Future of Higher Education Conference (6)

The fourth panel at #masonfuture included Bryan Alexander of NITLE, Robert Beichner of NC State, Anne Moore and Terri Bourdon of Virginia Tech, and Kevin Clark and Mark Sample of Mason. Their topic is “Beyond the Lecture Hall: Technology and Student Learning.”

Beichner showed us a model of the “scale up” classroom that they use at NC State that is drawn from the design first pioneered at MIT. Mason has just about finished one of those rooms for our engineering program. Because it seats 80 students, and is largely dedicated to the engineers, and was extraordinarily expensive to install (and will be equally expensive to maintain), we won’t see many of these rooms on our campus in the near future, nor with the folks in humanities and social sciences have much access to it. But I plan to do an observation in the room one day soon when it comes on line so I can see how well it is living up to its potential.

This sort of innovative design of space around learning outcomes is something I’m spending a lot of time thinking about and working on this semester. I’m on two committees — one explicitly devoted to this topic, and another devoted to the design of a brand new building — that are grappling with the intersection between space and learning.

One point I’m been making in those committees is that as our students get more and more connected to the global market for higher education, we need to design new learning spaces that facilitate rather than hinder these connections. So, for instance, I can imagine a future where small groups of students (3-5 let’s say) are clustered around larger monitors in a residence hall or an academic building taking a course in Moscow or Shanghai. We do not have such learning spaces on our campus right now, but are going to need them soon. Very soon.

Clark described his work with gaming and at risk students — using games to help these students prepare for the challenges of higher education. Our game design program is one of the fastest growing at Mason and Clark’s work is bringing an important educational dimension to the work of that program. One of the things I love about this program is that, as I argued yesterday in my remarks, the Internet is now a space of creation for students and this program teaches students to create media rather than consume it.

Moore and Bourdon previewed the “Math Emporium” at Virginia Tech.  Moore ended her brief introduction to the Emporium with a great bit of data — how much money Tech is saving on a per student basis by using the Math Emporium to help deliver mathematics education to very large numbers of students.

Bourdon called the Emporium a “comprehensive learning space,” by which she meant a mixture of traditional space (tutoring lab, etc.), but also online spaces. Tech did this all the hard way — wrote all their own course materials, etc. — which isn’t necessary today given the number of open source tools out there.

Mark Sample told us about his “social pedagogy” and used the example of writing about the word “alien” in one of his classes using Twitter and forcing students to write in just 140 characters. The best takeaway from this presentation in my view, is that we can actually think differently about such key concepts at “writing” and still accomplish our pedagogical goals.

Bryan Alexander then gave a brief overview of the landscape of MOOCs — a much bigger landscape than the over-hyped Coursera/U-da-City/EdX model we’re hearing so much about. One of the things Bryan pointed to is that all of these models are dependent on institutional subvention, but, as he said, it won’t be long before institutions figure out how to start offering credits (Antioch University already is) and new business models that won’t depend on subvention.

A question that keeps banging around in my head — yesterday and today — is how we might be able to un-silo our institution to develop new business models that remain focused on education while being attentive to our bottom line. I am convinced that as long as we live in our institutional silos, we have no chance to prosper in the coming two decades. But shattering those institutional silos, silos that have been in existence for decades (here, centuries elsewhere) is going to be extraordinarily difficult.

Maybe that’s our biggest challenge for the coming decade: how to make it possible for Mason to dance to the new tunes that the advent of a global market for education is performing?

In the Q&A, moderator Steve Pearlstein, pressed the panelists on the institutional political dimension of institutional change. It’s hard when your moderator is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, because he does tend to want people to answer his questions, not the questions they want to answer. The issue he kept pressing on was the speakers to take a position on how much leverage institutional leaders have when trying to get tenured faculty to change how they teach.

To try to get at an answer, he asked which level of administration was going to have the best change to bring about change: president, provost, department chair. Bourdon’s answer was department chair. Moore said department chair, but only if the dean stood behind them. Sample said “enthusiasm is not what gets [faculty to change].” Instead, it’s seeing other people being successful, which is why our teaching needs to be as open as possible. Given that I’ve been making this same argument since 1999-2000, I have to agree.