Virginia S. Lee

Last week I was fortunate to attend the 50^th anniversary celebration of the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) at the University of Michigan.  CRLT, the oldest and largest teaching and learning center in the United States, works with faculty, graduate students, staff and administrators at the University to improve student learning on its campus.

In attendance as special guests were members of the Ivy Plus Consortium on Teaching and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) Teaching Center Directors Group, who had gathered the previous day for their annual meeting, hosted also by CRLT. Not surprisingly, given the institutions represented there including Harvard, Yale, MIT, University of Chicago, Princeton, Stanford, Brown, University of Pennsylvania and Northwestern, there was quite a buzz about recent announcements concerning massive open online courses (MOOCs). Earlier that week Harvard and MIT had announced with much fanfare the formation of edX, a joint venture to offer MOOCs, and at about the same time, another set of universities had announced the formation of Coursera with a similar mission. Commentators on both sides of the aisle have been weighing in on the implications of these announcements including David Brooks in his May 3 Campus Tsunami column.

By and large the buzz among my Ivy Plus and CIC colleagues was overwhelmingly positive. For the first time in a long time, teaching and learning had the spotlight at the nation’s premiere universities. The sheer scale afforded by MOOCs—the possibility of reaching 100,000 plus students simultaneously—instantly made teaching high-stakes and very public suggesting a scope of influence unimaginable previously.  And certain features of the learning platform itself allowed heightened levels of faculty-student engagement,  personalization of the learning experience, ongoing assessment of student learning, and unparalleled access to data on how student learn—all qualities of the learning environment that my colleagues and I have been advocating for years.  In fact, these desirable features of the learning environment have been practiced in pockets of many colleges and universities for years and are widespread in institutions such as Alverno College, although on a smaller scale.

Virtually everyone acknowledges that it’s hard to predict where all of this is going and what it augurs for traditional brick-and-mortar institutions.  Some predict Armageddon, while others feel that traditional and online learning environments will coexist amicably for many years to come, each being attractive to different segments of the college bound population.

However things shake out, two things seem quite clear to me:

1. Earlier this week on The Story hosted by Dick Gordon on NPR in North Carolina, Gordon interviewed Sebastian Thrun, the former Stanford professor, whose Artificial Intelligence MOOC has spawned (arguably) all the furor. He predicted that the notion of the degree as representing the recognition of successful dedicated study over a four- year period is inherently flawed, particularly in our rapidly changing world. Instead he predicts learning will be life long (as it is already for some) and flow in parallel with work, marked perhaps by certificates of one sort or another. In fact, many corporations, even today, seem relatively indifferent to the difference between degrees and certificates as long as competence is evident.
2. I think we will move ever further away from accumulation of credit hours as demonstration of learning to ongoing assessment of competence.  I think the explosion of learning opportunities will put an increasing onus on the learner to make sense of and document his or her own learning perhaps using a portfolio approach since coherence will reside less in the curriculum (if it ever did) and more in learners’ own capacities for making meaning of their experience in their unfolding lives.  The fact that portfolios are receiving more attention, coterminous with the rise of MOOCs, is no accident, I think.  I also think it’s pretty clear that all of these trends will increase the importance and centrality of advising and mentoring in both undergraduate and graduate programs as a way to help individual students/learners choose appropriate learning experiences and then make sense of them in an integrated way in the context of their own lives.

For years I have admired the work of two pioneers of educational development in higher education, Nancy Chism and Devorah Lieberman. Last week I was fortunate to participate in a webinar cosponsored by Wiley/Jossey-Bass and the POD Network with Nancy and Devorah as the featured presenters.

Titled Getting to the Table: How Faculty Developers Can Become Key Players in Institutional Change, the webinar expanded on Nancy and Devorah’s chapters in Connie Schroeder’s Coming in from the Margins: Faculty Development’s Emerging Organizational Development Role in Institutional Change (2011; Stylus) with the wonderful addition of their personal reflections on long careers in educational development. The field of educational (or faculty) development is relatively new so it is still possible for a single person’s career to span the major developments in the profession to date. The careers of both women have evolved from early work as a faculty member and instructional developer to higher administration.

In brief, Nancy Chism is Professor Emerita of Higher Education and Student Affairs at the Indiana University School of Education, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). From 1999 to 2006, she was Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Associate Dean of the Faculties, IUPUI. She is a Former President of the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education. Previously she served as Director of Faculty and TA Development at The Ohio State University. She has received numerous awards and published widely on professional and organizational development and college teaching and learning.  She remains active in international educational development, including recent projects with the Commission on Higher Education in Thailand, Moi University in Kenya, and Singapore Management University. She served as a Fulbright Scholar in Thailand in 2008.

Devorah Lieberman became the 18th President of the University of La Verne when she officially took office on July 1, 2011. Before coming to La Verne, she served nearly eight years as provost and vice president for Academic Affairs at Wagner College (N.Y.). Prior to that, she spent more than 16 years at Portland State University in Oregon as a faculty member, teaching center director, and finally Vice Provost and special assistant to the President with educational development a major part of her portfolio. Her list of national involvement in higher education organizations includes, but is not limited to, having served as chair of the American Council on Education (ACE) International Collaborative, her work as an ACE Institute Facilitator, her position as Institutional Representative chair for the New American Colleges & Universities, and being on the advisory board for the National Review Board for Civic Engagement.

Like pioneers in any field, Nancy and Devorah both bring a vision for educational development in higher education that goes beyond the current practice in the field including the following:

• The critical importance of organizational development when much of the work in the field concentrated (and still concentrates) on instructional development with individual faculty members.

• An appropriate balance of research and theory on the one hand and pragmatism on the other hand to guide practice.

• A thorough understanding of organizational resistance in a variety of forms as an obstacle to institutional transformation and the identification and implementation of effective strategies to address it in their institutions.

• The ability to make their own opportunities for themselves and educational development through entrepreneurialism at their institutions, nationally and internationally.

• A conviction that educational development is central to the revitalization of colleges and universities

I feel fortunate to have participated in the webinar, but even more so to have been inspired by the example of these two leaders in the field of educational development.

I am delighted to report that this month Jossey-Bass/Wiley published Inquiry-guided Learning (New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. 129) that I edited. For more information, including selected chapters available for review, please go to http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-111829923X.html.

The volume includes eight case studies of colleges and universities, both U.S. and non-U.S., that have integrated inquiry-guided learning (IGL) throughout their institutions: Texas A & M University, Marymount University, Virginia Wesleyan College, Miami University (Oxford, OH), McMaster University (Canada), University of Sheffield (UK), University of Gloucestershire (UK), and a cross-institutional study from New Zealand. I wrote the introductory chapter, “What is Inquiry-Guided Learning?” and a closing summary chapter that draws comparisons across the eight institutions.

To the best of my knowledge, no other volume 1) addresses implementation of IGL at the institutional level (as opposed to the individual course- or department-level), 2) compares the implementation of inquiry-guided learning across institutions, and 3) compares implementation in both U.S. and non-U.S. institutions, which is unusual regardless of the nature of the reform initiative.

I recommend the volume for institutions that have IGL initiatives in place or that are contemplating such initiatives. More generally, the volume provides useful insights into institution-wide, undergraduate reform regardless of the nature of the initiative. For example, the book will be useful for colleges and universities accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) as they develop their quality enhancement plans (QEPs).

An excellent companion to the New Directions volume is a 2004 publication, Teaching and Learning through Inquiry: A Guidebook for Institutions and Instructors, that I also edited based on the inquiry-guided learning initiative at North Carolina State University , which I led. The volume includes chapter contributions from more than thirty faculty, staff and administrators on the implementation of inquiry-guided learning at the individual course, department and school level. For more information, please go to http://stylus.styluspub.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=76271.

The other night during the intermission of a concert, I got into conversation with a woman sitting next to me. In addition to being an accomplished singer, she was also the member of a department of biology at an undisclosed university. When, at her request, I told her what I did, she asked witheringly whether I helped professors with their presentations, clearly implying that my company was beneath her. When I indicated that there was a little more to it than that and tried to explain, she mumbled something about student engagement, and I slowly drifted away and up the aisle in search of fresh air.

Responses like these are all too common, and every time they occur I remind myself that I really need to come up with an “elevator speech” about educational development, what it entails and why, that’s clever enough to plant a seed of doubt if not a wholesale reversal in cherished, but unexamined belief.  In fact, the view held by nameless-woman-at-concert is exactly analogous to believing the world is flat.  And I mean exactly analogous.

In contrast, the other day a friend and colleague alerted me and others to “an intriguing piece that I find very consistent with – and a very nice addition to – our shared mindset for designing learning environments/programs.”  The piece was a talk with seemingly on-the-spot animation given by Sir Ken Robinson (see http://sirkenrobinson.com/skr/) on changing education paradigms. For both the talk and animation, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&list=FLM_SHxbH3kOpm_HCq-nL8_g&index=11&feature=plpp_video.

In addition to being clever and entertaining, the talk with animation was insightful and, by and large, true in my view. Thinking back to nameless-woman-at-concert, her comment was just the tip of the iceberg: in other words, the utterance emerged from a submerged tangle of assumptions, ideas and concepts whose origins are in the Enlightenment (at least) and the Industrial Revolution, which have now become ossified as institutionalized habits of our colleges, universities and schools even though they are . . . OBSOLETE.  The tangle, which the Robinson talk illustrates (literally) very well, includes, in no particular order, the opposition of abstract and concrete, theoretical and practical, academic and non-academic; learning as measured by credit hours, class periods, and semesters; the role of education as preparing students for future economies and conveying cultural identity in a world of globalization; standardized testing; students assembled according to cohorts of like ages; and the privileging of deductive reasoning.

In summary, teaching-equals-lecturing is obsolete by centuries and should go the way of the world-is-flat sooner rather than later: “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth.”

In my last blog, I promised to spotlight periodically promising reform initiatives on college and university campuses. Today I’d like to describe briefly an initiative begun recently by Lenoir-Rhyne University (LR), just 150 miles west of here in Hickory, NC. Below you’ll find a link to an excellent video on inquiry-guided learning prepared by LR’s marketing department.

The 1998 Boyer Commission report, Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities, heightened interest in inquiry-guided learning (IGL), particularly in research universities.  It argues that inquiry is part of the distinctive ecology of the research university in which faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students should all participate.  But the appeal of inquiry-guided learning has extended beyond research universities to other types of institutions of higher education including small liberal arts colleges.

After extensive research into educational methodologies, Lenoir-Rhyne University, a Methodist-affiliated institution with approximately 2,000 students and 100 full-time faculty, selected inquiry-guided learning as the focus of its quality enhancement plan (QEP), required by SACS, its regional accrediting body. (The QEP is an institution-wide educational reform initiative that builds on a college’s strengths to enhance some aspect of student learning over a 5-10 year period.) They felt that IGL offered a promising set of strategies to increase academic challenge through higher order thinking skills, the ultimate aim of the plan.

In Spring 2011, the University piloted the strategy in seven classes across a range of disciplines. The instructors of the classes formed a professional learning community to share their experiences and learn from one another. The pilot process helped refine student learning outcomes, the overall plan, and the assessment process, and affirmed the University’s choice of IGL. Initially, the University plans to implement IGL in selected First-Year Experience Seminars, then in selected upper-level core courses that are focused on independent research with a culminating capstone project. Faculty development will continue through professional learning communities. Ultimately, the University expects IGL to be embedded to some degree in all programs as it takes the first steps to nurture a culture of inquiry.

To stimulate enthusiasm for inquiry-guided learning among the rest of the faculty and students, the University’s marketing department prepared an excellent video on inquiry-guided learning, which you’ll find here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2OZjSK9-dI. With perspectives offered by the University’s Provost and faculty members and students who participated in the pilot process described above, the video conveys well the excitement for inquiry-guided learning experienced by faculty members and students alike as well as its rationale.