Friday, March 30, 2012

Open Learning Environments

The Learning Environments must also be open in that it creates additional opportunities. The Open Learning Environment is not the result from an Open University; rather, the creation of open learning environments is becoming more common allowing traditional institutions to become more open and thus more competitive with open institutions. Increasingly, technologies are replacing traditional courses and calling into question the entire business model of higher education. All of this is reflected by Randy Bass, Executive Director of Georgetown University's Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, who cites data from the National Survey of Student Engagement which notes that “much of what students rate as the most valuable part of their learning experience at college these days takes place outside the traditional classroom” (Young 2011).

The movement into openness in Higher Education is not simply an issue of classrooms; it is also a matter of the organizational structure of the organization. Frank Ostroff (1999) notes the danger of vertical organizations which Higher Ed institutions have in fact become. Often, the joining point of the individual colleges occurs at the level of the Provost. As is obvious, this is not simply the teaching aspect, but every functional level of the institution including research. Thorp and Goldstein (2010) advocate for the need for “open architecture,” arguing that in current higher educational research labs, it has led to a more interdisciplinary environment, and researchers have benefitted from the synergy of crossing disciplinary lines. They note that traditional disciplinary structures in higher education are not useful for attacking big problems due to their narrowness of focus [see INNOVATION and INTERDISCIPLINARY].

For an open university making extensive use of distance education (like SUNY—Empire State College), the means of delivery and design of online learning environment are critical. The traditional LMS (Learning Management Systems) and their associated course packs and externally provided content hyper-structure the course, forcing the students out of the environment, and failing to address long term needs and connections [see LIFELONG LEARNING]. David Wiley (2010) makes a clear parallel between LMSs and current online practices as they “take the approach of hiding educational materials behind passwords and regularly deleting all student contributed course content at the end of the term. If Facebook worked like Blackboard, every fifteen weeks it would delete all your friends, delete all your photographs, and unsubscribe you from all your groups. The conceal-restrict-withhold-delete strategy is not an effective way to build a thriving learning community.”

The nature of most LMSs implies that the value of the course is on the content materials with the social networking and assessment emerging from it—it is based on factual knowledge as opposed to skill sets or abilities[1]. The value of a course is not in the content—if it was, students would simply but the text at the beginning of the term and read it—it would be a much better bargain for them and they would still get content. Students pay tuition to interact with a faculty member. They want the best minds in the business to work with them. That is what the course needs to be built around.

MOOCs are a great example of an Open Learning Environment. A participant gets the best of all form a huge “crowd.” Those who want to pursue the assessment and engage in a deeper participation have the ability to—the open learning environment allows each individual to meet their own learning goals.

Open Learning Environments do not occur simply online, but can be developed in physical spaces as well. For that to happen, the classroom (which is itself a negotiable term) is the starting point of learning, not the only place. The walls of a classroom should exist only to keep out inclement weather, they should not be there to keep out other learning, and not just formalized learning. If a student is looking up what’s being discussed on Google that’s great—don’t take away their lap top to listen to you. If they have out their cell phone and texting, they could be fact checking. If they’re chatting with friends, don’t force them to put it away, make the class interesting enough for them to listen to you instead of chatting. We have all sat in committee and other meetings in Higher Education meeting, bored to tears, wondering why we are there, wishing we could be elsewhere. In those instances, it is not because the topic is irrelevant or insignificant, but the nature of discussion or the presentation is framed to exclude our learning and attention styles. If we experience that in our jobs, how do you think that student feels in the classroom. Give them something worth tweeting!

The classroom itself is an endangered idea. In her powerful work Now You See It, Cathy Davidson notes that if Ichabod Crane were to return today, with the exception of the computer in the corner, he would be perfectly at home in our contemporary classrooms (ok, personally, I think he’d have a hard time with the fashion, but that’s another less relevant issue). A classroom does not need to be a lecture hall or room set up with all chairs facing forward (allowing chairs to be arranged to discuss in groups doesn’t quite cut it either). Ask yourself what the focus of the student’s attention is meant to be in that room. Is the room designed so their attention is on a person; is a person the only thing a person can learn from? More importantly, nothing says that the classroom has to be in a campus building modeled on the structure of Bell Labs during World War II. There are many (if not most) coffee shops in the US that are better designed as learning environments than are our classrooms (just as most video games are better designed as learning environments than are our online courses). Students now come equipped with learning devices (the argument that students can’t learn from them comes from people who have yet to learn how to use them themselves[2]) which need to be exploited—we don’t get a donkey to pull a car.

So what does it mean to break down the walls? It is not simply about giving formal homework. Why not inspire students to leave the classroom and learn. Not learning under directions, but discovering what they need to learn and how to learn it. When we’re teaching composition courses, realize that most of the writing and communication that a student will do in their life time will not be based on an assigned topic with a specified mode, but the discovery of the what and the how is as important as the content itself. Creating a formalized assignment robs the student of the opportunity to develop skills in critical parts of what they should be learning as well as reduces their freedom to learn.

This is a call to guerilla teaching! Create learning activities that pervade student’s lives. Think about podcasts that students can listen to in the gym. Think about virtual office hours where students can reach you in your living room and model the ideal that the learning experience should transcend formalized learning time. There are many brilliant and extremely successful means to create learning opportunities. Walls do not frame my life; why should they frame my life as a learner.



[1] There is a danger in factual knowledge versus ability. The structural quantitative measure is easier to rationalize and saves us time form explaining; however, does it always measure the true learning outcomes. If we require someone to take a course in ethics, it is (hopefully) our intent that a student learns and applies the principles to their life to make them a more ethical individual. However, it is perfectly possible to be sub par on one’s ethics, never used or plan to use them, and still get a perfect test on an ethics course. We need to look at learning environments to assess beyond the content.

[2] I believe it was Edmund Wilson who said that “those who dislike the classics merely admit their lack of familiarity with the classics.” The parallel of rejecting computers for learning reminds one of Plato’s rejection of writing, or the wonderful scene at the beginning of Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame where it is explained that higher education is being destroyed by printed books.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Open Communication (and Open Governance)

Eric Anctil (2008), quotes the Kellogg Commission on the importance of open communication in the viability of the future of higher education institutions: “Strong institutional identification—reinforced by clear and decisive leadership, effective external relations, and a rich campus community—extends beyond the organization and positively affects larger communities of influence. Further, strong institutional identification extends the organization beyond being a near inscrutable entity governed by its own mysterious sense of self.” (Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Institutions 1999 p.200). Critical to this openness is a larger two way dialogue with its community. This should reinforce the college’s Academic Plan which in turn should be the essence of what is communicated in the marketing plan (Anctil 2008).

Likewise, the Open University must also have a system of Open Governance—in other words the governance bodies and administration work together in a positive trustful relationship which is aimed towards meeting the goals of the institution and the needs of its learners. Each should work towards establishing systems which are designed to support and further efforts as opposed to approval systems. A body which has only approval function is simply an obstruction. Likewise a system which works inversely from faculty expertise is also destructive. Governance and administration share the responsibility of helping individual faculty to thrive. When systems are designed in opposition and to establish a culture of “checks and balances,” both governance and administration implement and negotiate structures and practices which create obstacles to ‘impede’ the opposition; however, in doing so, they also create obstacles for themselves.

As Ronald Ehrenberg (2000) notes, shared governance as we currently practice it not only slows down the development and evolution of the college (the antithesis of agility), but the delays end up costing the institution revenue. Unfortunately, at the end of the line, it is the students who end up paying in the form of higher tuition. Thus, our practice of shared governance actually hurts students when a system of open governance would actually result in a benefit to students. Imagine a program which requires multiple layers of approval. A faculty design committee works on its own. It then walks it through the process, each body getting larger in scope. Suddenly, it gets to one level where a substantive change needs to be made. As it is substantive, it must now return to the beginning of the process which results in missing the target for a given academic year. A delay which pushes the launching of the program off by a year takes away one year of revenues which the institution could use to relieve budgetary pressures to help keep tuition lower (say nothing of endangering a curriculum and faculty work in making it a year older). As most institutions also use enrollments to determine faculty lines, it actually has the effect of limiting the hiring of new faculty. In an open governance system, each level would contribute to better the program through its specific function (which could be run synchronously). Imagine the same program if there were a development committee which could help shape the curriculum at the starting point; a resource committee which helped to develop the business model for the programs; a staffing committee which could help forecast the needs; etc. Now imagine that these committees were collaborative and respected one another so that they could fit their work together through a design committee as opposed to a development team having to create the entirety and walk it through the process. Rather than a hierarchical cone of approval, where the input voice gets larger, invert the practice to a pyramid where multiple individuals have a voice at the outset with the process getting narrower as it moves forward.

One of the major ways that illustrates this is the processes used on many campuses for new programs. The ideal system would be a pyramid where, as the program moves through the system, the expertise becomes more focused and the group becomes smaller. The mundane and process issues should be handled early on establishing the framework within which the academic system can be developed. In most instances, however, the system is shaped like a cone wherein the idea moves up into areas with less and less knowledge of the academics and discipline, but with more voices and possible sources of objection. Since the system moves away from expertise, it becomes clear that it is strictly an approval, or sometimes territorial, process as opposed to a support process to help the faculty who are developing the program.

There is also a great (and wonderful) opportunity to be had in modifying the shape and nature of the university, and that is in the opportunity to reshape knowledge itself. That reshaping can occur both in the definition and recognition of disciplines as well as in the means of conveyance, method, etc. As Roland Barthes (1986) notes: “the institution directly determines the nature of human knowledge, imposing its mode of division and of classification, just as language, by its ‘obligatory rubrics’ (and not only its exclusions), compels us to think in a certain way.” While we may think there is a certain stability; it can also be assumed that those who held the trivium and quadrivium dear felt the same.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Open Education Week

And now for a break from the rants so far...

On Wednesday, March 7, SUNY--ESC celebrated with an event called O.P.E.N. (OPEN Projects Enriching New york). For this event, we had presenters and physical audiences in Empire State College centers in Manhattan, Saratoga, Syracuse and Buffalo, connected via teleconference. The sessions were streamed online with a Twitter backchannel.

Carla Casilli, the Open Badges Project Lead for the Mozilla Foundation delivered the keynote. Donna Mahar, ESC Teacher Education Faculty member, presented our Virtual Teaching Incubator; Amy McQuigge, Coordinator for Student and Academic Services of the School for Graduate Studies, presented on our Badging initiative as it relates to the Teaching Incubator; and the final presentation was on our Virtual Business Incubator, presented by Dr. Nick Boccolucci, Incubator Coordinator, and Dr. Joseph Angiello, Coordinator of the Community and Economic Development Program.

For those who were not able to attend, a recording is available at either:


or

I had the opportunity to present the opening welcome, and in doing so, I came back to the beginning of this blog and began to read and realized how quickly the field of openness, and what we learn from one another moves at hyperbolic speeds.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Open University

Earlier in this essay I referenced Peter Abelard and now I must skirt along the edges of a philosophical argument between nominalism, conceptualism, and realism as they apply to an Open University. The question then is: does the term “open university” represent a singular specific idea? Or does it perhaps exist as a category describable by the sum characteristics of those institutions which identify themselves as such?

I would argue for the latter for a number of reasons. First, part of an Open University is the flexibility and agility to respond quickly to needs. Such an institution cannot be framed in a box—a truly out of the box institution is one free to move, not one which is simply in a different box. Second, just as I argued above for a diversity of intellectual ideas, there must also be a diversity of institutions and institutional cultures. A university should be the sum total of its community, their knowledge, and the ideas they develop. As there are open universities around the world, all serving the nation and culture in which they exist, there must, of course, be differences.

Universities were founded as scholars did not wish to be autonomous business units—and they were business units charging fees to learners. They retained their idea of being autonomous intellectual and academic units while the institution administered the finance, logistics, etc. The scholar was then free to focus specifically on their scholarship. In a networked world that is no longer true; there are multiple business models available for learning as a business—for profit universities represent only the tip of the ice-berg of what is possible. Just as Sun Microsystems once said that the value is not in the computer but in the network, the same is true of faculty today. The strength is in shared resources and their network. It is only by developing these value propositions that an institution can remain financially viable. The challenge in Higher Education has been to determine what business we are in, and how do we effectively perform in that area (Clougherty 2008).

When those early universities were first founded, as with today’s MBA programs that scholars in some disciplines turn their noses up at, the original idea of the humanities was as professional training—one needed to take minor orders to secure work as a clerk. In short, for a well-paying job, that degree was essential. Just as universities themselves have wandered away from Abelard's original definition and conception, we have lost sight of the professional need universities were ultimately designed to fulfill. In the United States the origin of the R-1 (a.k.a., “Land Grant” universities) comes from the Morrill Act which in itself focused on professional degrees. According to the specification of the act, each state should found “at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life” (7 U.S.C. § 304). Ironically, state universities were founded as institutions designed to teach in practical arts. They have, however, morphed into institutions committed to research. That is not bad, quite the contrary, the benefits are innumerable. It does, however, leave vacant the mission for which these institutions were first designed to fulfill. For that reason the graduate school of an Open University, in fulfilling professional needs as a teaching institution, not only fulfills the need, but frees up other institutions (and in a system like SUNY, the other institutions within the system) to fulfill that vital and critical research agenda. Terry Anderson (2010) said it best when he wrote: “Organizational structures should help us to surf ‘at the edge of chaos,’ not function to eliminate or constrain the creative potential of actors engaged at this juncture.” I am not meaning to imply that an open university does not perform research—quite the contrary; however, it involves different forms of research (such as action research) and methodologies (such as the authoring of case studies).

Likewise, moving beyond the graduate level research role into the graduate level teaching responsibilities, the open university differs from the traditional in the types of degrees it offers as well as the nature of its capstone projects. In terms of the nature of degrees, the graduate school of a traditional institution focuses on first graduate degrees for individuals looking to pursue strongly disciplinary careers at the entry point of a first career—as such it is responsible for providing many basic academic, life/maturity skills, etc. The graduate school of an open university, on the other hand focuses on second degrees—those that are achieved after one has entered into a career—this degree can be used either for advancement within the existing career, broadening of an existing career, or for career change. In each instance, the graduate school of an open university designs programs with this realization. That means that all programs assume that an individual comes equipped with basic skill sets as well as specific professional experience outside of a strictly academic environment which can be applied to an academic setting.

There are examples of each at SUNY--Empire State College. The MBA program is designed for individuals looking for professional advancement. One of the entry requirements/ recommendations, is that students arrive with 3-5 years of management experience (the reality, however, appears to be that the average student arrives with 8-10 years of experience). The students are expected to bring their experience and share it with their fellow students. The graduate experience becomes one where an individual’s experience becomes transformed by learning about what they have learned and learned how to take that experience and knowledge to the next level. In the field of degrees to broaden a career, our Policy programs often bring in students involved in specific areas of social issues who seek to expand their skill set into policy implementation. In this case, as opposed to managing a program, they can now take new policy—be it new requirements or legislation or grant criteria—and be able to apply that in their work environment. In that way, their comprehension has not taken them deeper into what they do, but has expanded what they can do within that field-in this instance for individuals who have be trained in other fields who need this realm of their professional career developed. Finally, our MAT program is designed for career changers who it is assumed have a given specialization (in this instance their content field) and as a cohort, they need to develop a secondary skill set—in this instance, teaching skills at a level sufficient to become certified teachers. Each of our new degrees and certificates falls into one of these areas.

In the capstone of a graduate degree from an open university, as the degrees are professionally focused, the research based thesis does not bring the appropriate experience, both as the research focus is outside the dimension of the professional degree. Second, the nature of such, as they are currently practiced, is based upon values of an open university discussed above (see OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESCOURCES, OPEN ASSETS, and OPEN SCIENCE). Likewise, in an open university, the assessment criteria and expectations must be clear to the student at entry—i.e, to borrow a phrase from Barbara Lovitts (2007), on capstone experiences, graduate schools, in approaching capstone experiences, need to “make the implicit explicit.”[1]

The capstone for graduate degrees in an open university can fuse with the commitment to Open Educational Resources as the capstone should meet the criteria of Open Educational Resources, Open Assets, and Open Science. While this is theoretical in that the author knows of no institution currently practicing such in a graduate education, the capstone experience could involve a three step process: to embody open science, the development and study notes (while research fits best here, it is being avoided to minimize confusion) could be posted in a blog or wiki; the professional experience would be posted as a case study for study by others and, therefore, an open educational resources; finally, the student could write a reflection of the experience of developing the project which could become an open asset. In short, the advancement of the graduate school as reflected in its repository of open materials would be enhanced by its student, and true to the practice of adult learning, learners become participants in a learning community and are able to learn from one another.

While some may believe that the distance nature of an open university somehow compromises it, when, in fact, it simply makes it more agile and able to evolve and change more quickly. As Porter, Blythe, Grabill, and Miles (2000) note, universities are “rhetorically constructed human designs (whose power is reinforced by buildings laws, traditions, and knowledge-making practices) and so are changeable.” An open university recognizes itself for what it is—a discourse community focused on learning—it does not hide its identity in the structure of buildings—which, as noted, are there to reinforce power as opposed to serving as part of the discourse, and the use of open learning, they alter the knowledge-making practices.

While a graduate school in an open university not only can be, but must be, selective, the current wall of in and out is both artificial and unethical. Because someone is not fully admitted to the degree and assessment process (or chooses not to be because they have other needs) does not mean that they should be fully shut out from a university and its benefits; as Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder (2002) note: “Rather than force participation, successful communities ‘build benches’ for those on the sidelines.” Everyone should have access to the content and knowledge generated by the university. In a not-so-modest proposal, I would argue that given the multiple functions of a university (content creation and delivery, communication and interaction, assessment, and certification), that individuals should be able to register and participate at the level of their needs.

Perhaps more importantly, the larger role which students are allowed, and the more they are treated as valuable resources, the more they will respond by becoming valuable resources. (This runs parallel to testers in a Linux environment who serve the dual role of tester and developer ((Eric Ray Stevens Cathedral and Bazaar)).)



[1] While Lovitts' book focuses specifically on dissertations, the same critique and actions must be applied to the traditional research based thesis.