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February 1, 2010
Preparing Students for New Wave Higher Education
By Daniel Bernstein, University of Kansas
Like Donna Heiland and many others in the Teagle community, I spent several days at the recent AAC&U national conference in Washington, D.C. For me, it was a giddy experience, for I went to session after session in which people shared experience with prototypes of innovative, high-end learning initiatives. Hearing all the good ideas and the evidence of their impact, I felt richly re-energized for the challenge of implementing change in my own teaching and in teaching generally on my campus.
From this community a consensus list of high-impact practices has emerged, based on the criteria of retention and engagement. By extension, greater learning follows from engaged practices, and learning should be the bottom line in all decisions. This community also presumes that active learning is more effective in generating understanding than are passive activities like listening, so the debate has moved on to whether courses are the right unit of analysis. Seat time and credit hours are challenged as the basis of credit for student and faculty work and as the basis of revenue. Learning can be generated through hybrid and distributed structures, with scholars serving as coaches and guides rather than instructors. Measurement of effectiveness is built into the programs through mastery demonstrations; students finish a topic when their work meets a high criterion, not when the term is over.
Increasingly student understanding is aggregated across a program through portfolios combining individual accomplishment with reflection that integrates across separate products. These aggregations serve as evidence for the learner and collectively as evidence for the institution. Faculty members continue to be central to the curriculum, though their emerging role may free up time for creative and scholarly activities. There is a continuing role for direct instruction of knowledge within focused areas, but it is less likely to be delivered orally in fixed times and locations. Faculty instead promote skills in discovery and integration through both face to face and mediated interactions .
Emblematic of my experience was a session by three leaders from Westminster College in Salt Lake City. They described a new Bachelor of Business Administration degree program that builds skills and understanding in students through innovative sequences of guided projects. The projects are accomplished through independent study across five broad areas with coaching from faculty members, and they must be revised as needed until they are completed with a high level of skill (competence-based mastery teaching). The individual projects lead to a large integrative project presented and defended in vivo by the student for approval by a panel of faculty members and community experts. There are no courses, no credits, no exams, and no grades. The Westminster presenters acknowledged many other institutions that offer similar programs.
In the lively discussion following the presentation, audience members probed the viability of the program. Some questioned the business model and others asked how faculty time and work would be assigned and evaluated. I would like to focus on one key question that caught my attention: Who are the students in this program and how well do they handle such independent learning? At Westminster the students are adult learners already in the workforce, and they do not immediately thrive in an educational world without structure, direction, and deadlines. We were told that after a couple of weeks to months, they get going.
I focused on this question because I would really like to see some versions of this educational model get a tryout in my own university (a large public), and I can anticipate the response any proposal would receive. Low completion rates are already a problem for many students, even with the built in structure of classes and semesters. Why would we presume that those same students would magically do the extra work required to master high quality criteria in a self-directed program of projects?
I would like to reframe the question, however, and pose several versions for us all to consider. What will it take to provide our students (whoever they are) with the support and preparation so that they can succeed in such a rich educational environment? What community should we build around independent projects that will support the individual work needed? Should the project mix include team projects that would develop important collaborative skills and also support individual work as a side benefit? Would it make more sense to embed large projects in the existing course structure (a working business model, after all), keeping the benefits of the project and mastery approach while not asking for such strong independence from students?
Maybe we will conclude that the credit hour system is not the problem, but rather we should change what is done inside those fixed time courses. Maybe we think an important part of our educational mission is to help students develop a sense of individual engagement and responsibility for learning, so project-based degree programs with appropriate scaffolding seem like the right direction. I am intrigued by the prospect of focusing our energies on promoting high levels of individual achievement, and I am willing to consider losing the credit hour version of measuring progress toward a degree. I am very interested in what we collectively think it would take to create successful examples of such learning, especially within the context of existing institutions. If we are to make a transition, we need to start with several steady, strong first steps.
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