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In the March/April and May/June issues of Change, the focus was on all the exciting new possibilities that are opening up for faculty as new technologies expand their teaching and research options. Faculty were the subjects of those editorials, in both senses of the word: the objects of discussion and the agents of learning—learners themselves and the ones who make learning happen in their students.
In this issue, students are the subjects, again in both senses of the word: the topic but also agents, since they are, in the final analysis, responsible for their own learning. The most important educational task we have may well be to teach them how to take the reins—to “change their habits of mind,” as David Hodge and his colleagues put it—so that advanced education can, in the future, be effective, portable, affordable, and appealing.
What would the signs of effectiveness be? We keep hearing about the need to produce graduates who are capable of being “productive, creative, and responsible members of a global society” (Hodge), both because the workforce needs them (employers “want clear communicators who are strong critical thinkers and who can solve real-world problems in an ethical way”) and because the polity needs “educated, engaged citizens who are able to make choices for themselves, their families, their communities, and their country,” as Charles Kolb says.
Where better to develop and practice that sense of responsible agency, which ideally students would have been growing into since kindergarten, than in college? It seems to me that one of the key questions we should be asking at the level of the disciplines, where Pat Hutchings says our most engaged assessment work is likely to take place, is how each area of study disciplines the minds of its students in preparation for future self-directed learning, since—given a world, as Madeleine Green describes it, in which they will be competing and cooperating with people from across the globe—they will need to learn continuously for the rest of their lives.
Anya Kamenetz makes the most radical case for self-directed learning in her article on prior learning assessment. For those who have learned how to learn—whether in college, in the workforce, or elsewhere—independent certification of that learning can help solve the credentialing problem that the large numbers of college dropouts have.
And it can help with the problem of portability. Students are on the move, she and Green both point out, and they take their learning with them. To the degree that they are agents of their own learning, they and not the institution that “gives” them their education should be the focus of skills and knowledge assessments.
Indeed as Kolb says, quoting Disrupting College,
degrees are a proxy for skill attainment, but they are far from a perfect one, as seen in the amount of retraining that employers do as well as the current unemployment figures. Real outcomes and real mastery—as often shown in work portfolios for example—are more important.
In the future the credentialing process may be bypassed altogether as employers trust in their own capacities to judge their prospective employees' work independently, as evidently many IT firms do today. I'm not completely comfortable with giving college credit for coffee roasting or doll collecting, both of which Kamenetz mentions, but there may be employers for whom those skills are pertinent.
Loss of control over the credentialing function—say, if students took their learning portfolios directly to employers rather than to colleges and universities—would be a real game-changer for higher education. If the marketplace functions at all efficiently, we have to be better than other learning venues at helping students develop core intellectual skills and knowledge that are widely valued in order to be the credentialers of choice.
Portability and affordability are conjoined, of course. Students who learn while engaged in other tasks, especially those that pay, are not only avoiding the direct costs of college but opportunity costs as well. If they could take with them not only academic credits earned elsewhere but credit for the skills and knowledge they have demonstrably gained, the transfer function would also be less wasteful and hence less expensive.
The need to make higher education more affordable suggests that we need to move to forms of teaching, as they have at Miami University, where faculty time is more effectively deployed and student time is used for active engagement with the subject. In this model, students often teach each other. I remember that years ago, a Nobel laureate who was giving a talk at the University of Virginia said that the most under-utilized teaching resource at universities was students; that is a lesson we are only now taking to heart.
And cost-effective teaching is knowledge based, more communal, and subject to investigation. Faculty teams at Miami learn about teaching and learning together, try out models, assess their results, and adopt the most promising ones. At Kaplan, that assessment is taken down to the course level, where communal expectations for learning reign and what Gerald Graff calls “courseocentrism”—where the course stands in isolated splendor and faculty don't cooperate or communicate—has been overcome.
Hutchings' encouragement of assessment at the level of the discipline is based on the premise that the most natural core community for faculty is a disciplinary one, where they share a language, investigative techniques, and a sense of what constitutes appropriate and adequate evidence. But opening that community to people with other forms of knowledge (at Miami University, those with expertise “in curriculum design, assessment, instructional technology, and student writing”) has proven fruitful as the scholarship of teaching and learning has developed.
A better and more cost-effective education is likely to be appealing because students seem to want to be the authors of their own lives—or at least at their best, they do. That is evident in everything the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders say, but I also see it in the students who write the Listening to Students (L2S) pieces in Change.
Maggie Castor, in this issue, has that kind of desire: She asked that in her bio, “there be more about me than my status at Elon. I resist shaping my identity as revolving around being an Elon student or representative. Something about being an activist in the Greensboro area would be great.” And listen to what Lillian Xie, the high school student who wrote the L2S for the May/June 2011 issue, said about what she wants from college:
I don't think four years at any level of higher education could teach everything about any single subject, but I want my own four years in college to guide me through some of that knowledge and show me how to access and analyze more. … I expect to be learning by doing. In college, I want to have experiences where the boundary line between lectures and real-world situations is blurred.
Giving Maggie Castor and Lillian Xie what they want calls on us to change, to be learners ourselves—a topic that Marcia Baxter-Magolda will explore in a future issue of Change. But that's what we're good at, right?
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