Crowd-Sourcing America’s Future: A Response to the State of the Union

When President Obama gave his sixth State of the Union address earlier this month, he noted that the times called not for a shopping list of proposed legislation and policy.  Instead, he discussed the broad issues that the United States must address in the coming years.  “ . . .what I offer tonight,” the President said, “is a set of concrete, practical proposals to speed up growth, strengthen the middle class and build new ladders of opportunity into the middle class.”  The goals he went on to describe included:

·      Building a sustainable economy.  Opportunities for innovation in this area include closing tax loopholes for businesses, rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, improving the connection between high tech businesses and research, supporting entrepreneurs, and building what he described as a “middle class economy.”

·      Focusing on the Environment by ensuring American energy independence and dealing decisively with global climate change.

·      Fixing the immigration system.

·      Rebuilding the American educational system to be effective in the new global information society by reforming job training, guaranteeing access to education, and repositioning K-12 and higher education.

·      Improving the economic position of America’s workforce, by ensuring equal pay for equal work for women, increasing wages, and improving retirement savings.

·      Expanding civic engagement domestically and internationally through expanding voter rights, ending the “permanent war footing” and emphasizing intelligence and diplomacy, promoting international understanding, and improving veteran benefits.

It was pretty clear, even during the speech itself, that it would be difficult for the U.S. government to develop a successful legislative agenda around this—or any other—list of social goals.  For the past six years, the Republican Party has clearly demonstrated that it has no intention of partnering with President Obama on legislative initiatives.  Now that the Republicans control Congress, we can anticipate almost complete stalemate at the top of our government.  

It has also become clear that our federal government is no longer in the hands of the people.  In 1941, Robert Maynard Hutchins wrote this about the national government:

The state is not an end in itself, but a means to the virtue and intelligence, that is the happiness, of the citizens. It is held together by justice, through which it cares for the common good. 

  

Today, however, many elected officials too often owe their allegiance not to the voters who they were elected to represent but to the corporations and other moneyed sources that fund their election campaigns.  Robert Reich reports that, in 2012, a record $6.3 billion was spent on Congressional and Presidential campaigns.  The 2016 election is likely to set an even higher record, with most of that money not coming from individual voter donations but from major investments by corporations, interest groups, and the very rich.  The system, quite simply, has lost the moral high ground.

So, what can we do?  If we cannot rely on top-down government to serve the needs of the American people, then we need to work from the bottom up.  How can we crowd-source the development of a legislative and policy agenda to support the critical areas that President Obama laid before the federal government in the State of the Union?

Ideally, consideration of a legislative/policy agenda would begin at the neighborhood level.  People—citizens, voters—would gather, identify one or more of the major areas identified in the State of the Union, and discuss what the government should do to realize the vision for that area.  The results from neighborhood discussions could then be taken to a community discussion and then to a statewide discussion, etc.  At each level, it would be important to have truly representative samplings of the population so that we get a true sense of what the real community believe.  The sampling model of the General Social Survey might provide a good model.  The goal would be to directly involve voters in the process of identifying legislative and policy priorities in specific areas of civic life and taking the results to elected officials who would then be asked to represent the voters wishes in Congress or to tell the voters why they are wrong.

Who would organize such a process?  It would require an organization that can operate effectively at all levels—neighborhood, community, state, national.   It could be managed by the political parties, perhaps, or by an existing civil society organization—the League of Women Voters, the Rotary, etc.—or by a foundation.  The challenge would be to keep big moneyed interests out of the process entirely.   It might take some time for a sustainable process to emerge, but it is worth the effort to re-empower American citizens to guide their democracy.

President Obama closed his speech with a call to action.  “And finally,” he said, “let’s remember that our leadership is defined not just by our defense against threats but by the enormous opportunities to do good and promote understanding around the globe, to forge greater cooperation, to expand new markets, to free people from fear and want. And no one is better positioned to take advantage of those opportunities than America.”  Perhaps one of the things we need to do in this era of innovation, is to find new ways to empower citizens to directly participate in their government.

America's College Promise: A Revolution in the Wings

In the mid-1800s, during the creative rush of the early Industrial Revolution, it became apparent that the United States needed a better educational system.  The innovations of the Industrial Revolution required new kinds of leaders for industrial innovation:  scientists, engineers, and managers, to name a few.  It also needed new kinds of professionals to ensure that the broader society could support an industrialized economy:  social scientists, teachers, and civic leaders, as examples.  At the same time, we needed universities where research was on an equal footing with teaching, so that new knowledge would freely enter into the thinking of new professionals. 

            The result was a revolution in education—one that we take for granted today.  In an era where most universities were church-related or private, our forefathers invented the public university.  This included state universities created by the sale of federal land grants to the states, where research, teaching, and technology transfer in the “mechanical and practical arts” fed innovation in industry while securing  the increased agricultural productivity needed to support immigration and urbanization.  It also included creation of public “normal schools”—teacher colleges, the antecedents of today’s state colleges—that trained the teachers necessary to staff public grade schools and high schools which were seen as a key to assimilating the millions of immigrants who had come to our shores to work in the mines and mills and to ensure that a goodly percentage of them (25% was an early goal) were prepared to go on to college for professional training.  A bit later on, we also created community colleges that could better respond to local workforce needs and feed students to four-year colleges.

            Today, we are in another creative rush as the Information Revolution matures into a global information society, and the question, once again, is how do we prepare the workforce for this new environment?   This time, the question contains another:  how do we as a country compete in an industrial supply chain whose workforce is distributed globally?  Over the past couple of decades, the nation has been pretty much silent on this issue.   Higher education, once seen as a national priority, had lost its place in the public discussion.  Increasingly, it was seen as a private good—preparing individuals to make their livings--rather than a public good that prepared citizens to live and prospect in and with our communities.   As government funding declined, the direct cost to students rose.  Corporations, the most direct beneficiary of an educated workforce, looked the other way, focused more on short-term profit than on long-term investments in their workforce.

            That is now changing.  The Obama Administration has proposed America’s College Promise, a new initiative that would allow responsible students (both traditional-aged and adult) to earn an associate degree or the first two years of a baccalaureate degree at no direct cost to them.  Just as high school graduation—once something students paid for themselves—became a universal expectation early in the 20^th century—America’s College Promise is a step toward making a college degree a realistic expectation for tomorrow’s workforce.

            The ACP is not a give-away.  Funding comes with some very real requirements for both students and community colleges:

·      To be eligible, students must attend college at least half-time, recognizing that some students will be working adults.

·      Students must also maintain a 2.5 average and make steady progress toward their degree.

·      Participating community colleges must offer academic programs that are fully transferrable to local public four-year colleges and universities OR offer occupational training programs that are in demand among employers.

·      Colleges must also adopt institutional reforms to improve student persistence and degree completion.

            The federal program will be a partnership with participating State governments.  Federal funding will cover 75% of the community college costs; states will be required to provide matching funds (the specific percentage varying based on the state’s current contributions to its community colleges).

            The America’s College Promise initiative could be a major step in positioning the United States for long-term success in the global information economy.  It will plant the seed of a public expectation that all responsible students should have access to undergraduate education just as they have access to high school graduation.  In the process, it will demonstrate the idea that higher education should be a normal expectation of citizens in a global information society.  In the process, it could very well break the longstanding barriers between high school and college curricula and create new relationships between community colleges and their four-year public colleges and university counterparts.  In the process, it could give four-year colleges and universities a heightened focus on professional education and research.  Its impact may be far reaching, indeed.

            As one might expect, there are many questions to be asked at this early stage in the consideration of the ACP proposal.  One that arose quite early was funding:  how will the federal government pay for this new service?  What other government projects will be scrapped to allow the government to realize the ACP vision?  There are many ways to answer that question.  President Obama suggested one in his 2015 State of the Union message:  close the tax loopholes that currently allow many corporations to avoid paying their due taxes.  Another would be to re-direct funds that are now spent on maintaining our military presence in other countries.  In short, money can be found.

            Another question is how to make the Promise a reality in states that have weak community college systems.  Pennsylvania is a good example of this.  For many years, Pennsylvania’s land grant university—Penn State—has maintained a network of 17 community-focused undergraduate campuses.   Other schools in the State System of Higher Education have done the same.  As a result, while Pennsylvania has 14 community colleges, many potential students live outside the range of a community college.  As America’s College Promise is implemented, this imbalance will need to be taken into account.

            A third question speaks to the supply side of increasing community college graduates:  the need to ensure that enough high school students graduate with the skills they will need in order to go on to higher education.   This may inspire new “dual enrollment” partnerships between high schools and colleges to allow talented high school students to earn both high school credit and college credit, preparing them to move quickly into college while also reducing their total time to degree.

            These are not reasons to abandon America’s College Promise.  They simply are examples of the kinds of issues that will surely arise as folks get down to brass tacks and start to construct the means by which to realize the potential of ACP.  It is an incredibly exciting initiative, one that might just help us build a new public consensus around higher education as a key societal investment in this new economy.

Celebrating UPCEA's Century of Support for University Outreach

This year, the University Professional and Continuing Education Association will present its 100^th annual conference.   UPCEA—under one of its earlier names, NUEA—was my very first professional association.  The anniversary has made me think back about it and about the role of professional associations in the working life of professionals in higher education.

            In the late 1970s, I was working for Penn State Public Broadcasting as Director of Viewer Services.  This included a variety of ways in which we tried to get video resources used in the community, including formal courses delivered by broadcast, cable, and several non-broadcast technologies.  One day, the Station Manager, Dave Phillips, dropped by my cubicle to tell me that the NUEA would be holding its national conference in the spring and that, while there, several institutions were hoping to start a new professional community within NUEA to be called the Division of Educational Telecommunications Utilization.  He asked that I attend with two goals: (1) to vote for creation of this new division and (2) if possible, to get us involved. 

            I went and found a small group of ten or so colleagues from the University of South Carolina, the University of Georgia, Edison State College, Empire State College, and the University of Wisconsin, among others.   We did what we needed to do to establish the Division and then hung out together, since little else on the program dealt with our interests.   In those days, NUEA was dominated by traditional continuing education functions.  The major divisions focused on evening programs, conferencing, and business-related programming.   Distance education was represented by the Division of Correspondence Study.  This was a longstanding and very active professional community within NUEA that encouraged members to share course materials across institutions and helped each other proctor exams for students living in their states.  The Division also worked with a commercial publisher to create an annual catalog of correspondence courses available from all member institutions.  Needless to say, they weren’t real interested in having a bunch of TV folks barging in on their sessions!

            The Educational Telecommunications Utilization Division was a new—and separate—community within the continuing education profession.  Many of the individuals and institutions attracted to educational telecommunications had no history in correspondence study.  It was, truly, a new community.  At most institutions, we in educational media were doubly outsiders.  Like our continuing education colleagues, we were not traditional academics—we were professionals who helped traditional academics extend programs beyond campus.  At the same time, though, we were not traditional continuing education people.  While we reported to the same Dean or Vice President, we operated on different financial models, had different relationships with academic colleagues, and different connections with the communities we served.  As a result, we had few colleagues within our institutions with whom we could share ideas and problems and find solutions.

            The new NUEA Division of Educational Telecommunications Utilization gave us access to a community of professionals with whom we could share experiences and problems and find good solutions to apply back home.  We became friends and, while we all looked forward to the annual conferences, we communicated with each other throughout the year.  With the advent of satellite delivery, the community grew.  The University of Kentucky led a regional Appalachian Educational Satellite Program in the late 1970s.  Several major engineering schools combined to create the National Technological University, using satellite to deliver graduate engineering programs to workplaces around the country.   Around the same time, PBS shifted to satellite delivery; it created a national system of satellite uplinks and downlinks—combined with the ability of local PTV stations to deliver satellite-distributed programs to homes.  This stimulated production of tele-courses, a national marketplace—the PBS Adult Learning Service—for sharing course materials, and a well-funded resource—the CPB/Annenberg Project—to fund major new national educational media projects.  As a result, continuing education units at many more institutions began offering video-based courses as part of their local services.  The Division of Educational Telecommunications Utilization grew quickly as a result.

            Over the years, NUEA changed its name several times.  It became the National University Continuing Education Association (NUCEA), then the University Continuing Education Association (UCEA) and, most recently, the University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA).  Each change reflected a shift in how continuing education (which has gone through identity crises of its own, moving from Extension to Continuing Education to Outreach to Engagement at some institutions) related to its institutional home and to its community.

            I stayed active with the association throughout my years at Penn State and the University of Maryland University College and, again, when I returned to Penn State in 1994.  I served on the Board, helped to write principles of good practice, and, in my last year at Penn State, chaired the UCEA annual conference in Vancouver.  It was an important professional community throughout my career.   Its importance—and, indeed, the importance of any professional organization in our field, is both personal and institutional.  Participation in UCEA put me into contact with individuals at other institutions who were dealing with very similar change and institutional development issues at their institutions as I was doing at mine.  This was incredibly valuable at a time when innovations with technology-based outreach required that instructional technology leaders take on significant new roles within our institutions, to develop new organizational relationships and new institutional policies, and to help stimulate new internal and external partnerships. 

            When online learning came along in the mid-to-late 1990s, something surprising happened.  New online learning initiatives often were not housed in the Continuing/Distance Education units of institutions.  Instead, it soon became apparent that many different areas of our institutions were innovating with the new information technology utilities at their institutions.  In some cases, individual academic units were taking the lead, offering key degree programs to both on-campus and off-campus clients.  In other cases, the central Information Technology unit had the lead, while other initiatives were centered in the Provost’s office.  The Sloan Foundation responded by bringing together the institutions that it funded through its Asynchronous Learning Networks program.  I had already been involved in educational media for over 15 years when I attended the first meeting of what became the Sloan Consortium (now the Online Learning Consortium), and I was surprised at how few people I knew from my days in video-based distance education. 

            As online learning expanded, many UPCEA member institutions began to offer online courses under leadership of their Outreach/Extension administrative unit.  UPCEA responded by creating a new Center for Online Learning Leadership and Strategy, led by a friend, Ray Schroeder, who I got to know first through the Sloan Consortium.   I think we will see many opportunities for UPCEA and OLC—and our international counterparts—to work together in the years to come.

            Meanwhile, it is truly wonderful to see UPCEA celebrating its centennial.  It demonstrates that, whatever we call it—Continuing Education, Distance Education, Outreach, Engagement, etc.—it is here to stay and will continue to thrive as our institutions innovate to meet the needs of our global information society.  Congratulations to UPCEA for a century of leadership.

Penn State World Campus: #1 Undergraduate Online Campus

Online Degrees | Online Programs | Get a degree Online | US News - US News



US News and World Report has issued its rankings of online degree programs.  I am happy to say that the Penn State World Campus ranks #1 in undergraduate degree programs.  It also ranked fourth in graduate education and graduate information technology programs, fifth in graduate engineering, and 7th in online MBA programs.  Congratulations to all my colleagues at Penn State!

Next Generation Online Learning: Engaging Communities

This fall, I had the opportunity to participate in the prototype of a new community action project—GeoDeliberations.   The project was organized by faculty in Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology and funded by the National Science Foundation.  It was adapted from an Oregon initiative that brought together a small panel of community members in a week-long conference to address an important community issue and report recommendations to local elected officials.   GeoDeliberations organizers adapted the original Oregon model, replacing much of the face-to-face meeting time with an interactive online website to facilitate discussion by the citizen panelists.   

            One advantage of the online environment is that it gives all participants an equal opportunity to voice their concerns.  In most face-to-face meetings, a small number of participants do most of the talking, while others listen, take notes, and wait for the vote.   Online, all panelists have equal access.  They can sign in multiple times whenever they wish to read, post, and respond to the postings of other members.  The pilot effort demonstrated the power of the online environment to bring neighbors together around issues and to create citizen-based input into the governmental process.  It also demonstrated the value of public universities using technology to engage and empower the communities they serve.   

            The project also raises an important question for the future:  How do our public universities support faculty engagement in the community through online technology?  At most institutions, online technology was used originally to extend credit courses—and certificate and degree programs—to off-campus populations.  Institutions organized their technology and support services around the needs of credit instruction, both on and off campus.  GeoDeliberations is just one example of how online technology can also be used to engage the community in less formal ways that build on the traditional missions of engaged research, technology transfer, and public engagement.  Two other examples of emerging online engagement are:

·      Open Educational Resources – Extending access to online learning objects and other resources to other educational sectors,such as K-12 school classrooms, business and industry, government, and civil society organizations.

·      Engaged MOOCs—Using the idea of “massively open online courses” to bring together interest groups who otherwise have little ability to meet face-to-face (see my earlier post).

            Over the past twenty years, universities around the world have innovated to extend credit programs to off-campus students through online learning.  In the process, they have proven that higher education can address a key stress point as society adapts to the needs of the Information Revolution: the need for a better-educated workforce.  The challenge for a new generation of university leaders is to provide central support and encouragement for faculty who want to engage with the community to address the multitude of issues facing residents in their roles as citizens, workers, parents, and members of civil society organizations in the years ahead.  The GeoDeliberations project is demonstrating what faculty can achieve by engaging at the neighborhood level.  As this model is refined and expanded, it should be possible to use online technology to bring together panels in many different contexts.  This kind of engagement in this era of rapid and profound societal change is central to the continued vitality of public higher education.

Finding Christmas

            Historically, Christmas season is embedded in the traditions of the old Roman celebration of Saturnalia.  When the Christian church adopted December 25—the birthday of Mithra, the old god of light—as the date to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, it accepted that the key Christian holiday would exist side-by-side with the abandon and debauchery associated with the old holiday.  The impact was so great that, when Puritans left England looking for a purer society in America, they outlawed the old celebration of Christmas.   Eventually, Christmas was re-conceived in America as a holiday focused on family and children, incorporating elements of northern European celebrations.  In England, Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” emphasized giving and sharing as Christmas ideals, and our modern ideal of Christmas was born.

            Today, though, the holiday is returning to its Saturnalian roots, but as re-defined by a commercialized society.  Christmas has become less about giving than about spending.  For some years now, retail merchants have pushed the spending season back to Thanksgiving.  “Black Friday” now starts on Thanksgiving Day or, at best, on midnight as Thurday turns to Friday.  Thanksgiving weekend has, in addition to Black Friday, attracted new opportunities to spend:  Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, etc.   During the holiday season, increasingly, we cease to be Christians, Jews, Muslims, or Buddhists; we all become simply consumers.  In the process, the spirit of Christmas—both as a religious celebration and a time to celebrate family and the spirit of giving at the beginning of a new natural cycle—is being overshadowed by commercial greed.   This is a longstanding problem, but it seems to be getting worse these days to the point where the spiritual meaning of the season is barely visible.

            What to do?  I was happy to see that, this year, people pushed back, using social media to encourage folks to enjoy Thanksgiving Day with family and to avoid stores during the Black Friday onslaught.  The fact that people are able to shop online also has had an impact, giving people confidence that they need not rush out to local stores to shop “while supplies last.”   Like many issues in today’s Information Society, the best approach seems to be “crowd-sourcing”—people taking things into their own hands and simply refusing to led around by commercial interests.

            I have very fond memories of Christmas as a family celebration of the warmth and optimism associated with the birth of Christ—and the symbolic assurance that the world will brighten again.  There were presents, to be sure, but it was also a time for family, friends, and neighbors and for quiet reflection.  Let’s not lose these in the face of what has become a mindless commercial Saturnalia.             

"Present Shock" -- Some Implications for Online Learning

In his new book, Present Shock,  Douglas Rushkoff argues that, in an increasingly technology-centric world, we need to take care not to let technology replace natural cycles in our lives.  Over the centuries, we have become to see time as linear and to recognize natural cycles within that linear structure.  Technology, however, creates a world of immediate choices: just as the Internet is global—eliminating geography as a defining factor in our lives—it is “timeless:” everything is available at all times.   Each moment ceases to be a point in the linear progression of time; instead, it becomes an immediate choice.   The implications:

Instead of taking our cues from the central clock tower or the manager with a stopwatch, we carry our personal digital devices with us.  Our daily schedule, dividing work time from time off, is discarded; we are always-on.  Our boss isn’t the guy in the corner office, but a PDA in our pocket.  Our taskmaster is depersonalized and internalized—and even more rigorous than the union busters of yesterday.  There is no safe time.  If we are truly to take time away from the program, we feel we must disconnect altogether and live off the grid,’ as if we were members of a different, predigital era” (p. 85).

            Some of the symptoms of this new environment are a sense that we must act immediately, in the moment, to stimuli presented by our digital tools; we have lost sight of natural rhythms—day versus night, time of month, time of year—that used to guide our actions.  Technology gives us many choices, but the obligation to choose is, as Rushkoff writes, “no choice at all”—“especially when it prevents us from achieving our own sense of flow and rhythm” (p.115).

            In response, we have invented new terms—multi-tasking, information overload, etc.—to describe ways to respond to the constant pressure of digital choices. 

            This is a special challenge for those of us who create online educational environments. Not only are we using digital technology to connect students to information and to a learning community, but we are also creating new environments in which students use the technology to develop their ability to transform information into knowledge and then work together to apply that knowledge to solve problems.  In this environment, in which time is replaced by a world of immediate choices, how do we use the digital environment to create new educational opportunities while helping students develop their ability to thrive in this environment?  Here are some beginning thoughts:

Course Designers and Faculty:

·      Since the online environment has no geographic limits, we should be conscious that our students will be in many different time zones.  Course design should minimize synchronous sessions, which require that some students be online at times when they would otherwise be sleeping or doing other things.  Design should optimize the asynchronous nature of the digital environment and let students determine when, during any 24-hour period, they engage.

·      In a traditional classroom, 15-20 percent of the students actively engage in discussion; the others learn by taking notes.  We need to avoid what Rushkoff calls the “quiz show approach” (p. 125) that rewards the first hand up when a question is asked.   Set a reasonable deadline for response—understanding that students are not all available at the same time—and allow everyone to answer before responding to anyone.

·      Let students know your expectations with regard to timing and rhythm of response and interaction. 

Students:

·      Be aware of your own daily rhythms. For instance, it may be that you do your best research in the evenings, that afternoons are the best time for you to analyze ideas, but that you are most articulate in the mornings.  If so, use the evenings to seek out content, afternoons to read what your faculty member and other students have said on a topic, and respond the next morning.  Make the asynchronous nature of the environment work for you.

·      Avoid the idea that you must respond immediately to every stimulus.  Don’t feel the need to be the “first hand up” for every question.  See what other students have to say and then pitch in when you are ready.  Make it a conversation, where you both listen to others and share both your original ideas and your responses.  Don’t feel the need to respond immediately; give yourself the time you need to articulate what you really mean to say; that may mean giving yourself the time to do more research before you respond. 

            While any course is about content—gathering information, validating it as knowledge, and applying knowledge to solve problems—it is also about developing learning styles that, ideally, students can take with them into their professions.  The lesson from Present Shock is that we need to use technology in a way that gives us access to choices, but that also protects our ability to optimize the natural cycles that are part of our physical and cultural DNA.  This is a challenge for course designers, faculty, and students alike.