I’m happy to announce that the paperback edition of Revolution in Higher Education has just been released by MIT Press. It is available from online and traditional booksellers everywhere.
Prof. Dan Ryan from Mills College posted another thoughtful piece on #FutureHigherEd, posing the question what will the regulation of academic quality look like in a Flat World?
We can imagine the emergence of both disruptive skill/knowledge certifying enterprises that operate at the individual level and certification accrediting enterprises that operate at the program level. To generate a healthy ecosystem of such “regulators” we will need to think not in terms of government regulation of educational institutions but rather of some collective regulation of regulators.
Ryan has in mind a collection of marketplace solutions that together will: :
In short, these are reforms that should foster innovation. It was the first thing that occurred to me in 2012 when the MOOC phenomenon started to reshape my thinking about technology-enabled learning:
Letting learning outcomes speak for themselves in a Linked-In network of referrals, accrediting course repositories rather than institutions, and crowd-sourcing ratings to help students choose among competing courses and curricula are all experiments that are under way. Whatever their outcome, the future of accreditation will not be the same.
I was pretty critical of accrediting agencies back then, but over the past four years I have found myself returning over and over again to the idea that the same Flat World rules that inspired Dan Ryan can also breathe some new life into this necessary part of education:
Accreditation is, well, boring. Accreditors are the green eye shade players in the drama of higher education. It’s hard to get excited about green eye shades, but today—improbably—I find myself excited by accreditation. To be more exact, I am excited about what will replace it.
Today’s #FutureHigherEd post is by Mills College professor Dan Ryan, who teaches a course on how to use design thinking to improve higher education. Prof. Ryan asks whether an idea can be innovative if someone else is already doing it.
It’s a question that is interesting in its own right. The bottom line is that it is not only OK, there’s virtually no other way to make progress. A few years ago, Mike Brown at Brainzooming wrote about how to steal (borrow) creative ideas with a clear conscience:
Ryan’s students went looking for innovative ideas to borrow from other schools and came up with an interesting list, including:
Mike Brown thinks this is the basis for creative instigation, the process of searching intentionally for ideas that can instigate your own creative activities as you sculpt, adapt, and reassemble them into solutions that are meaningful and relevant to your circumstances.
Do you think this is a missed opportunity for educational innovators? My experience is that ideas originating off-campus (or, shudder, from other industries) have a hard time competing with local ideas. Think N-I-H: Not Invented Here. Why is the N-I-H syndrome such a powerful force? How much better off would we be if we routinely built on the work of others?
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?
Let me share some stories about higher education from this week. These aren’t technology stories, not futuristic accounts. Instead each anecdote illustrates the enormous financial pressures squeezing most of American colleges and universities. None of them are unusually dramatic: no closures in this post, no queen sacrifices. Just the steady ratcheting up towards crisis.
Item: the University of Massachusetts Boston told 400 adjuncts that they might not be rehired this fall. That is about one third of the campus instructional staff, and more than half of the non-tenured faculty:
There are 1,271 total full- and part-time faculty, according to university officials. About 775 of those are nontenure track, about 400 of whom have received notices that they might not have jobs in the fall.
Note that this comes after fall classes are already on the books. See, things are in flux:
Although many adjuncts have already been scheduled for classes…
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