What SHOULD students pay for?

By Dan | Published: May 21, 2013

I recently attended the University of Nebraska’s Symposium on Innovation in Pedagogy and Technology.   It was a fairly typical conference style experience, but as I walked out of the building I was struck with a question:

What SHOULD students pay for?

I’m not trying to be facetious, not trying to be accusatory, but what should we be saving for?  If we can articulate good answers for this, then we’ll be able to thrive going forward.  But if the answer continues to be ‘learning content’ – as so much of our system is organized around, then we will be in trouble.

I believe students should pay for:

  • expert guidance to help make sense of our  complex world – help with context
  • help making connections amongst courses; connections with peers and faculty, and connecting what they learn in class with transferable job skills
  • a safety net to take risks in trying to solve complex problems
  • high level of feedback and assessment in specific learning activities and across all of their coursework

I believe students should not pay for:

  • content delivery. whether through books, lectures, or other media.  courses should help students make sense of the content
  • credentials such as degrees that represent a measure of time (credit hours) rather than a measure of competency
  • experiences that don’t open doors for multiple kinds of employment

If universities – especially less selective ones cannot come up with a vision for what students SHOULD pay for, someone else will and that is where students will go. We have to live with their definition of value, not the institution’s definition or faculty members’ definitions.

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MOOCs are Just a Single Tool

By Dan | Published: March 25, 2013

With so many spotlights shining on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in the past few months, it has been easy to look past some of the other developments emerging in higher education.  We don’t have to jump on the MOOC bandwagon,  we just  cannot keep doing what we’ve always done – there are too many forces of change around us.

Below are two articles that caught my attention this weekend because both offer alternatives to the MOOC experience. The first describes an academic experience, the second the desire for face-to-face interactions in consumer interactions.  I liked them both because both of them emphasize the value in interactions that don’t scale.

1) “Micro-Targeted Online Programs (The Anti-Mooc?)” from Inside Higher Ed:  A different perspective that complements MOOCs, and our existing online offerings. I liked this one because I think this approach deliberately doesn’t scale and brings far more opportunities for instructors and students.

2)  “Forget Your Email: We All Crave The Physical” from Fast Company: This is more about consumer products and experiences, but describes a marketing report that shows evidence of how consumers are seeking out physical objects and experiences despite all of our digital conveniences.

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Established Universities, Emerging Opportunities

By Dan | Published: October 19, 2012

We have an incredible opportunity to redefine and reinvent so many elements of higher education.  All of us connected with institutions should seize this opportunity to do the defining while we can still hold grand visions; otherwise the experience will be framed for us by the shortest of short-term thinking based on immediate results.

Last Wednesday, October 10,  I started a new job at the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO) as Special Assistant to the Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs.  My main roles are to listen to faculty from across the campus and help make many pilot projects happen that seek to improve the experience for students, faculty, and the greater Omaha community.

There is a lot of positive energy at UNO, and I think much of it stems from the institution’s strong commitment to engagement with the regional commnunity.  More than just service, engagement is about building connections between what students do in classrooms with the very real-world conditions of the community around them.  UNO is building a brand as a “premier metropolitan university” and is seeking to grow from approximately 14,500 students to 20,000 students campus-wide by 2020.   I’m excited to be here and look forward to working on a wide range of important projects with interesting people.

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How might we improve the face-to-face learning experience?

By Dan | Published: August 29, 2012

Today’s New Y0rk Times features an article about Ohio University’s program to help international graduate students strengthen their spoken English skills.  The goal is to reduce misunderstandings that arise in courses that are taught by PhD students from overseas who often have thick accents that students cannot understand.

But even if they are speaking clearer, it strikes me that improving pronunciation specifically or conversational skills more broadly also are not enough without some pedagogical training.  It’s the interactions that matter to improving the classroom experience, not just clearer pronunciation.

I’ll also be interested to see how Ohio University and others evaluate this program.  Will it be a student satisfaction metric (i.e. count the number of student complaints)?  I hope that they will take some effort to measure the level of student interest/enthusiasm for the subject matter (i.e. increase in number of majors or minors).  For larger state universities, an increased level of student interest and motivation can help increase their 5-year graduation rates.

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Stanford Course Reflections

By Dan | Published: June 22, 2012

We all know that changing any behavior is hard. For me, I need to post more frequently to this blog and do more work to make it better for me and for the audience – I’ve just let it slide down my list too far.

 

EDUC 333B Students present models for connecting girls schools globally

Envisioning the Future of Learning, The class that I co-taught at Stanford with Ami Mehta finished well. The final presentations were on June 7 in Palo Alto and our students did a fabulous job engaging an audience of peers and guests with complex problems.   The course came together very quickly, I’m proud of how much we were able to accomplish in so short a time.

As I have thought about the course for the past few weeks, my reflections have coalesced around a few themes

*Students have a lot of previous knowledge, just not always the knowledge the teacher thinks they have.  By our second class it became clear that our students had a different background than we were expecting: they had more experience with reading, writing, and analyzing, and less experience designing, connecting, and working with real-life partners. We tried to mash these two  backgrounds together, some parts of it worked, others didn’t.  Regardless, figuring out where your students are starting and what they bring to the table is critical if you want to get good value out of the time.

* Planning a course is like packing for a trip – take half as much as what you think you need, improvise the rest. We overplanned, trying to jam so much content into ten weeks. By the end of the course we realized we had at least 2 distinct courses going on – one on improving girls education and another about predicting the future of learning and potentially a third focused on communicating complex ideas to a variety of audiences. In any course I teach in the future I am going to whack my curriculum in half and then leave some free time to improvise

* If the conversation has anything to do with young people, make sure there are some young people in the room. We were thrilled to have two middle school students participate in our final exercises. They asked different kinds of questions and gave answers we just hadn’t considered.

Stanford students and guests generate ideas for improving teachers' lives in India

 

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Envisioning the Future of Learning

By Dan | Published: April 12, 2012

What is one thing every 11-year-old girl in the world should know?

The answers to this have included “that she has power” “that she is beautiful for who she is, not how others say she should be” “she should know how to read”

This spring I am returning to Stanford as the co-instructor and co-creator of the course “Envisioning the Future of Learning” to pose that question to graduate students and then challenge them to design an experience that will  help girls around the world.  Working with Ami Mehta, I will travel to Stanford for 5 of our classes and then join via Skype for the other 5 classes.  This is an experiment in a different kind of hybrid course – one where just a single instructor is the hybrid person, everyone else meets in person every week.

Our students come with backgrounds in Learning, Design, Technology, Public Policy, and Business.  The goal of this course is to give them a platform to synthesize the skills they have learned throughout their careers and their courses that can have real world impact.

I hope you follow our course wiki and offer comments on our work.

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50 billion connected devices by 2020 and the power of habits

By Dan | Published: March 2, 2012

Being away from a blog is embarrassing. We are all busy, I just need to develop a better habit of being here.

I’ve read two articles in the last few weeks that I’m trying to figure how they connect with each other.  First, Dave Evans Cisco’s Chief Futurist and Chief Technologist published a white paper last April called the “Internet of Things”. Evans predicts that there will be 50 billion connected devices in just 8 years.  His point is that the internet now connects more devices than people.  If you think we are too tethered to our devices now, what will we look like in just a few years?

Second, the New York Times published, “How Companies Learn Your Secrets” by Charles Duhigg summarizes research about how powerful our habits are and how data mining can make all of our habits more predictable to the world.

What can the combination of billions of devices and the power of routines produce?  Will we have more participation online than we do now? Will the amount of time we spend without devices continue to decrease?  Can we encourage people to create more positive routines and use our devices to trigger cues and give rewards to encourage positive behaviors? It there enormous potential to abuse this power? I think the answer to all of these questions is yes – and I think there are many more questions out there that we can’t even predict.   Our obligation is to keep talking about these issues so that we all know how our devices work and how our habits work and feel like we still have power over our devices and our networks.

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Libraries as Maker Spaces

By Dan | Published: November 15, 2011

I came across a fantastic  story from KQED’s MindShift blog about an innovative library project in Fayetteville, Arkansas that combines the acts of “finding” with “making”.  The idea is to create a workshop style space with tools such as 3-D printers, CNC machines, and workbench spaces for people to make things they would like to use in their lives.   To me, this is an exciting example of how communities can create spaces where all kinds of different learning activities can happen. It’s also an example of how people can be inspired by the work that others do around them.  We’d probably need to re-brand the word and concept library but those discussions are happening anyway, this is an opportunity to build on these discussions already happening.

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The State of Social Media: How do Nielsen’s numbers impact schooling and learning?

By Dan | Published: October 18, 2011

I had heard about the release of Nielsen Research’s report on social media several weeks ago and was blown away by the fact that Americans collectively spend 53.5 billion minutes every month on Facebook alone – the equivalent of  101,788 years!

Today, I spent a little time on the Nielsen report site (State of the Media: The Social Media Report) and as much as the data continued to floor me, I was even more struck by the fact that so many of our institutions just aren’t in place to accept the implications of all this new behavior.

I’m particularly interested in schools which – no matter where they are – are basically organized in a rigid hierarchy which is the opposite of how social networks are organized.  I wonder how much of a culture clash this sets up for students and parents even if we can’t quite articulate it yet.   I wonder if/when students – and parents – will seek to organize schooling more like the way work is organizing in the 21st century. Certainly schooling is organized around the way manufacturing used to look, but now – and going forward – we should consider organizing schooling to reflect the world we live in now and  will live in going forward.

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Stanford in New York?

By Dan | Published: October 17, 2011

One of the most inspiring visions I have seen in the last few years is the idea of creating a second Stanford campus on Roosevelt Island in the heart of New York City.  There is an update about the proposal and Stanford’s apparent competition with Cornell (and maybe Columbia and City College of New York) in today’s New York Times.

Led by Stanford President John Hennessey, the plan calls for creating a second fully functioning graduate school that would help drive STEM leadership in New York City and from New York around the world.

Stanford’s vision and reflections can be found on the Stanford + NYC site.

This proposal has challenged my thinking about the importance of place and local culture that surround learning institutions and has also got me thinking about the importance of branding, namely that Stanford and Mayor Bloomberg see benefits to tying their respective brands together in a partnership that just would have been so hard to imagine even 10 years ago.  New global alliances are obviously emerging in all kinds of corporate settings, it’s fascinating to see this emerge in academic settings.

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