Academia in crisis: Brian Hawkins addresses the NITLE Summit — NITLE
Brian L. Hawkins, co-founder of the Frye Institute and the first president of EDUCAUSE, gave an impassioned presentation “The Information Resource Professional: Transformation, Tradition & Trajectory” to an engaged group of conference participants at last week’s NITLE Summit. He didn’t mince words: along with institutions in all other sectors of higher education, it is urgent that liberal arts colleges invent a new future together, working in true collaboration. Today’s uniquely dire higher education fiscal environment is the driver. Institutional failures to respond energetically will result in the institution not surviving (emphasis DSC).
Hawkins based his argument both on astute observation of the current milieu and on comparisons with the trajectory of events and transformations he observed during his long and distinguished career of higher education leadership (emphasis DSC). Drawing on his experience in roles ranging from Senior Vice President at Brown University to EDUCAUSE leader, and returning to his many publications and presentations throughout that career, Hawkins delineated the current environment, painting an unsettling picture: (emphasis DSC — which I call a game-changing environment).
…Hawkins further stressed the critical importance of genuinely transformative inter-institutional collaborations: “We have to stop thinking of collaboration as an avocational approach…… it is the only means of competitive survival.”
UC panel outlines drastic reforms – The Huffington Post — [via Ray Schroeder, and his comments below]
The University of California Commission on the Future met today to discuss a host of major changes to the school system, including substantial student fee hikes and three-year bachelor’s degree option. According to the Daily Californian: Recommendations from the group include the implementation of online courses in order to increase student access to courses, decrease the time necessary to acquire a degree and reduce the costs of education to both students and the state. The report recommends “the pursuit of the pilot project being coordinated by the Office of the President which … will develop and deliver up to 40 online undergraduate courses, evaluating their quality, learning effectiveness, workload impacts (and) costs.”
“Stanley Ikenberry, interim president of the University of Illinois, on how students, families and the university all could save money and, at the same time, maintain the quality and integrity of his institution. Ikenberry said a shorter college career, an “accelerated program” that could be in place by fall 2011, would raise revenue for the school while cutting tuition and letting students enter the work force sooner. The president said a combination of distance learning or online courses, placement tests for college credit, high school participation in some programs and, especially, use of summer school could shorten a student’s stay at one of the three campuses.”
From DSC:
I’m not sure what I think about all of the possibilities, but clearly, the environment is pressing us for change. The status quo is no longer an option.
Quotes below — with emphasis from DSC
Already more than one in three students studies part-time and one in six is from overseas.
There will be more mature students, more studying part-time, more living in their own or their parents’ homes, and many more studying online.”
There will be more tailor-made vocational courses, operated in partnership with individual companies and employers.
There will be more “pick-and-mix” degrees, with students accumulating course credits at different universities, even across different countries, and with gaps for employment in between.
Students will increasingly become “consumers” as we reach the tipping-point where their contribution to the cost of the degree is greater than that made by the government.
Private providers will take over an increasing share of the university market.
The all-round university will increasingly lose out to more specialised institutions.
Finally, universities will become more global.
ENABLING WORLDWIDE LEARNING – THE “MULTI-VERSITY” — from Changing the Education Equation (part 3) – My Reflections on the 2010 HP Innovation in Education Worldwide Summit
This hybrid and distributed approach we used in our summit has wonderful (and challenging!) implications for how we think about “the learning institution” (universities, colleges, school systems), and there are many institutions already seeing the “disruption” at the end of the tunnel.
Ray Schroeder, one of our presenters on the panel, “Learning without Limits…” sent me a post-summit email in which he shared one example of the changing education institution, which he calls the “Multi-versity”:
“…following on Michael Horn’s predictions that community colleges and online universities are the delivery platforms in higher education today and tomorrow, [I believe] that the “day-after-tomorrow” will be the advent of the multi-versity. That is, colleges and universities collaborating in offering a vast range of interconnected classes from which students will select to fulfill degree requirements that allow for nearly unlimited emphases and specializations. The motivation for these multi-versity collaborations will be both push and pull – the economy is pushing higher education to become more efficient through sharing resources and the students are pulling universities to be more responsive to their individual needs for access to a wide range of classes. This, I believe is the true potential of [Google] Wave as a Web 2.0 platform, to enable and facilitate inter-institutional class collaborations that provide a diversity of perspectives and a rich breadth of information sharing.” (emphasis DSC)
From DSC:
I don’t mention this to support or plug Google Wave. Rather, I mention it because the idea of a multi-versity is a model that could easily happen (and, in fact, is already occurring to some degree).
From DSC:
For those of us in higher education, what occurs in K-12 affects us, as it affects our incoming students’ expectations. We need to prepare now for our students of tomorrow! And congratulations to those of you in K-12 who are working hard to keep your students engaged, growing, challenged, participating, and learning!
Who needs a prof? –– George Siemens
I’ve talked in the past about trailing ideologies – namely that we design systems to serve an era, but when the era changes, the systems often don’t. Education is a great example. In higher education and corporate training, we labour under many assumptions and ideologies that have been negated by the web, social media, and mobile technologies. Courses, classrooms, and teacher-centric learning can (should) be rethought to capitalize on what technology enables and renders obsolete from the previous model.
So what role is left for the teacher? To be effective, Wieman says, they must be “cognitive coaches” rather than conduits of information. Rankin believes that the change in pedagogy will happen soon. “It’s comparable to the introduction of a light switch,” he adds. “It’s just going to take a while for people to figure out what this looks like and how it works.”
From DSC:
Also from the “Who needs a prof?” article:
Similarly, William Rankin, an associate professor of English at Abilene Christian University, has been a primary mover behind equipping students at the Texas university with iPod Touches and iPhones. The program began in 2008, and now nearly half the student body have the devices. Rankin says teachers, too, are better off for it. The faculty uses the devices to overcome time delays between tests and feedback, get immediate class input, and participate in ongoing online discussions via blogs. “The medieval apprentice model in which people learned in these very personalized ways is exactly the type of learning we can see in this initiative,” says Rankin. “I do think that in the next two or three years you will see a groundswell of these sorts of initiatives.”
From DSC:
I post this here to show my support of the need for change and to sew seeds for change. In order for us to meet this next generation where they are at, we can’t hold on to the status quo. We need to cultivate change now in order to be ready for the K-12ers coming our way.
