Yearly Archives: 2009

Earlier this month I attended a UNESCO Educational Leaders Forum sponsored by Microsoft. The forum’s theme was thinking through the challenges that lie in the future of higher education and to focus on the vision, barriers, and strategies to address these challenges as they develop.

The vision discussed by a number of panelists (see http://blogs.msdn.com/elf08/default.aspx ) was that we should be using technology enhanced active learning strategies to improve student learning. One of the primary barriers to doing this was a traditional faculty and organizational culture that relies on the lecture method as the primary instructional strategy.

Current approaches to broaden the instructional repertoires of faculty members include faculty workshops, summer leave, and individual consultations, but these approaches work only for those relatively few early adopter faculty members who seek out opportunities to broaden their instructional methods. The major problem is how to affect organizational culture as a whole so that most professors will be receptive to adopting active learning methods and using IT tools to enhance the effectiveness of these methods in their classes.

Addressing the problem of faculty resistance to using IT tools in active learning instructional strategies, James Morrison on July 21, 2008 at 2:36pm

I know I shouldn’t be so hard on my own tribe, but the myopia of academia drives me a little crazy sometimes. This is a fine piece, and it generated some interesting discussions. Clearly these are people who care about teaching and who have a lot of good ideas about how to improve it. Yet it’s a discussion that seems to happen in an ivory tower vacuum.

To make the void visible you just have to consider this idea of a “teacher who resists new technology” that lies at the heart of the debate engendered by the essay. They certainly don’t mean online education faculty, for example. In my experience, too, most community colleges have long since incorporated the computer and the web into their classrooms.

If there’s resistance at Community Colleges, it’s probably due to a lack of funding or a concern with student’s lack of access. They are also not talking about graduate students, or the adjuncts who teach the majority of classes in many subject areas, especially in the first few years of a degree plan. Unless they have a union, they have to take what they get, more or less.

The so-called junior faculty in public universities are likely a mixed bag. Most are perfectly comfortable with these new technologies, but not all of them feel it is appropriate in the classroom. There’s a kind of “reverse chic” phenomena too; it’s the same thing that created College Republican fads several times over the last three decades. Just say no to something.

So what this term means, to a large extent, is tenured and often reactionary faculty. They have the power and status necessary to resist the introduction of new technology into the classroom. Maybe that’s good in some ways: slowing down the system might help ameliorate pedagogical consumerism. Teachers, like everyone else, tend to want every shinny new toy.

In my experience, though, the real problem isn’t with what these faculty do in their classroom. History will just past them by in time. The real problems is that they too often see themselves as romantic refuseniks, last hold outs against the coming robot Apocalypse. Honestly, that’s hardly an exaggeration. That makes discussions of change nearly impossible.

When the Online School for Girls flickers to life this fall on computer screens across the country, students will take part in an unusual experiment that joins two trends: girls-only schooling and online teaching.

A consortium that includes the 108-year-old Holton-Arms School in Bethesda is driving the project, in the belief that girls can benefit from an Internet curriculum tailored just to them.

“There’s been a lot of research done on how girls learn differently with technology than boys,” said Brad Rathgeber, Holton-Arms’s director of technology. “Part of this is a little bit of theory that we’re trying to put in practice to see if it really does play out.”
Md. School Joins Test of Online Courses Tailored to Girls

Md. School Joins Test of Online Courses Tailored to Girls, Michael Birnbaum, Washington Post, Monday, July 6, 2009

Jujutsu, my father once told me, was all about using your opponent’s own weight against him. Or her, in this case. That’s what’s so interesting about these single gender courses. Patriarchal culture pushes everyone into polarized genders, girls on one side, boys on the other. Of course, biological life is much more nuanced than this simple binary implies.

Still, we all grow up inside these oppositions and the oppositions grow up in us, too, helping to shape everything from work to family. The usual counter-impulse (or at least the usual modern liberal impulse) is to try to create little gender utopias, especially in the classroom. If we can only learn to treat everyone equally, then we will achieve equality.

Culture turns out to be just as nuanced as nature, and we seem to have hit some sort of wall. In very specific ways, and despite a lot of effort to fix the problem, girls don’t do as well as boys in certain subjects. (Boys have their own distinct difficulties.) Single sex classrooms have had some success, particularly in science. It’ll be interesting to see if this works online too.

The Education Center recently released a report titled Drowning in Debt: The Emerging Student Loan Crisis. The study found what students already know all too well: college costs are skyrocketing. With tuition rates soaring and financial aid funding not keeping pace, more students are having to take out loans to pay for college.

In fact, about half of all students at four-year public universities are borrowing money for school, even with many colleges receiving government subsidies to control tuition hikes. This at a time when students’ “unmet needs” (which is the difference between the total cost of college and the sum of the expected family contribution) has increased well beyond the maximum amount of money available from subsidized federal loan programs.

To fill this gap, multi-billion dollar private lenders have stepped in, offering high interest rate loans to students. Having little choice, students are taking the bait. During the 2003-04 school year, just 5% of undergraduates borrowed private loans; that number has since tripled to 14%.

Report Finds What Students Already Know- Loan Debt is Out of Control, July 9, 2009

Historically, there were two ways that most Americans moved into the middle class financially (culture is a differant if related issue). You got a good union job, say at a steel plant or an automotive factory, and worked hard. In the mid-twentieth century, too, lots of the children of these union workers took the second path through college and into professional life.

The first stage in the desrtuction of class moblity (the first to be complete) was the destruction of the unionized industries, and the huge shift of Capital overseas. We’ve gone from about 1/3rd or more unionized to 1/10th. (Most of that is in the public sector.) I can tell you from experience that the children of Wal-Mart associates struggle with the idea of college.

We’ve created an entire culture of people who are struggling just above the povery level. Millions of people without healthcare, millions of people underemployed or unemployed, the cost of food and housing continuously rising, and even if you have a job, it’s a dead-end and your wages rarely if ever go up.

It’s the sameenviroment that my father came out of in Mississippi in the 1930s and 40s. Not many people in his family even thought of college. He did, mostly becuase of the G.I. Bill; he pushed his kids to go to college too, and although he wasn’t completey successful, he had the help of grants and reasonbly cheap tuition. No more.

Now the second path into a middle class status is on the way out. As someone once said to me, tuitioin and fees are bascially a form of unregulated regressive taxation. If the legilature won’t fund your programs, you can always raise money by forcing students to pay more for their education. Every four or five years, you have fresh marks.

If you believe in the market, this isn’t a problem; student loans can take up the slack. That means another tax on wages paid out over the course of 20 or 30 years. It’s an worse deal if wages and salaries are stagnant or non-existent. It’s a horrible legacy. New programs might lesson debt, but we need a debt forgiveness program too.