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Toy Circus

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stuff it took me 20 years to learn – and I’m still trying to figure out

 

1. Learning is volitional. It cannot be mandated. We can teach, but each person decides for him- or herself what will be absorbed and integrated.

 

2. What’s taught in the classroom is only the starting point for knowledge-acquisition and skill mastery. Deep learning happens when class is over – the space for real world application and practice.

 

3. Motivation to learn influences how much work a person is willing to put into self-directed learning and mastery.

 

4. People are most motivated to learn things that are of direct interest and relevance.

 

5. Motivation is a state, not a trait. Motivation is largely a product of how we (instructors) engage students.

 

6. We can amplify students’ engagement by giving them an authentic and substantive voice in co-creating curricula.

 

7. Paragogy and heutagogy, emerging theories of teaching and learning, point to decentred learning, self-determination, and peer-to-peer learning as core to 21st Century education.

 

What might paragogical teaching look like in a post-secondary classroom? In this Acclaim interview with Maegan Stephens (Public Speaking as an “Interactive Democracy”), Professor Stephens describes how:

I give them a ballot of issues to vote on, including the content of the speeches they will give, how they will be graded, and class policies on cell phone use and on attendance. I also ask them if they would prefer to spend class time doing activities, watching speeches, hearing me lecture, or a combination.

I try to ask as more as more of a moderator and facilitator than as a lecturer. This kind of interaction, advances the aspects of debate and speaking oriented pedagogy on day one. It is not so much about flipping the classroom as it is about reversing the authority and changing the professor student dynamic, and encouraging my students to take more responsibility for their classroom.

 

 

Love it. Can’t wait to try it.

 

 

 

 

 

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Advances in education theory for a digital world

 

This article is abbreviated from:

Herie, M. (2013). Andragogy 2.0? Teaching and Learning in the Global Classroom: Heutagogy and Paragogy. Global Citizen Digest, 2(2): 8-14.

Whether implicit or explicit, everyone has a theory of teaching and learning. This gets expressed and enacted by how we engage with others, whether as instructor or student. Traditional theoretical frameworks can be broadly grouped into four domains: instructivism, critical theory, constructivist approaches and andragogy (or adult learning). However Web 2.0, characterized by many-to-many, decentred and non-linear networking and communication, has given rise to corresponding advances in conceptualizing teaching and learning in the global classroom. Emerging frameworks – heutagogy (learning as self-determined and non-linear) and paragogy (peer-to-peer and decentred learning) – have important implications for practice in the 21st Century.

Education theory has seen a trajectory from teacher-centred (instructivism) to learner-centred approaches (constructivism and andragogy), incorporating broader contextual issues and dynamics of power, privilege and community (critical pedagogy). However, these theories were all developed prior to the rise and ubiquity of Web 2.0 and social media. Integrating emerging models can extend constructivist, critical and andragogical frameworks towards a kind of “andragogy 2.0”.

Heutagogy and paragogy represent potentially useful extensions of constructivist, critical and adult learning theories; that is, androgogy 2.0. Both heutagogy and paragogy offer models of learning that are (1) self-determined, (2) peer-led, (3) decentred and (4) non-linear. These characteristics map onto social media applications and the democratization of knowledge and information. Heutagogical and paragogical approaches also extend traditional andragogical and adult learning frameworks through their emphasis on meta learning, or learning how to learn.

Andragogy, as self-directed learning focused on competency development, is reconceptualized in heutagogy as self-determined learning focused on developing capabilities. As our rapidly-changing occupational terrains continuously advance and expand workforce competency needs, today’s workforce requires lifelong learners who are both competent and capable. No post-secondary program of study can ever really prepare students with all of the knowledge and skills needed (competencies); rather, it is one’s capability in determining what knowledge and skills need continuous development, and how to access/master them (capabilities). The skills associated with locating and interrogating information to inform decision-making, what we might call “knowledge curators”, are paramount in a knowledge economy.

This in turn implies access to knowledge and skills in a non-linear fashion by today’s “hyperlearners” (derived from the hypertextuality of the web, where information is hyperlinked with no beginning-, middle- or end-point). The process of knowledge construction is itself non-linear, and non-linear curricula would mirror real-world knowledge retrieval and construction. Similarly, shifting from instructors and learners collaboratively co-creating curricula, towards a learner-directed approach, may better prepare learners with the skills needed for lifelong learning via personal learning networks (mapping onto autonomous digital communities).

Finally, heutagogy and paragogy address process over content – the “how” as opposed to the “what” – or meta-learning (learning how to learn). Through networked community and crowd-sourcing, “the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts”. This is illustrated by the elegant solutions to complex problems yielded via crowd-sourced distributed networks. For example, in 2011 crowd-sourcing was used to successfully solve a protein structure (retroviral protease of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus, the cause of an AIDS-like disease in monkeys) that had puzzled scientists for over a decade (Akst, 2011). The crowd-sourced solution was published in the peer-reviewed, academic journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology (Khatib et al. 2011).

An emphasis on developing capabilities in a learner-directed, non-linear and process-oriented way makes it particularly well suited to today’s digital generation, where connectivity, creativity and reflexivity are foundational to global citizenship and collaboration.

 

These models represent a departure from mainstream structures of higher learning. Just as social media and Web 2.0 turned a “one-to-many”, broadcast model of Web 1.0 on its head, the notion of peer-to-peer, self-determined, decentred learning within the context of a learning community characterized by principles of social justice, equity and inclusion may sound utopian: “It is […] no easy task to adopt a decentralised model, since it will require massive procedural, economic and professional change in higher education” (Weller, 2009, in Corneli and Danoff, 2011). Yet in many ways, heutagogy and paragogy simply extend constructivist and critical frameworks, reimagined for a digital generation and a global community.

A provocative 2003 article by Carol Twigg references higher education as largely a “handicraft industry”, with most courses developed by individual faculty for unique cohorts of students:

Currently in higher education, both on campus and online, we individualize faculty practice (that is, we allow individual faculty members great latitude in course development and delivery) and standardize the student learning experience (that is, we treat all students in a course as if their learning needs, interests, and abilities were the same). Instead, we need to do just the opposite (Twigg, 2003, p.38).

Globalization has led to global classrooms, where difference among learners is the rule rather than the exception, spanning culture, language, gender, sexual orientation, faith, ability, social location, migration history and standpoint. It is unsurprising that educational institutions struggle with students’ accommodation needs and demands: it is hard to reconcile standardized curricula with learner heterogeneity along multiple intersecting dimensions.

An analogous example can be seen in advances in chronic disease management. Like education, medicine has traditionally delivered care via an expert model, where treatment is provided based on clinical diagnoses and evidence-informed interventions. In acute settings this works well, however the highest costs and challenges to health care today relate to chronic disease prevention and management. Unlike acute medical problems, chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension are, by definition, ongoing and rely on patients’ own decisions and motivation regarding health behaviour change. New models of medicine are now focusing on patient self-management and enhancing motivation for change, whereby the system of care (both formal and informal) surrounds – and is largely directed by – each patient for him or herself (Frenk et al., 2010).

Similarly, while instructor-led curricula may be effective for brief episodic and “acute” educational needs, programs of study to prepare students for “chronic lifelong learning” demand student self-management and motivational enhancement. Just as chronic disease prevention supports patients in becoming their own health care leaders, our increasingly complex and digitally connected world places a demand on higher education to shift focus towards more effectively helping learners to become their own teachers within formal and informal networks of guidance and support. This does not negate our role as subject matter expert, but it does place the onus – quite rightly – on supporting students’ capacity for nuanced critical reflection, judgment and decision-making.

Radically self-determined and networked learning approaches (like heutagogy and paragogy) affirm individuals as experts in their lives and learning trajectories. As Stuart Brand famously said, “information wants to be free”. So does learning.

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View the June 3, 2013 presentation for the College and Degree Operating Group (CDOG) conference on the topic of “Andragogy 2.0? Introducing emerging frameworks for teaching and learning: Paragogy and Heutagogy” on Slideshare.

Related articles:

Androgy 2.0: Emerging Theories of Teaching and Learning

Wiki-MOOCS

 

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It’s all about creativity, reflexivity and connectivity

Teaching as informing is a short-term solution to a long-term problem. Today, providing information is secondary to engaging peoples’ interest and motivation so much that they will want to seek out more and more, beyond the boundaries of the boardroom, lecture hall or online discussion forum. It’s about meta-teaching…teaching others to become their own teachers.

Daniel Pink, in A Whole New Mind, describes how the information age has undergone a seismic shift to the conceptual age. Meaning that the left brain skills of information management/analysis have been surpassed by the right brain skills of creativity, reflexivity and connectivity.

We’ve progressed from a society of farmers [the agricultural revolution] to a society of factory workers [the industrial age] to a society of knowledge workers [the information age]. And now we’re progressing yet again – to a society of creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers [the conceptual age].

In the conceptual age, educators and presenters need to go way beyond informing because:

a. The information that the presenter deems essential may not align with the relevance and priorities of the audience; so that means little incentive for long-term retention.

b. People generally don’t remember much of what they hear. Or if they do, the half-life of information is pretty short, so there isn’t much impact to be realized if our focus is on the content of a presentation.

c. Even if the information is relevant and memorable, our knowledge landscape is a moving target – information changes so rapidly that what is current today quickly becomes out of date.

And that is where transformative learning comes in…

Introduced by Jack Mezirow in 1997, transformative learning is about engaging peoples’ underlying assumptions and facilitating change in frames of reference. Think of it as that “aha!” moment, when a whole new concept seems to snap into place and suddenly we see things from a new and broader perspective. Signal moments in learning are accompanied by affect – delight, surprise, disappointment, satisfaction, excitement – extending beyond solely cognitive-based insight or understanding.

A defining condition of being human is that we have to understand the meaning of our experience. For some, any uncritically assimilated explanation by an authority figure will suffice. But in contemporary societies we must learn to make our own interpretations rather than act on the purposes, beliefs, judgments, and feelings of others. Facilitating such understanding is the cardinal goal of adult education. Transformative learning develops autonomous thinking.

How can we as educators make this magic happen in our day-to-day work? Well, transformative learning presupposes transformative teaching (if teaching is the right word in this context) (a.k.a. transformative faculty development?). And in turn, transformative teaching implies…teaching about teaching. Meta teaching.

Both the words and the music. Play that funky music.

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Democratizing education may mean creating a strange and hybridized monster

 

In principle, MOOCs embody the democratization of information and education: open access to leading edge scholarship and learning, facilitated by outstanding leaders in their respective fields. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are being described as a great equalizer in higher education (awarded an overall “B” grade in a recent New York Times Sunday Review article). Maybe MOOCs are shaping up to be the “killer app” of higher education?

 

Except…there are a couple of snags.

In her exploration of the Ethics of MOOCs, Nora Dunne questions whether it’s defensible to use institutional resources to create and support MOOCs if this diverts what’s available to tuition-paying students. Unless the money comes from a school’s marketing budget?

Institutions of higher learning care about students. They care about access. They want to make the world a better place by linking students with research, theory, knowledge, skills and applications. They also care about enrollment, to which their funding is inextricably tied. They care about their brand. They are competitive.

Such drivers are not mutually exclusive and are not a bad thing. Visionary thinking drives innovation, and so does competition. But there is a risk if academic institutions start regarding MOOCs as “loss leaders”.

 

Are MOOCs at risk of becoming brand advertisements to drive enrollment?

From an education research and theory perspective, best practices in online learning emphasize the importance of interactivity, both with peers and with faculty. Conversely, the one-to-many model, whether delivered in a massive open lecture hall or in a massive open online course, focuses more on information delivery than knowledge construction.

The ideal would be a customizable and dynamic MOOC that integrates high-quality learning objects, pre-recorded or streamed video of outstanding instructors, asynchronous and synchronous small group discussion, simulations, and individual tutoring. But taking it back to budgets, how is this sustainable from a cost perspective?

Unfortunately it’s just not. And the problem with the one-to-many approach is its fundamental incompatibility with 2.0 anything. But…what if all of the above learning tools/strategies were crowdsourced? Not just across institutions of higher learning but from students themselves (past, present and future)? (Representing an authentically paragogical/heutagogical approach, a.k.a. “Andragogy 2.0“).

 

The Digital Frontier

If we venture into the frontier of digital open-access territory, we need to understand that MOOCs, by their nature, are free, open and out there. Positive institutional branding becomes a by-product of bleeding-edge, innovative curricula co-created by outstanding faculty and students.

And might this mean the creation of a strange and hybridized monster – a WikiMOOC?

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Disruptive innovations aren’t easy for established institutions

Online learning has been around for over two decades now. Yet institutions – secondary and post-secondary – continue to struggle with its integration and applications. I am still hearing lots of questioning and debate about the suitability and effectiveness of online delivery. What does the research say?

Learning outcomes have been shown to be modestly better for online versus classroom-based courses (Means et al. 2010)

Learning activities can be equally effective across online and face-to-face conditions (Neuhauser, 2002)

Online courses across a variety of theoretical and practical topic areas have been offered successfully (Tallent-Runnels et al. 2006).

Course development (whether face-to-face, mixed mode or online) is resource-intensive. Here is a radical rethink of higher education from a systems perspective, from a provocative 2003 article by Carol Twigg (decribed as a Rock Star in higher education technology and innovation) for Educause:

American higher education remains what Bill Massy and Bob Zemsky have called a “handicraft” industry in which the vast majority of courses are developed and delivered as “one-offs” by individual professors… Currently in higher education, both on campus and online, we individualize faculty practice (that is, we allow individual faculty members great latitude in course development and delivery) and standardize the student learning experience (that is, we treat all students in a course as if their learning needs, interests, and abilities were the same). Instead, we need to do just the opposite.

Full disclosure: I have taught a graduate clinical course focused on addiction treatment for over 10 years. Don’t get me wrong, I love classroom teaching. But feedback I get from students has consistently reinforced three things:

1. There are as many ways of teaching online as there are face-to-face. Just like there can be good and bad classroom courses (and instructors), same goes for online.

2. Online courses can be experienced as equally or more rigorous than their in-class counterparts, in that online students report having to critique, reflect and formulate their ideas more deeply in order to contribute to class discussion and dialogue.

3. Online learning is accessible to students in a way that classroom teaching can’t accomplish.

In any case, the debate may well be moot: Instructional videos on YouTube – for everything from how to change a tire or rig a sailboat, to advanced chemistry – constitute what might well be the world’s biggest and most vibrant online apprenticeship training. Khan Academy (“our mission: to provide a world-class education for anyone, anywhere”) materials are used by teachers worldwide in their classrooms. (Because the online version teaches it better?) Students today have grown up in a world where the Internet has always existed. Digital communication, networking and collaboration are like talking (or breathing).

So why, twenty years on, aren’t there more online offerings in colleges and universities (especially among those in the top tier)? I think the hesitation comes from a deep place in our collective psyche as educators. We want to believe that our physical presence at the front of the class is a key contributor to meaning-making and learning for our students. From an instructivist theoretical frame, this makes sense. Thing is, the education field has widely adopted constructivist models of teaching and learning, at odds with a “sage on the stage” approach.

Online learning in higher education represents a paradigm shift and a disruptive innovation. Big time.

Manufactured Landscape

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is blogging the digital equivalent of tree-planting?

In his famous series of large-scale photographs capturing the impacts of industry Edward Burtynsky highlights massive reconstructions of our natural world. I watched the award-winning 2006 documentary Manufactured Landscapes on a long-haul flight a few years ago, juxtaposing mountains of discarded computer monitors (on the screen in front of me), with pristine polar ice (out the airplane window).

Burtynsky shows us debris fields in real environments. What are some of the by-products and reconfigured terrains of the knowledge construction industry?  Here are three manifestations:

1. Degree inflation: Just like 50 is the new 40, Masters are the new Bachelors. Is this because today’s world is infinitely more complex and new hires need additional time and preparation for job readiness? Or are we seeing the equivalent of monetary inflation? I once served on a selection committee for a prestigious lectureship, where the candidate we chose had the credentials PhD, PhD. Let’s leave it at that.

2. Manufactured authenticity: Knowledge workers tend to spend a lot of time indoors. We all crave the experience of real-world adventure but fear of the attendant risks can be a deterrent. That’s what simulations are for: in teaching, learning and recreation. Google Glass represents the first wave of integrated mobile computing. Will this be the next television?

3. Digital nostalgia: The internet is a social construction and was once (in the words of Howard Rheingold) an electronic frontier. Consider the contrast between the WELL and Facebook with respect to discourse and advertising presence. Burtynsky catalogued the manufactured landscapes of the industrial world – what will 2020’s documentary on the manufactured landscapes of the information economy look like?

The post-industrial wastelands of the digisphere weren’t always there. Maybe blogging is the digital equivalent of tree-planting?

 

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The world is opening up, and that’s a good thing. (Don Tapscott) 

 

In their 2010 book Wikibrands, Sean Moffett and Mike Dover argue that with the advent of the social web, it’s no longer the purview of a company to articulate and define its brand – it’s what people say about the company that defines the brand. The implications for all organizations and sectors, including education, are huge.

Institutions of higher learning expend considerable resources on branding, but for the most part this follows traditional marketing channels. And where social media is integrated into organizational branding, it tends to be used as more a corporate communication tool than a meaningful way to engage with students or prospective students. Reputation management is a big consideration. How do you control your brand if you open up a “comments” or “review” page on your website?

A recent investigative reporting piece focusing on healthcare invited Canadians to rate hospitals, and while popular among the public (see story), was sharply criticized – by hospital administrators (though not by patients, see story).

Whether we like it or not, there are multiple outlets for review and commentary, and these are more likely to be adopted when the “official” website is perceived as promoting versus informing. When I choose a hotel do I trust a corporate website or visit TripAdvisor for candid ratings and reviews? Why should it be any different in selecting a college or university? The stakes are a lot higher, and information = power, or at least the illusion of such.

The drive towards inside-out organizations is premised on the notion that we – organizations – get more from sharing than we do from secrecy. This is a big culture change for education. It’s radical. Although high-level data about high school and post-secondary outcomes are publicly available, specifics (e.g. course evaluations, students’ comments and reviews) are not.

Here’s the thing: In a very short time frame complete institutional transparency is going to be expected. As a matter of course. If we don’t provide it someone else will be happy to step in and do it for us. And they get to keep the ad revenue from the high click-through rate: RateMyProfessors is only the beginning.

As Don Tapscott puts it: “Institutions are becoming naked, and if you’re going to be naked … fitness is no longer optional. If you’re going to be naked, you better get buff.”

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Here’s what the ultimate teaching challenge might look like…and in the future it may be the rule rather than the exception

A new book, Motivational Interviewing in Groups (Wagner and Ingersoll) outlines motivational approaches and strategies in group facilitation. While the book’s emphasis is on clinical practice, the principles and applications are also relevant to education settings.

The book’s authors present a table illustrating different types of group format, structure, composition, size, length and admission arranged along a continuum of difficulty (for facilitators) from easier to harder:

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This looks different for educational groups, but the essentials still apply. Here is my modification of Wagner and Ingersoll’s framework calibrated for teaching and learning:

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In other words:

Elective courses are easier to teach than mandatory courses. Students generally take electives out of interest, as opposed to being forced to take mandatory courses. Teaching students content that someone else thinks they ought to know is tougher than content in which they’re already interested.

Instructor-led courses presuppose a “script” (i.e. lesson plan), versus collaborative or student-led curricula. Paragogical approaches posit peer-to-peer learning and individual autonomy, and demand a proportionately higher level of finesse and facilitation.

Classes where students share more similarities than differences can be easier to work with than heterogeneous class compositions. For example, students who differ widely in age, ability or pre-existing knowledge and skills present more of a challenge in ensuring that all learning needs are met, and establishing an inclusive, cohesive and positive community of learning. Of course diversity, including culture, sex, gender and lived experience, enriches everyone’s learning exponentially – but demands artful facilitation on our part.

Student engagement and interactivity are more straightforward in classes of 25 or less. As class size increases so does the challenge of promoting opportunities for practice and integration of knowledge and skills.

It’s easier to keep peoples’ interest and attention for a single class of 2 or 3 hours than it is for a whole day or for multiple days. The latter demands both a varied menu of instructional strategies as well as formidable stamina (on the part of the instructor and the students).

Strict and highly competitive admission criteria can yield the “cream of the crop” of high-achieving and highly motivated learners. On the other hand, classes where admission is unrestricted means addressing the needs of the best and the brightest alongside those with academic struggles and other challenges.

Like any framework, this conceptualization tends to oversimplify and blur the many complexities and nuances of artful classroom teaching. Real life is always messier than the manual (if there even is a manual). But in general, teaching a mandatory class using a student-led curriculum, among a highly diverse cohort of 100 students or more, over a multi-day course that is freely open to all could well represent the ultimate teaching challenge.

We haven’t added the layer of classroom-based versus online teaching and learning, but does this scenario represent what may well be future of higher education…MOOC 2.0?

 

 

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The hardest thing about writing is writing (Nora Ephron)

 

Student plagiarism is a big issue (and apparently an equally big industry) in high school and post-secondary education. It’s never been easier to craft a bricolage of web-based material for a written assignment, and it’s never been easier to detect evidence of academic dishonesty. Tools like Turnitin, iThenticate and online search engines allow for immediate identification of copied source material. Given the high risk and high stakes involved, why do students do it?

The way I see it, a number of interacting factors have created a “perfect storm” kind of context in which student plagiarism can flourish:

1. Stewart Brand, digital social network pioneer, famously said that “information wants to be free”. We’ve seen how intellectual ownership of music and film has been defended vigorously in the courts, yet for every torrent site that gets shut down, a new one pops up. Digital content on the network behaves like water: block one pipeline and it effortlessly reroutes through others. The digital generation has grown up accustomed to immediate access to a gushing flood of “free” content.

2. This leads to the next contributing factor: social media platforms are as much about the flow of content as original content creation. Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, and others are about free flow of media and ideas. There is a culture of “content curation”, and the best curators are rewarded by likes, notes, reblogs, retweets, repins etc.

3. Academic databases have traditionally been way less user-friendly than search engines. This is starting to change, but the reality is that if you’re pressed for time, don’t understand Boolean logic, and want easily-digested and accessible information, a quick web search might win out. There have been periodic (and growing) exhortations for researchers to make the products of research more accessible, however we have far to go in realizing this knowledge transfer ideal.

4. I am not sure that students really appreciate the consequences of academic misconduct. It’s a bit like impaired driving: seems worth the risk at the time, but when you find yourself in court, without a license, and facing massive fines, insurance costs and social stigma, the cost of booking a stretch limo is a bargain. Same goes for plagiarism. Universities take it pretty seriously, and that meeting with the Dean is a lot like going before a judge.

5. Finally, writing is hard. Encoding our ideas in abstract alphabetical symbols just doesn’t come naturally for most of us. In fact, sometimes coming up with original ideas to encode doesn’t come too naturally either.

Academic Integrity is the foundation of knowledge generation and production. But somehow there’s a disconnect with digital norms and popular culture/practice. The solution? Still murky, but I think that an ongoing dialogue with students acknowledging and exploring the terrain between these separate realities is a good place to start.

 

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Unsolicited advice is the junk mail of life (Bern Williams, in Miller & Rollnick)

Compassionate listening – stepping back and allowing learners to individually explore their ambivalence, concerns and ideas about an issue or concept – is at the crux of individual discovery and adult learning.

Here’s the rub: as educators we want to support student success, so when we see someone heading in the wrong direction or struggling, we’re often galvanized into action with all good intentions! This “Righting Reflex” is essentially the imperative to do something…to “fix it”, and often kicks in without any conscious awareness (see Miller and Rollnick’s 2013 text on Motivational Interviewing).

To add clarity: A a quick illustration of the Righting Reflex from a conversation I had on my way in to work this morning (for real):

Me: “I’m thinking that I’d like to buy a Smart Car.” 

Significant other: “Well what about a Honda CR-V? I know someone who has one for sale.” 

Me:   ?   !   ?

O-kayyy…How useful was that unsolicited (albeit well-meaning) advice in helping me think things through? And, to be fair, my own Righting Reflex isn’t hard to activate in both personal and professional spheres. Learner autonomy as being at the heart of constructivist approaches is widely discussed and accepted, yet in practice it’s “simple but not easy”.

In an ideal world, educators validate, explore, question. They evoke and encourage students to critically examine different sides of an issue. This doesn’t negate our roles of teacher, guide or concerned other, but it does place the onus – quite rightly – on the learner’s capacity for decision-making and problem-solving.

A big part of education in health care (and other fields) is less about teaching the correct answer, than in facilitating the process of ethical and nuanced judgment and decision-making. If we can resist the Righting Reflex we’re creating a positive space in which to explore, experiment and make mistakes.

So…as for my own automotive decision-making process…a design endorsement by the MOMA may just tip the balance!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Will it be on the exam?

In-class exams may well be one of the most stressful – and for some, traumatic – experiences in a student’s life. This truism came front and centre last week at a certificate program I was teaching, geared to seasoned interprofessional practitioners. The varying responses to our in-class, summative, multiple-choice exam tended to cluster around the less enthusiastic end of the spectrum.

Why are exams so aversive?

One obvious reason is that they can be high stakes, as in this (admittedly oversimplified) equation:

high grades = approval + scholarship $$$ + grad school admission

Another reason may have to do with lack of autonomy: we didn’t write the exam questions, and we generally can’t know – or in many cases – anticipate – them in advance. And people inherently strive towards personal autonomy.

But I think that radical pedagogical analyses get closest to the crux of the matter, in their critical interrogation of power dynamics in the classroom, the stance of the professor as “expert”, and framing of “curricular content” (for example, Laura Béres 2008 article).

Constructivism frames learning as socially constructed by learners, where learning is meaningful and relevant to real life. In-class exams are, by nature, removed from real life and focus on content domains that the instructor sees as key.

This can be an uneasy alliance in progressive classrooms, and one that I am still struggling to reconcile… Especially in a knowledge landscape where locating information should take precedence over memorizing information (see Julio Frenk’s influential report in the Lancet, “Health professionals for a new century: transforming education to strengthen health systems in an interdependent world”).

Closing thought:

Exams do stimulate affective arousal, which is associated with enhanced memory retention. I’m just not sure that those memories correlate well with the exam content!

Predicting the Future: Higher Education in 2112 (Part 2)

My workplace overlooks a big downtown university campus, and it’s always fun to see the frosh week excitement and back-to-school energy.

This made me think about: what will higher (university) education look like 100 years from now? Hard to imagine, especially because universities have sustained a pretty enduring business model and delivery system for – what – the last thousand years or so?

But I think we’re seeing the fault lines in higher education, some driven by students themselves and their expectations/learning preferences, some changes being driven by new technologies/social media, and perhaps the most significant changes are a result of globalization and rise of “educational megalopolies”.

So – here are some of my predictions:

This first one is kind of a no-brainer: Face-to-face learning will be the exception. Students will design and access knowledge and skills guided by both human and virtual tutors/faculty

Students will register and be affiliated with multiple academic institutions from the same family of university “brands” (as smaller schools become gobbled up by the big names)

Students will travel virtually or geographically throughout their academic careers and access a plethora of institutionally-branded choices in different metropolitan centres and online, with the entire academic record in a single transcript file location

The electronic transcript will look more like a virtual portfolio of students’ work and assessments, and will link to other accomplishments/activities

There will be no such thing as “full” courses (due to over-enrollment) because all courses will be webcast

The most successful university brands will offer programs in multiple languages: for example, English, Mandarin, Portuguese, Hindi, Russian (via automatic simultaneous translation of faculty/instructional materials)

Unique, personalized programs of study will be developed so as to fit specific jobs via proprietary algorithms (and these will be recalibrated as students’ career goals change)

Teaching performance will be graded on a variety of metrics – including student performance and feedback/reviews – and this will be integrated within mobile academic course calendars (inside-out universities).

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