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Innovation in Higher Education - and other blasts from the past
- 1. Innovation in Higher Education And other blasts from the past Tannis Morgan, JIBC @tanbob
- 2. Exploring our past, present and future
- 3. The Then and Now Game
- 4. Things are changing we are told, and higher education must innovate to keep up with, stay ahead of, adapt to, or cope with the changing world around it.” “A seemingly indispensible ingredient of modern commentary upon higher education is a concern for innovation…
- 6. “After centuries of chalk and talk, universities are finding themselves at the centre of a technological revolution”
- 7. “The development of new technology for education raises the question of control. Large corporations have entered the education field"
- 8. "Institutions are like blobs of jello. They absorb attempts to change their shapes"
- 10. “The crisis facing higher education in our nation has been mentioned so often that I fear we may tend to consider it an old story. It is not.“
- 12. “ there is a chorus of exhortations – articles beginning ‘Higher Education should’ or ‘must’. 1967 Innovation: Processes, Practice and Research
- 13. “technological revolution" is a term “used with great abandon and little definition” 1968 Educational Technology: New Myths and Old Realities
- 14. “in spite of or because of its obscure meaning, individualized instruction is held up as a panacea for the ills of education”
- 15. “Kids who are used to having blaring transistor radios around hem every waking moment have trained themselves to ignore anything coming into their ears, and therefore hear very little of what comes out the the earphones they we are in the language lab”
- 17. They are designed to serve working adults, usually without any academic prerequisites for entry, and they involve the delivery of instruction at a distance. Best known of these new institutions is the Open University of the UK, which has identified some 29 other universities around the world which implement the open university concept in various ways. For most of these universities, adult off campus students constitute the sole or primary clientele
- 18. — Lifelong learning — Real accessibility for all. — Social development. — Needs of working population. — Greater mobility of knowledge. — Wide use of new media and techniques. — Rethinking the learning situation. — Taking account of people's prior life experiences. — Reduction of unit costs
- 19. Are we solving our higher ed problems?
- 20. “The current renaissance in ed tech is bringing new attention to the pressing and still unresolved needs of our educational system”
- 27. Retain - the right to make, own, and control copies of the content Reuse - the right to use the content in a wide range of ways Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself Remix - the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new Redistribute - the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)
- 28. Autonomy and interdependence Freedom and responsibility Democracy and participation
- 30. What happened? “the message seems to say that the old ideals of the 1960s that used to excite and inspire, albeit midst frequent controversy, are gone, and new ones have not yet emerged” 1981
- 31. “institutions of higher education lag behind most other sectors of the economy in their capacity to improve productivity” 1982
- 33. • Independent project work at all levels, for all students and faculty, would replace all standard courses. • Students would evaluate their own work. • Students would keep portfolios of their own work as an alternative means of showing what they had accomplished. There would be no more examinations of conventional types. • Students and faculty would participate fully and equally in the governance of the department. • The department was to run as an open organism with free access for everyone in the university, whether or not they were formally enrolled for credit. • Each person would function both as a teacher and as a learner. • The faculty accepted responsibility, in cooperation with the students, to create and maintain a rich and stimulating learning environment for the benefit of all.
- 35. Flexibility: that’s the key word when you think about the liberal arts education we offer you at St. Lawrence…create your own, through our multi-field option. Take an elective you never would have imagined taking, just because you want to. Study in a foreign country. At St. Lawrence, your education is yours to shape. http://www.stlawu.edu/academics
- 40. Greater opportunities to collaborate with others
- 44. Greater institutional visibility...for good reasons
- 48. “I find that textbooks that are published have a lot of filler in them, make them bigger and more expensive. There’s a lot of fluff in the texts- when you’re not doing it for money you are drilling down to the most important points. There’s no motivation to add filler when money isn’t the bottom line. “
- 49. “When I make an addition to my open text it doesn’t mean the student has to go and buy another textbook or edition. I love the fact that with open textbooks you can pull from other disciplines and other open textbooks - a chapter here and there - as long as you provide credit you can use that without copyright issues. For example, in my ethics class I pull out a social psych chapter about power imbalances but I don’t need everything else that’s in that book. Any interdisciplinary course or program can benefit from open books.”
- 50. “To me, access to education in general is vital to the evolution of society — free access makes it easier and far more beneficial to explore, learn, and research. I cannot count the number of times I have had a project to complete that had to be limited or modified in some way because the information I needed was not free to access. This is very constricting — we are sacrificing curiosity and the ability to learn in order for someone to potentially make more money off of their material. Having access to free, current information is literally invaluable to one’s education and the quality thereof. “
Editor's Notes
- The theme of this year’s conference is Exploring our past, present and future, and in the past I’ve become quite interested in looking into the past of innovation ,ed tech, and open in particular. This presentation will take a journey to the past, the 1960s and 70s for the most part, and talk about current day open and innovation in relation to the past.
- Then and now game. Very simple. I’ll put up a quote and you have to put up your hand for then or now. Hint, then is time period between 1960 and 1980.
- “A seemingly indispensible ingredient of modern commentary upon higher education is a concern for innovation. ‘Things are changing‘ we are told, and higher education must innovate to keep up with, stay ahead of, adapt to, or cope with the changing world around it.” Then. This is from a 1970 dissertation entitled The Erosion of Innovation in Higher Education
- As part of this dissertation, the best shout out in an acknowledgement that I’ve ever seen. DB Johnstone, not Gail, his wife (despite an excellent dissertation), went on to become president of Buffalo State College
- Now. “After centuries of chalk and talk, universities are finding themselves at the centre of a technological revolution” From a 2017 article in The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2017/apr/04/the-automated-university-bots-and-drones-amid-the-dreaming-spires?CMP=share_btn_tw
- Then: 1970 article entitled Technology and Education: who controls? https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED039732
- 1977 Radical Innovation in a Conventional Framework: Problems and Prospects https://www.jstor.org/stable/1979012
- Familiar tropes that you can recognize: higher education is changing and innovation is an urgency; chalk and talk, sage on stage, nothing has changed for centuries; education market, and higher ed is resistant to change. But this doesn’t’ end here. What I learned in looking at 1960-1980 is that for every gushing Chronicle or Ed Surge article you can find a 1960s or 70s equivalent, and the point of the game was to demonstrate the extent to which , with few exceptions (actually only 1 that I could find) the conversation hasn’t really changed or isn’t that dissimilar. Now, there is both great comfort and room for critique in that observation.
- In 1963, where this quote is from, it turns out there was a crisis in higher education in the 60s and 70s. This quote is from 1963 and what we learn from reading about this time period is that the drivers for the crisis, perceived or real, are not dissimilar. For example, there is a pressure of numbers- in an OECD report in 1968 Change and innovation in higher education pointed to the pressure of numbers (changing demographics) as a result of growth in population and demand for greater equality – I was surprised to learn that in UK between 1961 and 1968 24 new universities were created. Also a driver of scientific and tech progress: “new disciplines must be introduced; boundaries between the old ones become artificial; the rapid obsolescence of existing technologies has to be taken into account”
- 2015 Compare with this article from 2015 and we see that all the same drivers are here: demographics, tech advances, access to higher ed http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-ricardo-azziz/higher-ed-in-crisis-a-fac_b_6457910.html
- Disruption 1960s style: “ there is a chorus of exhortations – articles beginning ‘Higher Education should’ or ‘must’. 1967 Innovation: Processes, Practice and Research p.38. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED013380
- No shortage of buzzwords and technology solutionism http://www.hepgjournals.org/doi/abs/10.17763/haer.38.4.37863k075234nu72?code=hepg-site
- And no shortage of skepticism - the newest trend becomes embraced or critiqued – 1968: Educational Technology: New Myths and Old Realities http://www.hepgjournals.org/doi/abs/10.17763/haer.38.4.37863k075234nu72?code=hepg-site
- Distraction: “Kids who are used to having blaring transistor radios around hem every waking moment have trained themselves to ignore anything coming into their ears, and therefore hear very little of what comes out the the earphones they we are in the language lab” : 1968: Educational Technology: New Myths and Old Realities http://www.hepgjournals.org/doi/abs/10.17763/haer.38.4.37863k075234nu72?code=hepg-site
- One of the greatest higher education innovations was the Open University. It is curious that during the MOOC mania, there was little discussion about how open universities were a real solution to a demographic/accessibility/education massification problem, AND they actually provided students with real credits in a meaningful education “currency”. The OU UK established in 1969, this is a sampling of some that are still in existence today. Here in Canada, as a result of the Quiet Revolution, there was the establishment of a new higher ed system called CEGEPs in Quebec in 1968, resulting in 46 new 2-3 year colleges that were accessible and largely free.
- 1979 John Daniel writes in Opening Open Universities: http://journals.sfu.ca/cjhe/index.php/cjhe/article/view/182792/182779 : Keep in mind that the open university in UK was established in 1969, which means in 10 years 28 others were established.
- In Quebec the task force on the télé-université had reported in May 1972, telling the University of Quebec (UQ) that the télé-université should address these challenges. What is striking is how incredibly ambitious this is list is.
- In comparing our current day solutions to changing demographics, population, tech change, accessiibilty, to those of the 60s and 70s, where there drivers were very similar --Are we solving our higher ed problems? The 60s and 70s had open universities with ambitious agendas. Today we have MOOCs and OERs. We are certainly asked to buy into a rhetoric of disruption.
- Of course, we are constantly being told that ed tech is the solution to our higher ed problems…
- Disruption then and now- in 1960s it meant social unrest and student uprisings on campuses, today it means the creation of new products
- Innovation in my field is often about technolgy
- This graphic from 2015 is a sample of so-called ed tech players disrupting education. You’ll notice that any are LMS or MOOC platforms
- Breathless growth. Although the “education market” has always existed, and in 1966-67 it was estimated to be worth 48 billion dollars in the US, second only to defense. Today the ed market, however defined, is second only to heath care in the US.
- Recreating the same thing. The conversations of today aren’t that different than convos of 60 and 70s and perhaps if we need to be doing anything not recreating them.
- Open pedagogy is a good example of recreating the past. When I began looking into the origins of open pedagogy, I didn’t find much in the English literature, but found a small body of work in the French literature that dates from the early 70s. Claude Paquette, UQAM.
- Open pedagogy in its current day form has been argued to be the pedagogy that results when open education resources (as defined by the 5R permissions) are used. Along with this definition is the 5Rs as articulated by David Wiley. As a result, this is a content focussed definition.
- What becomes interesting is when we contrast the current day open pedagogy, centred on content, with open pedagogy of the 1960s where learner emancipation, not the use of OERs, is the goal of open pedagogy. Claude Paquette outlines 3 sets of foundational values of open pedagogy, namely: autonomy and interdependence; freedom and responsibility; democracy and participation. For me, this is a much more ambitious definition of open pedagogy.
- Contrast the response to massification/ access to university with open universities vs MOOCs. Contrast OER enabled pedagogy with open pedagogy of 60s and I can’t help but feel that the current day versions are a more diluted version of the past. Much less ambitious responses to higher ed problems.
- Patricia Cross , speaking about community colleges, describes it as a plateau “between 2 periods of high energy and a sense of mission in the community colleges”. Ideals have receded Community Colleges on the Plateau, 1981 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1981085?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents . In this article, she compares ‘should be’ goals at a 10 year interval and notes particularly the decline in the should be goal of accessibility, significant decline in esprit de corps…mutual trust and respect among faculty students and administrators.
- I admit I spent less time in the 80s than in the 60s and 70s, but perhaps this article provides some explanation – productivity, business talk creeps in. Published in Journal of Higher Education – The Impact of Organizational and Innovator Variables on Instructional innovation in Higher Education 1982 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1981854
- There are more examples in this graveyard of dreams. The case of Earth Sciences at St. Lawrence University
- Bill Romey earth sciences at ST Lawrence university. Radical Innovation in a Conventional Framework. Reflects on the attempt to transform an academic department http://www.jstor.org/stable/1979012?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents “An opportunity arose to implement a new program in a conventional academic department of geology and geography at St. Lawrence University. Would it be possible to bring about extensive change from within a conventional department in an old-line, conventionally oriented liberal-arts school? “ Completely innovate a department. Bill describes the evolution over a few years, and notes that conventional thinking is starting to creep back in but for the most part the department is operating as described above. Outlines 10 or so characterisitcs of the enw program
- Today the department looks nothing like it’s past self – very conventional structure
- Although there does seem to be an essence of the interdisciplinarity and freedom, but it reads like Academic plan-speak, a bit of tokenism. There were lots of experiments happening around –St. Lawrence not the only one and it would take some work for somebody to dig in and explore how they look today.
- But there are also some examples of things that have only gotten better with time – flipped learning 1960s style Flipped learning, 60s style innovation: lectures scripts for private reading + classroom time for small group disc and assignts
- Past and present version of ourselves shared a common desire for teaching, learning, and student success. And this is where I think current day higher education can innovate with openness. It’s important to mention that there were many strands of openness in the 60s and 70s as well…eg. open enrollment, open classrooms
- ‘ Open’ is often associated with copyright and permissions, as defined by creative commons.
- But increasingly I’m less interested in potential of CC licensing and more in these questions. In other words, what is open a means to? I feel like our 60s and 70s counterparts were much more clear and explicit about this question.
- Here are some examples of how I think current day openness provides a means to an end. BCcampus was where it started for a lot of institutions in BC, and at the outset collaboration was encouraged. I think BCcampus and the BC higher ed sector are a good example of this in action. A lot of open activities, this is where many of us started with open.
- One of big gaps was all this open but other than Moodle, little use of open ed tech.. Decreased funding in BC higher ed. Vendor driven decisions about ed tech. More recently collaborating at a sector level around exploration and pilotng of open technologies that may help our faculty and students
- Better, more sustainable options for ed tech
- New models for doing it together – the coop model for WP in BC, ( also very much a 60s and 70s ideal)
- Greater institutional visibility - ESS and ESS services beyond our BC mandate. Open means it reaches more people
- Over 7000 views, being reused across North America. Open for the public good. Fentanyl crisis has challenged the need to be visible contributors by caring about communities we serve.
- International and inter-institutional collaborations. Co-development of a faculty development certificate for the UdG, as part of the discussions and ultimately the contract language we developed it under a CC BY NC license.
- The Zed Cred at JIBC – Law Enforcement Studies diploma. Creating open textbooks has made teaching and learning better and easier.
- Faculty quote
- More control over resources such as technologies, textbook publication cycles and specialized subject matter – LESD is a field that draws on ethics, policing, crim, etc.
- Student perspective and quote
- A community created by open educators to widen open participation (internationally)