From DSC:
Whereas:

  • We often hear from the corporate world that our students aren’t graduating with the sort of skills that the corporate world needs
  • We are now on exponential curves vs linear curves in a number of areas (technological changes being one of them)
  • The half-lives of information are shrinking from 30 years down to 5 years (see John Seeley Brown)
  • The pace of disruptive innovations seems to have picked up and businesses can be obsoleted within a short amount of time (i.e. Blockbuster, Kodak, Smith Corona, DEC, others)
  • Automation, artificial intelligence, and algorithms are influencing what’s available — or not — out in the job market for humans (see the work of  Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee)
  • The corporate world is forced to adapt or die, and to be more nimble

I can’t help but wonder, especially in my role as an Instructional Designer:

  • Should the corporate world be setting or significantly guiding what is covered on the assessments within higher education?  Then the faculty members and Instructional Designers can work backwards from there to design the necessary scaffolding, modules, and streams of content.

 

Such a setup would:

  • Create stronger alignments between the skills needed in the workplace and the skills of our graduates
  • Help faculty members know where to invest their time, resources, and their own learning
  • Address the accountability concerns/skepticism being placed upon higher education

Two other thoughts/ideas here:

  • We need better communities of practice whereby some members come from the corporate world and some members come from the world of higher education (faculty members, staff, and students)
  • I wonder if corporations could post real-world needs, ideas, and situations to higher ed faculty members and students — in order to create some solid, cross-disciplinary, project-based learning experiences…?

…

I can hear some of you asking, “What about the liberal arts!? All of this sounds very vocational and job-oriented. There’s more to higher education than that.”

And I would agree with you. I graduated with a liberal arts degree and I work for a Christian college that is focused on the liberal arts.  So I think that there is still very much a place for liberal arts.  However, I fear that those disciplines will only thrive again when the prices of obtaining such degrees are significantly reduced.  It’s one thing to get a $5,000-$10,000 degree in a liberal arts-related discipline (as it was years ago). It’s entirely another thing when it costs $100,000+ and then you struggle to find a job or you are told that a Master’s is the new undergrad degree (as is sometimes the case today).

So, I am back to wondering how we can re-architect our learning ecosystems to insure better alignments. The above thoughts are some of my ideas in this area.

 

A somewhat related posting: