Anya Kamenetz opens the NITLE Thought Leader Series

Anya Kamenetz and participants

How is liberal education being impacted by technological, social, and economic changes?  Anya Kamenetz explored this topic with dozens of campus representatives this afternoon during the first offering of our NITLE Thought Leaders Seminar series.

Here are notes on that nearly two hours of discussion.  This is a draft, so please add your corrections, additions, and reflections in the comments.

Anya Kamenetz, the well-known author of Generation Debt (2006) and DiYU (2010) began her presentation by identifying herself as a member of generation Y, and hence being able to claim a student’s perspective.  She then sketched out a view of higher education, noting the campus’ historical role as a “cathedral of rationality”, the  importance of face-to-face learning, and the salience of Clark Kerr’s mass university model.

DIYU, Kamenetz' most recent book on education

That model is now at a crisis point, with higher education increasingly unable to provide access, just as demand booms in a massive recession.  Cost is a key reason, as tuition races beyond inflation.  Historically successful college massification boosted a cost-demand growth spiral, which is now apparently out of control.  Those higher costs have been increasingly shifted to students, whose ability to bear them has declined.  Campuses are also unable to significantly cut salary costs, as per Baumol’s disease: faculty members are needed to teach, and cannot be “improved” by efficiency strategies, just as no amount of efficiency can remove the necessity of having musicians play instruments for a string quartet.  On top of these problems are mounting concerns about teaching efficacy and accountability, most recently signaled by the publication of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, University of Chicago Press,. 2011), which argued that a key student population is not learning for a significant period.  Moreover, computing power is generally not being used as integral part of education.

How can we turn this around?

Within the liberal arts world, we experience both some resistance to change, and also the awareness of great opportunities.  Kamenetz cited Cathy Davidson and HASTAC as one source for understanding the transformation in how we learn which is already going on, along with Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind (2005) for new ways of thinking about how we learn.

Kamenetz broke down the world of change into three areas.

1. Content: the world of digital, especially open content is rich and continuing to grow.  MIT’s OpenCoursewWare (OCW), TED Talks, open textbooks, Flat World Knowledge were mentioned, along with some new federal funding support.
2. 

   Mozilla Drumbeat, one collaborative learning exemplar

   Socialization: how we learn and the relationships we form in schools.  Now is the time for personal learning environments (PLE), or peer learning, since we learn in the center of networks: people, mentors, resources.  For example, the  Toaster Project.  Formal and informal networks are already in use in daily life; our students are growing up with them.  Another example: Reenacting history, a Greek history role playing exercise, where within an “Online Symposium” students policed each other for historical correctness.  Another example: P2PU’s “School of Webcraft“, done with the Mozilla Foundation.

3. Accreditation: “most development is in this area”.  More institutions may specialize in assessment.  More practices to assign credit for prior learning, self-learning, learning with peers should surface.  An example of a company working in this space: Straighterline.  New forms of assessment should grow: reputation-based, portfolio-based.  When enhanced by social media, these should increase affordable access.  Additionally, we should see more data-driven career planning.

School of Webcraft, an example of collaborative learning

Overall, Kamenetz concluded, we could consider the example of the Protestant Reformation, which added new paths towards truth in Europe.  Meanwhile Catholicism stil exists, as should traditional education.

A question and answer period followed, lasting nearly one hour.

Q: What about the global impact of peer-to-peer learning?
A: OpenCourseWare is international.  China, India, Columbia are interested.  Lots of new universities in the Middle East.  One issue: how to handle tech transfer without being colonialist?  Another issue: how to get access around the world?  Internet cafes play a key role, as does formatting text for appropriate devices, i.e., University of the People’s making pdf a baseline.

Q: Does the Academically Adrift argument apply to liberal arts campuses, since we are all about doing the things that book’s authors see as lacking in academia?
A: There is still resistance to assessment and data.  Students will demand more of this, over time.

Q: What about two problems with unbundling courses: first, some knowledge paths are built on scaffolding, which requires a recognizable sequence of units, from study abroad programs to advanced sciences.  Second, graduate programs design admissions and curricula based on undergraduate class series.  How can grad schools deal with this unbundling?
A: The key is modularity.  We already build tests into some curricula, where how you learned the subject doesn’t matter.  Additionally, we need to expand transfer capacity.

Q: (One dean asks) How can we expand on credentials and assessment?  We already do portfolio assessment.
A: Work with the ultimate audience, especially employers, who want to help with this.  For example, the Western Governors University (WGU) meets with panels of companies .  Fine arts can bypass formal certification by using portfolios of work.  Blogs have served as portfolios for journalism.  In the sciences, make greater use of publications.  Kamenetz notes that the number of jobs accepting non-diploma qualifications is growing.

Q: Back to the international level – how should our schools work with technology on the world stage?
A: The open source movement can be worked with, and learned from, on this score.  Example: Mozilla.  We should also grow international student collaboration.  Example: OpenStudy, running on MIT’s OCW.

Q: (One dean asks) How do we change our mission, before making investments?
A: Emphasize unique campuses, rather than educational sectors.

Q: (One librarian) How to boost faculty rewards for open content?
A: Historically, schools induced such work with cash.  Now some funders stipulate open content.  Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, open content can have a powerful effect on reputation, a crucial part of academic professional life.

Q: What about your experience with the Mozilla Foundation?
A: It’s a case of the kinds of networked learning Anya described.  She became involved through P2PU, via a personal connection.  Serendipity brought Anya to Barcelona.  As a nonprofit,  and to fight for the open Web, Mozilla needed to expand their network.  Educators are a great community for these needs.  Now a series of events have begun, such as one hosted by an academic collaborator.

HASTAC meets Mozilla

Mozilla is all about a combination of discussion and collaborative working.  Example: the classroom attention barometer.

Q: What do you make of the current political landscape for higher education funding, at both state and federal levels? (questioner references DIYU chapter 3)
A: Austerity can be a spur for innovation.  Also, costcutting curves are out there, a la solar power R+D and Moore’s law.  Faculty can also increase sharing course materials across semesters and across schools in the same sector.
Q: Following up: won’t that lead to dilution of campus identity?
A: The world is all about this kind of inter-silo mixing and interconnection, now.  Examples of consumer brands, where franchises and local enterprises coexist and overlap.

Q: Adjunct faculty already do a huge amount of teaching in the US.  Do you see adjuncts becoming the norm for college teaching?
A: That is a trend which predates the tech revolution.  It can be considered a neoliberal argument.  David Autor (MIT) a trend of casualizing or automate low-end jobs (clerks, not managers), which could prove true of the economy as a whole.  Will it reshape academia? Kamenetz demurs from predicting that.  Faculty maybe appear in the roles of student learning coaches, mentors, or guides, helping learners with metacognition as well as subject matter.

Q: You and most of us probably agree that college should be seen as a public good, adding value to American life.  Do you think the majority of Americans agree with you, and how is that changing?
A: Kamenetz cites traditional American skepticism.  She adds: a mistake began in the 1930s, when academia was presented as the path to the American Dream.  People agreed with this, and still see it as true.  But now it’s a casualty of the economic crisis.
Q: Followup: what about the 1960s and 70s, when college was also viewed as a time for self-discovery?
A: The Boomer era was an aberration, based on generational history: a fine economy, a strong sense of optimism.  But our optimism has fallen on hard times, since.

Q: Do you think there’s a higher ed bubble?  (Questioner cites DIYU on comparing the student loan process to the Great-Recession-causing mortgage and CDO bubble (66)).
A: Kamenetz draws attention to the difference between research and teaching, suggesting varying impacts on those two aspects of academia.  Additionally, all kinds of social welfare institutions are all under siege.  Education ould get smaller, could get privatized, swallowed by larger organizations.  She doesn’t think schools will perish, but are organizing into something else.

Q: (A dean’s question) Campuses have gone through historical changes before now, where experiential learning was gradually acculturated: service learning, study abroad, internships.  Conferring of academic credit w/o students sitting in classroom.  Students come to campus to grow up – and maybe they can do it better themselves.
So how do we give students an edge?

Q: (Another dean’s observation) We’re like the Galapagos turtle arriving on the global beach.   We need to sell ourselves, and our intangibles, better.  How do we take residential campuses into a world shifting its balance of attention away from the physical, and more into the virtual?
A: Kamenetz offers another metaphor, that of cities, which outlast nations and empires.  Something to shoot for?  We’re figuring it out now.  “Please figure it out now!”

Slides for Anya Kamenetz’ presentation can be downloaded from  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/758143/DIYUNITLEpptx.pdf.

(HASTAC and Drumbeat images via HASTAC on Flickr; videoconference screenshot by Eric Harper)