(This is an extended version of some remarks I'll be giving to UVU's University Planning Advisory Committee in its January 23 meeting. With a bit of luck I'll have some time to look at a few of the more prominent innovations being considered in higher ed from this perspective before the meeting and post on that as well.)Too often, especially in such a technology-driven society, we think of the innovative as the opposite of the old-fashioned, the stodgy, the closed-minded. In this binary, innovation is inherently good, and the opponents of innovation are Luddites seeking to hold back progress and seeking stability for its own sake. Often the opponents of the “innovation” are seen as acting out of their own self interest (see the debates on MOOCs in which opponents were characterized as out to protect their own jobs at the expense of students) or out of fear of the new. Implicit in that is a sense of both technological determinism and technological solutionism: technology can do something, therefore it inevitably will do that thing, and that thing will inevitably solve all the problems.
Of course that’s not true often enough to be of any use. Those pursuing innovation have personal interests at stake at least as often as opponents; it is the height of hypocrisy for Coursera, a for-profit company, to accuse those opposed to MOOCs as protecting their own interests. Fear is as prominent on the side of supporters as on that of opponents, as anyone who has heard arguments that we “have to be out in front of change or we’ll be destroyed by it” should recognize. Technologies, as products of social processes that are put to use in other social processes, are no more deterministic than any other social process. And we know of many technologies that make problems worse rather than better. Any of these may be true in any one case, of course. But saying that they are true generally is like saying that flipped coins generally turn up heads.
It seems then, that there are at least three positions: too little innovation to address our problems or take advantage of new opportunities, effective innovation, and too much innovation that pulls us further away from challenges or presents new and more difficult challenges than the ones it solves. We can see effectiveness in innovation, then, as an Aristotelian virtue: a middle point between the extremes of rashness and timidity.
There are a few cases of high-profile innovation in higher education that we can look at to see this sense of innovation at work. The partnership between San Jose State University and Udacity to offer remedial math courses is a great example of rashness in innovation. It looked compelling at the start but was eventually seen as an unmitigated disaster, with exceptionally poor pass and completion rates. The program was suspended last fall, after which Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun called the MOOC “a lousy product” and decided to change his company’s emphasis from higher education to corporate training.
Western Governors University was at one time a leader in competency-based education, but its moment now seems past and its innovations now stagnate, a model of timidity in innovation. The university declined to pursue direct assessment programs even when the federal government created a law intended to allow them to do so. One education executive has said that WGU “has become a poster child for something that actually hasn’t happened” and failed to create a model that can be imitated. Another executive said, “What they’ve done isn’t quite what a lot of us interested in competency-based education thought they had pioneered.” WGU made important steps toward something new but never achieved the breakthrough it sought; it’s strategy is now directed at expanding enrollment through connections with state university systems rather than innovative pedagogies.
Both stand in contrast to the growing success that Southern New Hampshire University’s “College for America” has had with direct-assessment competency-based education. SNHU’s direct-assessment associate’s degree breaks completely with the credit hour and, in fact, with courses entirely, working through 120 competencies instead. The School worked with its accrediting agency, NEASC, and with with the federal Department of Education to create accreditation and financial aid eligibility processes that did not rely on instructional time. The system is being copied in various ways by Northern Arizona University, the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education and Salt Lake Community College’s School of Applied Technology.
One reason I think SNHU got it right and the others didn’t is that for them, the driver was educational need. Competency-based education, whether of the direct-assessment or the credit-hour mapping variety that WGU uses, is a response to the now non-traditional majority in higher education. Students returning to higher education from the workforce have more experience and more time constraints; that presents both a need to finish quickly and an opportunity to skip parts of a program. Their direct-assessment model does exactly that, dispensing with a structure that, while once a form of development of education, has turned into its fetters.
WGU was partially successful for the same reason, it’s target also being returning adults especially in nursing and education. But it is important to note that among of the drivers of their approach was a need to certify teacher’s skills prompted by the requirements of No Child Left Behind and a need to remedy a shortage of registered nurses from among a pool of nursing assistants. That made certification as important as education. Having met that bureaucratic requirement, there is less incentive to continue developing the line of innovation they began. Hence while SNHU was driven by an internal mission, WGU was driven in part by an external strategy: by the how, rather than the what; by the means to the end rather than the end in itself.
Both, though, are radically different from SJSU. The SJSU-Udacity partnership was driven not by educational needs but by technology. Buying in at an upturn of interest in (read: hype about) MOOCs, SJSU accepted Thrun’s vision that MOOCs were the inevitable future of higher education that would simultaneously solve the problems of quality and access: the best professors in the world using technology to reach hundreds of thousands of students at minimal cost. That’s exactly the ideology of determinism and solutionism guiding so many rushes toward the latest technologies. For SJSU, it wasn’t just a matter of focusing on the means rather than on the ends; the means and ends were inverted: educational needs were opportunities to demonstrate that the institution was on the cutting edge of technology. That’s not a condition for success.
A second key condition was is the role of assumptions. WGU allowed the assumptions behind current practices in higher education to go unexamined. The accreditation standards and federal regulations of the time they created their first programs were both built around study time requirements in the form of clock or credit hours. WGU thus created programs that mapped sets of competencies to courses in which the nominal amount of study was consistent with credit-hour standards. In essence, they assumed that the credit hour was a permanent feature of the regulatory environment of higher education, an assumption that may not have been entirely unfounded given hesitation on the part of the US Department of Education.
SNHU showed, however, that this assumption was indeed unfounded. Working with the Department of Education and NEASC the school was able to institute the first true direct assessment degree programs that have no connection to credit hours. That they did at the same time as WGU was purportedly showing that the “Credit Hour (Still) Rules” demonstrates the value of being aware of and challenging the assumptions behind what already exists, being especially careful not to assume that the current circumstances are permanent features of the environment.
Certainly that is not true of SJSU, where the rhetoric of "disruptive innovation" was entirely about challenging the existing assumptions about how higher education must work. But those aren't the only assumptions in play; one does not replace the old assumptions with a new, assumption-free model. SJSU entered the Udacity partnership without examining the assumptions behind Udacity’s courses.
When Thrun argued that the system failed because
"These were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives,” he says. “It's a group for which this medium is not a good fit."many took that as disdain for the "wrong sort" of people taking the class. I think that line of critique is an overstatement, but Thrun’s observation does clearly show that the SJSU-Udacity partnership assumed students much like what Udacity had seen in its non-credit courses. Those students were “roving autodidacts”http://tressiemc.com/2013/05/31/are-all-of-your-education-disruptors-white/ as Tressie McMillan Cottom has called them, people already educated and self-motivated with no need for a coherent degree program. They could take a non-credit class in artificial intelligence, understanding readings and videos without the clarification of discussion and completing assignments without the discipline of a gradebook. They were not, however, the students that SJSU knew it was signing up for the courses. It should not be surprising that a pedagogy that assumed one kind of students failed badly when used to teach very different students.
Ultimately I think this suggests that the language we use for innovation today is often dead wrong. Virtuous innovation is most effectively sought if we understand it as organic rather than technological, as evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Successful innovation is, like all Aristotelian virtues, prudent: it is adapted to the circumstances and flows from them even where it will eventually change them, sometimes dramatically. It builds on and modifies existing structures rather than disrupting them; like friendly fire, "disruptive innovation" isn’t.
Interestingly, there is another virtue that Aristotle held to be a median between rashness and timidity: courage. Higher education needs to be courageous with innovation. Resisting change for fear of the unknown will lead to failure, but so will charging headfirst into change for fear of being left behind or thought reactionary. It is innovation that is neither rash nor timid, that is about our educational missions and not innovation for its own sake, that considers and challenges the assumptions behind both what we are doing now and the innovations we propose that will make our institutions and our students better.
No comments:
Post a Comment