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What Happens When A University Imagines Its Future in Generational Terms? #FutureHigherEd

November 30, 2016
Comment and Review, Institutions, Uncategorized
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ideo-challenge

Today’s post from the openIDEO #FutureHigherEd Challenge is from my very own institution.  It concerns Georgia Tech’s Commission on Creating the Next In Education (CNE), a group that has been asked to look out ten years or more (well beyond any planning horizon) and recommend investments, experiments, pilots, projects, partnerships, and ecosystems that would help guide the choices of future leaders to maintain or even improve the Institute’s  mission to provide the best and most valuable education to new generations of learners:

Georgia Tech’s mission to define the technological university of the 21st century is not strategic boilerplate. It is a beacon. It is tempting to conclude that future success will follow from continuing the successful strategies of the last 130 years — that the same beacon will attract new generations of scholars and students. That may be true, but it is equally likely that the Georgia Tech student of 2030 will be different in fundamental ways from the student of generations past. The changing landscape of a Georgia Tech education is evident to anyone who looks at the numbers.

Armed with extensive data and a charge from the Institute, CNE will have a rare luxury: adequate time to develop ideas that might be acted upon. The mid-21st century is well beyond Georgia Tech’s current planning horizon. The Commission’s role is not to engage in premature planning but rather to consider the ideas, experiments, and novel ways of organizing that can inform future strategy…

“The Commission will lead Institute-wide discussions of fundamental questions surrounding topics such as the knowledge 21st century students should gain and how sustained lifelong learning differs from the transformational learning experience of recent high school graduates. In a sense, CNE is an opportunity to deepen the knowledge needed for the Georgia Tech community to pursue strategic ‘options’ that can be exercised over the next 20 years.

Do you know of any other efforts that have this scope and charge?  If so, how did those projects turn out?  Is there advice you can give to the Georgia Tech team as it enters its ideation phase?

5 Different Models: Speculating on the Shape of Future Universities

November 28, 2016
Comment and Review, Institutions
1 Comment

5-different-models

More ideas from the openIDEO Challenge: All are tied together by existing credentialing and business models, but they each address the challenges of learning communities not well-served by traditional residential degree programs. These speculative models were inspired by David Stanley’s EduCause Review article

  • Polymath University: For T-Shaped learners in the 21st-century workplace, Polymath University requires students to major in three distinct areas.  By the same token, faculty members must be capable of teaching in three distinct programs.
  • Nomad University: A kind of competency-based model, the Nomad University has no fixed location (and in some interpretations, no fixed courses). For learnings in the gig economy, this flexible approach to education has some advantages.
  • Interface University: I was struck by this idea of constructing an entire university curriculum around the notion of computational thinking.  There are elements the interface university in Georgia Tech’s computational media degree which combines computing and the humanities in a degree focusing on technology-enabled content.
  • Neo-Liberal Arts College: There is a great deal of discussion about how to bring the liberal arts to science and engineering curricula, but  little effort on the opposite side of that coin.  How would you design the arts and humanities around technology?
  • Ludic University: This is the university of play.  Instead of lecture halls, seminar rooms, and laboratories, this is a university built around design studios. According to Kate Rushton, “this is the university of what-if.”

These are five novel ways to organize post-secondary education.  What problems would these universities solve?  How are they different from current experimental approaches to higher education, and which ones would actually change our system if they were successful?

 

The Human Library

November 23, 2016
Comment and Review, Resources
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ideo-challenge

Kate Rushton contributed a startling idea to the Future of Higher Education Challenge  #FutureHigherEd:  Suppose you were studying Environmental Justice.  You might attend lectures, read some books, pore over a few case studies…or you might want to actually talk to someone who was affected by, say,  the Flint, Michigan water crisis or the events following the Fukushima tsunami:

If I was studying it today, instead of reading about Exxon Valdez or Brent Spa, maybe I could learn from the perspective of the people involved in current issues around the world today e.g. the conflict between the Sami and Britain’s Beowulf Mining over an iron ore mining project in the north of Sweden from the perspective of the Sami, other locals, the Swedish government, Beowulf Mining and shareholders in the company, and buyers of iron ore.

That’s the idea behind the Human Library.  What if we could create a platform that would allow learners to easily host events involving people that would otherwise be difficult to assemble.  In Kate’s terms, “What if we could borrow people instead of books?”  It turns out there is a way to do this on a limited scale. Human Library UK is an international movement to facilitate conversations.

The Human Library is an international equalities movement that challenges prejudice and discrimination through social contact. It uses the language and mechanism of a library to facilitate respectful conversations that can positively change people’s attitudes and behaviours towards members of our communities who are at risk of exclusion and marginalisation.

It’s an idea that applies to many different conversations.  Wouldn’t it be great for computer scientists studying cyber security to assemble key players in the discovery, capture and containment of the Morris Worm, widely believed to be the first broad cyber attack on the Internet? How might a small liberal arts college host a classroom discussion with participants from around the world? The 1981 collapse of a walkway at the Kansas City Hyatt Hotel is often used as a case study for ethics classes, but many of the stakeholders (victims, engineers, construction personnel, government officials) are still living.How about  engaging in a dialog with them?

If this appeals to you, visit the openIDEO Challenge website and add your thoughts.

Join A Global Challenge: Can We Reimagine Higher Education?

November 22, 2016
Announcement, Comment and Review
4 Comments

ideo-challenge

Reimagine the Future of Higher Education

Georgia Tech, USA Funds, Global Silicon Valley, Northeastern University, the US Department of Education, and  the international design firm IDEO are partnering to sponsor the OpenIDEO Future of Higher Education Challenge. The global initiative was announced Nov. 15 at the White House by Department of Education Under Secretary Ted Mitchell and will run through February 2017.

Read the full news release.

Get involved in the Challenge and share your vision!

The Challenge’s Research Phase is now underway. Share stories and reflections, emotions, perspectives and other personal contributions related to education after high school and throughout one’s lifetime. These contributions can be shared through the OpenIDEO Challenge Portal.

Postsecondary education is one of the best investments a person can make, serving as a gateway to social mobility and economic opportunity. This year, U.S. public high schools recorded a graduation rate of 83.2 percent, the highest number ever in recorded history. As these students transition into the American workforce, they’re likely to have four job changes in less than 10 years. Of those jobs, two billion will disappear by 2030—that’s approximately 50 percent of employment opportunities today. Learners are more diverse, because the country is more diverse.  They are also older, because as old jobs disappear, people return to school. They do not always live and work near a college campus, so access to quality education is not guaranteed.  Even if education is accessible, many find themselves priced out of a learning experience by tuition increases that outpace inflation by a factor of four.

There are dozens of shifts in the academic and economic landscapes happening all at once. Designing an adaptive postsecondary system that supports lifelong learning will be more critical than ever before.

The people and unmet needs behind these numbers inspire a huge opportunity for redesigning the post-secondary learning experience. Traditional colleges and universities, new  providers of education, emerging learning communities, families, students, employers, civic institutions all seem to be poised at a pivotal moment for innovation.  How might we prepare students – of all ages –  for active civic engagement, real-world employment, and career success in an ever transforming economic ecosystem?

With your help during this Future of Higher Education Challenge, maybe we can find a way to work together to design new ways in which we might better support learners to evolve with the needs of tomorrow. Let’s explore ideas that cut across cultures, income levels, and sectors as we envision a system that supports innovative models and empowers a broad set of learners.

Check back as I summarize some of these ideas, and feel free to add your comments and perspectives here and at the OpenIDEO Challenge Site.

Future Trends Forum on Revolutions in Higher Education

February 29, 2016
Announcement, Comment and Review
1 Comment

cropped-bryan-and-bear-grinning

This bearded fellow is Bryan Alexander, who runs a wonderful future-oriented blog about higher education.  Bryan has been conducting a read-along of Revolution in Higher Education. As he was approaching the last chapter, he sent me a note asking me to be interviewed on his new Future Trends Forum,   On February 16, I spent an intense hour with Bryan and a pile of viewers discussing topics ranging from access and affordability to the nature of innovation in colleges and universities.  It was an interesting (and not entirely accidental) contrast to a similar interview that Bryan had conducted a week before with Audrey Watters, who more or less savaged the very notion that higher education could be doing a better job.

An edited version of that interview along with Bryan’s notes is located here.  The YouTube video is embedded below.  I encourage you to follow Bryan’s entire FTF series.