LearnmoreMN Blog

Not a passing storm

By Curtis Johnson, April guest blogger

Perhaps the ‘perfect storm’ metaphor is overused. But it’s an apt description of the forces converging on higher education these days. Graduation rates for most institutions remain stubbornly low; employers chronically complain that those who do graduate don’t know what they need to know or have the skills jobs require.

Meanwhile, college costs continue their relentless rise — exceeding over the past three decades even the increases in health care costs. Into this supercharged atmosphere now emerge serious online offerings. Once considered marginal, quaint and not very good, the online option has almost suddenly burst into the market as a major disruptive force.

It’s easy to find professors dismissive of this trend. And in Minnesota’s outstanding community of private colleges and universities, there may remain a rationale for high confidence — for a while. You don’t worry much when your institution is doing well.

Here’s the reality: education — including and maybe especially its higher forms — is the last of the ‘old media’ to be disrupted. The disruption is following a familiar path — starting as not so good, appealing first on affordability or convenience, then getting better and ineluctably grabbing market share.

Skeptical? Let’s start with one word: Kodak. In rich historical irony, Kodak scientists actually invented the digital camera in 1975. But Kodak executives, keenly aware that the company’s profits came primarily from selling film, waved the scientists away. In Helsinki last summer, I was told that engineers at Nokia went to management a decade ago with a product design that almost eerily presaged the iPhone (which didn’t emerge until 2007). Again, executives dismissed the engineers with the reminder that the company was doing quite well selling its phones. Well, you know how these stories ended.

It’s precisely when organizations are doing well, succeeding in their field, that they seem more susceptible to the forces of disruption.

So is Minnesota higher education a fortunate exception? Likely not. Minnesota, accustomed for a long time to leading the nation on multiple fronts, actually did lead the nation over the last decade — in disinvestment in higher education. According to some, state investment went down as much as 48% on a per student basis.

A half-century back, Minnesota was an early mover on access to college and got institutions set up all over the state. The idea was to give every student a shot at getting a good college education without moving from home. Well, that is fast becoming an easy proposition — without leaving home at all. Online learning, following the classic pattern of disruptive innovations, is now moving from its early stages to something truly consequential.

If you’re not yet convinced, that’s not mysterious. The online platform for higher education today is about where digital photography was, when all you could buy was a 1.3 megapixel device. Just think back on how fast digital got better. And think then about what truly great learning online is going to do to the undergraduate market (a major revenue machine for many institutions).

Ever since for Stanford University professor Sebastian Thrum and his colleagues offered the first Massive Open Online Course and saw 160,000 enrollments worldwide, assumptions about the future have taken a noticeable shift. And firms like Coursera and Udacity have formed, along with the EdX consortium.

Every college will soon have to answer this question: what is it that we offer that students need to be on campus to get?

Note: Johnson’s second guest blog, coming mid-April, will feature the game-changing power of moving to a proficiency model for student progress. He will report on growing national attention to Minnesota and the number of institutions declaring intention to move to proficiency.

Telling stories in school

By Rashné Jehangir, February guest blogger

Last year my 5-year-old kindergartener came home from school and proudly proclaimed: “We are writing personal narratives in class!” I tried to contain my glee and asked for an explanation of these big words. She said matter of factly: “Well, it a story about your life that you write and then share with your class.” From what I heard, this assignment generated a great deal of excitement in her classroom in St. Paul. Stories matter — whether you are 5 or 55, the opportunity to tell your story is powerful. Yet, so often in academia, we implicitly ask students, particularly first-generation, low-income students — to leave their stories outside of the classroom. Instead, what if we as educators intentionally designed opportunities for this new majority of students to share their personal narratives in class and integrate this type of reflection into course objectives?

We often celebrate this expression of voice in young children but the space and time to do the same in higher education is limited. In some cases, the value of narrative is undermined as “anecdotal” and contrary to the real academic work that happens in college classrooms.

Here’s the rub: The composition of our college campuses is changing — and with it the narratives that shape how and which students get to college. What will sustain them through the journey is changing too. Today more and more students who are first-generation and low-income are getting to college, but it is well documented that (Engle & Tinto, 2008) a disproportionate number leave without a degree and with considerable debt (NYTimes.com). We know that financial constraints, perceived and real gaps in academic preparation, family commitments and distance both literal and metaphoric between campus and home worlds contribute to the lack of belonging. To challenge these issues requires creativity and a shift in what we consider valuable in the academy. And this is one place where the stories come in.

For the past 10 years I have been researching first-generation students’ perspectives about spaces that allow them to give voice to their own experiences. This research has been imbedded into my teaching with an effort to intentionally design opportunities for students to share their lived experiences as a means of deepening written and oral skills as well as expanding their perceptions of the diversity in their classrooms.

In the excerpts below, two first-generation low-income students describe their participation in a Biographical Object assignment where students write about a meaningful object in their lives while also sharing the story in class:

“When we shared our biographical objects, I feel that we share about our past, ideals, ambitions and values. We are more in tune with each other and how it relates to what we are learning in class.”

“I have been trying to fit in this society since the day I got here, to be able to succeed and be part of this country that has too much to offer. When we did this activity I realized how everyone is the same. We all have memories that make us remember who we are and what we are fighting for. I felt how I was part of the class and part of the university and its students… I am not so different.”

For these students the narrative medium invited them to the center of the classroom experience and created space for reflection on self while also connecting more deeply with content material and the experience of others.

It is critical to know and understand the stories that constrain the first-generation journey in college. We can use these lived experiences as a means of informing practice and policy on campus. But it is equally important to ensure that this narrative of limitation is not the primary and defining story of who first-generation students are. If your story already defines you based primarily on your perceived deficits, it is harder to feel like a full citizen on campus. Nigerian author Chimamanda Adiche describes this as “the danger of the single story” — a narrative that collapses and flattens who you are. First-generation students are not a homogenous group and giving them intentional spaces to tell their own stories can go a long way in cultivating a sense of full citizenship in the academy and teaching how we can better support them.

Should we be spooked by MOOCs?

By Todd Bloom, October guest blogger

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a popular topic in higher education. But what will be their impact on student learning and outcomes?  Are they a short-lived trend or a means to transform education opportunities for all types of learners?

The idea of scalable free online courses has gained traction quickly: the for-profit company Coursera, for example, recently added 16 higher education partners, more than doubling the number of institutions they work with and expanding the number of courses they offer to nearly 200.  And edX, a nonprofit founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology now hosts courses from Berkeley and the University of Texas System as well.

What type of learning experiences do MOOCs offer? Like online learning in K-12, the MOOCs with the most successful student outcomes impart discrete knowledge and focus on technical content — STEM courses, for example.

While MOOCs give large numbers of people access to the course content of renowned institutions, the scale of the classes limits the support available for students. Contrary to in-person and traditional online courses, students generally don’t receive help from the instructor when they raise their hands or exhibit other signs of needing assistance.

MOOCs normally do enable peer interaction, but beyond crowdsourcing, successful students must be independent and thrive in a relatively inflexible instructional environment. EdX did a limited study of students who performed well in a MOOC and found most had taken a similar course before and had completed any suggested academic preparation.

In September, the Gates Foundation announced that they will award 10 grants for the creation of MOOCs to provide remedial coursework. In particular, they want applicants to focus on introductory classes with a primary audience of low-income and first generation students. Educators will be watching to see if the grantees can maintain the scale of MOOCs while delivering the individual support successful remediation requires.

Students have a variety of reasons for taking MOOCs, which tend to fall in three categories:

• Personal satisfaction and growth
• Mastery of content that can be shown to an employer
• Academic credit (see LearningCounts.org as an example)

The University of Texas System recently took a step toward using MOOCs as a means to accelerate degree completion while containing costs. System leaders believe that having more options for students taking bridge courses (introductory classes required for multiple degree programs) will alleviate the problem of those courses being over-enrolled.

As institutions find creative ways to use MOOCs to broaden educational opportunities for all students, colleges and universities need to go a step beyond putting in place a credentialing process. Students in MOOCs need the same support as traditional students in developing an academic roadmap.

MOOCs are a huge opportunity for institutions to give students a taste of their best offerings and for students to get a taste of college success. What do you think? Can MOOCs promote student achievement and degree completion?

Developing innovators by design and experience

By Steve Kelley, September guest blogger

I was in Potsdam in July, standing next to my friend Aleksandar as he quietly said, “My college (Heidelberg University) wasn’t anything like this!” He couldn’t help commenting after we had seen student presentations on the projects they had completed during their 12 weeks at the Hasso Plattner Institute School of Design Thinking. Surrounded by slogans like “Don’t Wait, Innovate,” I had to agree that my college and the University of Minnesota, where I now work, didn’t create anything like the higher education experiences of these design thinking students.

One team was demonstrating new ideas they had developed for a sponsor who owned facial recognition technology (it knows you smiled at the box of Cheerios) and wanted to use the technology in non-retail settings. Another team had created large foam cubes that played the sounds of different musical instruments when you sat down (a 7-year-old girl and I had fun playing the violin and clarinet parts of an orchestra). The cubes were part of a design for the Potsdam Symphony’s effort to reach a low-income neighborhood in the city.

Young people from all over the world came to Potsdam to learn new skills — design thinking — and to learn them in a new way — solving real-world problems for a real sponsor in a diverse team.

The School of Design Thinking wasn’t my first time learning about this new approach to higher education. I had read about the Stanford Institute of Design and The Laboratory at Harvard and I had listened to instructors from Denmark’s KaosPilots and from Amsterdam’s Knowmads. The latter two organizations may use and teach design methods for solving a wide range of problems but they also explicitly teach leadership and how to make change in the world.

Students and society need much more from higher education than we have been delivering. The new approach represented by these educators gives us an opportunity. We could teach new skills that integrate across disciplines, combining analysis, intuition, science and aesthetics into a new, innovative whole that solves real problems. Student teams could work on problems presented by external sponsors or ones they identified. In Minnesota, this happens now in some courses at some schools, many of them in graduate school. It doesn’t happen on a sustained basis, over multiple years, so students could practice complex skills and address really complex problems.

We don’t have to abandon courses in disciplines like chemistry, literature and economics. We could enable undergraduates to work on both projects and a major. We could put undergrads and grad students on the same teams. We wouldn’t have to give up on getting students to graduate in four years. We could enable them to graduate with new problem-solving skills and the sense of leadership and power to change the world that would come from having done it in school.

Then innovative Minnesota higher education would really be leading the nation.