largely through a series of introductory courses in literature, history, and philosophy.  In the 1930s, the “Great Books” attempted to make the humanities the center of a general education program that focused on the cultural heritage of great works of western civilization. 

The latter half of the 20^th century saw other experiments with approaches that took different approaches to the humanities.   I discussed several of these in detail in The Meaning of General Education.  Here are some snapshots: 

*  Contemporary Civilization at Columbia University began as a response to the state of society at the end of World War I.  Its purpose, as stated in the 1920-21catalog, was to enable the student “to understand the civilization of his own day and to participate effectively in it.” 

*The Experimental College, created by Alexander Meiklejohn at the University of Wisconsin in the 1930s, with the goal, as Meiklejohn described it of “the building up of self-direction . . . trying to create or cultivate intelligence, capable o f eing applied in any field of scholarly work.”  The primary task, he wrote, was “the education of comment men . . .in terms of the kind of thinking which all men are called upon to do in the enduring relations of life.”  The freshman year curriculum focused on ancient Greece, the foundation of classical humanism, while the sophomore year focused on 19^th century (and, later, 20^th century) American culture, with the idea that the program would help students understand how different people in different times approached similar problems.  One can argue that problem solving was the underlying goal of the curriculum.

*The Great Books Program evolved out of what John Maynard Hutchins described as a “permanent studies” program based on the idea that “it is impossible to understand any subject or to comprehend the contemporary world” without understanding the ideas contained in the great books of western civilization.

Over the past few decades, however, the humanities have seen rough times.  As the demand for humanities graduates has declined, so has the central role of humanism in the curriculum.  At the same time, as the distribution system has re-asserted itself, the institution’s role of teaching the humanities has declined as institutions increasingly encourage the transfer of credits from high school and community college curricula to meet general education requirements. 

That said, institutions recently have made some interesting experiments that may point the way.  For instance, in October 2015, Tania Lombrozo wrote  about two University of California-Berkeley faculty who offer the humanities as a way to “open our eyes to the distinctive ways that people in different places and in different times, in different cultures and in different groups, have imagined what it means to be human."  Their interdisciplinary approach “is the study of the different ways that human beings have chosen or been able to live their lives as human beings.”

What, then, should be the role of the humanities in a 21^st century general education curriculum?  As the Berkeley innovation suggests, the answer lies, in part at least, in an understanding that the basic role of the humanities is to help students understand how people understand what it means to be human—to live in a human community in particular times and particular places.  At the same time, we need to acknowledge that, in the global information society, the experience of ancient Greece is no longer the sole source of inspiration.  We no longer live within a culture defined by the traditions of western civilization, but in a diverse global society.  As William Irwin Thompson noted in Transforming History: A New Curriculum for a Planetary Culture (Landisfarne Books, 2009), “Humanity is now experiencing the release of heat in a phase change because our whole matrix of identity is shifting, from a culture of economic acquisitiveness and patriotic fervor to a new planetary culture in which science and spirituality are the diploid parents of a new matrix of consciousness” (p. 24).  The goal of the humanities in the general education curriculum must be to prepare students to live in a multi-cultural global society in which the actions of individuals are shaped by and connected to the community by technology.

With that in mind, the humanities component of a general education curriculum should provide students with an understanding of how people from different times and cultures addressed similar problems and, then, have the student use those understandings to address current problems facing society today.   The specific course design would vary based on the institution’s mission, the student population involved, and other factors.  However, several key elements should be presents:  The program should be problem-centered, with a problem statement providing a context for reading key documents;  the program should be inquiry oriented, giving students an opportunity to explore documents to find ideas that can be used to address the problem; and the program should be interdisciplinary, allowing students to see the issue of multiple perspectives (i.e., historical, philosophical, social).

For example, a humanities course might use historical and philosophical studies to help students understand how people from different cultures in history reacted to similar problems—the rise of agricultural communities, for instance, or the emergence empires due to territorial conquest.   Then, the students could work on how those experiences might inform how our culture could best respond to a current issue, such as mass migrations due to political revolution or climate change.  Some institutions may be able to partner with peers in other cultures to use online technology to allow students to interact across cultures to find compatible solutions.

Ultimately, the key issue is that a general education curriculum should incorporate an active, collaborative, research-based, problem-centered approach to the humanities as opposed to simple survey courses on western philosophy, history, etc.

A Memory of Paul West

The big event in State College this week was the 55^th annual book sale by the Penn State chapter of the American Association of University Women.  It has been an annual event for our family since the 1970s, when the sale was held in the HUB ballroom on campus. Even when we lived in Maryland, we came back for the sale, which has since moved to the Snider Agricultural Arena on the edge of campus, past the football stadium.

            This year, my prized find was My Mother’s Music, Paul West’s memoir of growing up in England.  Paul was my mentor as I worked on my baccalaureate and master’s in English in the late sixties and early seventies.  He introduced me to the magical realism of Garcia-Marquez and Cortazar, Malcolm Lowry’s mix of autobiography and symbolism, and other modern writers who helped me understand what the magic of writing fiction was all about.

In My Mother’s Music, Paul tells of life with his mother in the 1930s and during World War II.  Trained as a classical pianist, Mildred West had given up pursuing a musical career in favor of marriage and raising two children in Derbyshire, giving piano lessons and playing for her own satisfaction.  But as he describes it, Mildred gave Paul a gift by equating words to music.  He writes, “I was finally forgiven for not having made my boyhood’s music with her, not at the piano anyway; but we certainly succumbed together to the music of words.”

Paul attributes his own very personal style to his mother’s idea of “all art aspiring to the condition of music.”   His distinctive style made him a star in his own right.  Paul became known internationally for his playful use of language to build a world that resonated with layers of meaning when seen simultaneously from different perspectives.  As he wrote in the memoir, “A lost analogy is two universes wounded.”

Paul and his wife Diane Ackerman, herself a Penn State grad who has become internationally respected nature writer (most recently, The Human Age), eventually left Penn State for Ithaca, New York.  A few years back he suffered a stroke.  She wrote about it in 100 Names for Love, a powerful memoir of their life together and his recovery of the creative process after the stroke.  Paul died this past October.  I will miss him, but am glad to have his words—his own music—to keep me company.