My iPhone backs up to the “cloud.” GoogleDocs is all about “cloud computing.” And Facebook, well, forget the clouds; it’s as ubiquitous as the sky.

But ...]]> Engaged learning—the type that happens outside textbooks and beyond the four walls of the classroom—moves beyond right and wrong answers to grappling with the uncertainties and contradictions of a complex world.

My iPhone backs up to the “cloud.” GoogleDocs is all about “cloud computing.” And Facebook, well, forget the clouds; it’s as ubiquitous as the sky.

But learning? Really? Is learning really going to be in the clouds as well?

I’m referring, of course, to the dramatic rise in online learning. Whether it is the millions upon millions signed up for MOOCs (massive open online courses), the popularity of Khan Academy, or the fact that one in three college students has taken an online course as part of their education, online learning is everywhere.

In some respects, this is to be expected. Technology has driven just about everything to the web, from the way we shop to how we watch movies and plan our parties, there appears to be an app for it all. Education, it appears, will be next.

Brookings Institution's Center for Technology Innovation, for example, recently profiled five key “success stories,” including MOOCs, computerized adaptive testing, and “stealth assessment.” A common thread is that such technology is based upon massively networked, data-driven, and automated systems. Students playing an “adaptive” learning game will find that it changes in difficulty according to responses, offering instantaneous feedback and helpful prompts. Research has shown that such automated real-time feedback, when linked to learning analytics grounded in “big data,” provides opportunities for mastery learning at a much faster pace than in traditional face-to-face classrooms.

Such disruption is no longer at the margins. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is investing in similar technologies for community colleges, which educate almost half of the 18 million undergraduates in postsecondary education. The U.S. Department of Education recently approved Southern New Hampshire University as the first institution in the country to offer a fully online competency-based education (that is, reflecting, “can you actually do the work?” rather than seat time).

So is that our future? If it is, where does it leave traditional bricks-and-mortar institutions?

I run a research center that planned to convene more than 100 scholars and practitioners at Tufts in July to discuss this very question. There are dozens of academic programs—certificates, minors and majors—around the country that focus on community engagement. From questions of civic leadership to community-based asset mapping to theories of social change, we help students develop the habits of mind and repertoires of action to engage with our local and global communities.

So the question of online learning looms large over our programs. Yes, like a big dark cloud. Paul LeBlanc, the president of SNHU, is coming to speak to us. So are the folks from MITx. And we’re going to ask lots of questions and take lots of notes. Because deep learning, it seems to me, can’t all be done with our head in the clouds.

Don’t get me wrong. MOOCs, and online education more broadly, may be wonderful for a certain form of content delivery, one which helps students master certain kinds of knowledge. This is oftentimes referred to as transmissional knowledge, in that we simply transmit a particular body of knowledge. As the Brookings report makes clear, technology is becoming really good at that. So good, in fact, that within a decade, it will change much of how we think about and do teaching and learning.

Such technology, though, has very clear limits. Namely, the knowledge that can be learned through such systems has to be stable, singular and solvable. Put simply, there has to be a right and a wrong answer.

But to be blunt, this is not truly education. Or at least not all of it. Education, ultimately, is transformational in that it helps us grapple with the uncertainties and contradictions of a complex world, pushing us beyond our comfort zones and into moments of genuine reflection. John Dewey suggested that such true learning begins in a “moment of doubt,” what we might call an “aha moment,” of rethinking and reframing what we thought was normal.

So with that goal in mind, I want to suggest that we must keep our feet firmly on the ground at the same time that our heads are up in the clouds. Engaged learning—the type that happens outside of textbook covers and beyond the four walls of the classroom—offers a chance to make learning come alive and bridge theory and practice.

In the end, the ubiquity of the technological cloud that is blanketing higher education may indeed have a silver lining: It will help us to be clear that what we do in our classrooms and communities matters to our students, local stakeholders and the future of higher education.

Dan W. Butin is the founding dean of the School of Education at Merrimack College and the executive director of the Center for Engaged Democracy.

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It will be truly ironic if the most impersonal technology of all ends up saving the most personal kind of teaching and learning in higher education.

I speak about the dramatic rise of online learning and MOOCs. Everyone, it seems, is talking about and questioning the relevance and ...]]> NEJHE on Models that Will Change Higher Ed Forever

It will be truly ironic if the most impersonal technology of all ends up saving the most personal kind of teaching and learning in higher education.

I speak about the dramatic rise of online learning and MOOCs. Everyone, it seems, is talking about and questioning the relevance and “value proposition” of higher education. From Thomas Friedman’s exuberant op-eds to President Obama’s suggestion in his State of the Union address to rethink accreditation from the ground up, the question of the future of the university is upon us.

These are not idle speculations of the twittering class. A bill currently in front of the California Legislature proposes that the 50 most oversubscribed lower-division courses across the state’s entire higher education system be made available online through MOOCs for college credit. Similarly, the State University of New York Board of Trustees has just endorsed “Open SUNY,” a major initiative to expand enrollment by up to one 100,000 students through a combination of online learning opportunities and prior-learning assessments. The disruption of higher education is here and our traditional models of teaching and learning have forevermore been shattered.

It makes this disruptive moment that much more unexpected. For even as I embrace certain aspects of this technological transformation, I would argue that it is a perfect time (or maybe just a last-ditch opportunity?) to make the case for place-based community-engaged learning. The global reach of MOOCs, I want to suggest, may actually help us reconnect with our local communities.

Let me explain.

I have long argued that we have reached an “engagement ceiling” in higher education. For all the community service hours, glossy pictures of neighborhood revitalization and anecdotal success stories, college and university engagement with their communities is too often shallow and ephemeral. There is little that is sustained or meaningful to our students, faculty or community partners. There is, put simply, a vast gap between the rhetoric of what we say and the reality of what we do regarding community engagement.

This is a shame. Community engagement—which I take as an umbrella term for the multiplicity of practices and philosophies such as service-learning, participatory action research, civic learning, democratic engagement, and community-based teaching and learning—can be an incredibly powerful mode of linking theory to practice and campuses with their local communities.

It is one of the few “high-impact” practices that the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) has shown to substantially affect student learning and retention. Indeed, research has found service-learning to have statistically significant positive impacts across multiple social, cognitive, and cultural domains. Moreover, national data on faculty attitudes coming out of UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute show that close to 90% of all faculty believe that “colleges and universities have a responsibility to work with their surrounding communities to address local issues.”

David Scobey, executive dean of the New School for Public Engagement, has suggested we are at a “Copernican Moment” in the civic engagement field, and nowhere is this more eloquently articulated than in the Crucible Moment, a report put out last year by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and endorsed by the U.S. Department of Education, which argues that higher education must “embrace civic learning and democratic engagement as an undisputed priority … where education for democracy and civic responsibility is pervasive, not partial; central, not peripheral.”

The problem, though, is that we have heard this rhetoric for too long. We can look to Ernest Boyer’s clarion call a generation ago for a “scholarship of engagement,” or further back to the turn of the 20th century to the University of Wisconsin’s articulation of the “Wisconsin idea” that the “boundaries of the university should be the boundaries of the state,” or even further back to the Morrill Act of 1862, which formed land-grant universities.

But what we see is that lasting and meaningful successes have been few and far between. Twenty years ago, an AASC&U report put it bluntly: “While the idea of public engagement is frequently embraced by college and university presidents, there is considerable evidence that deep engagement is rare—there is more smoke than fire, more rhetoric than reality.” Just a few years ago, a white paper sponsored by the Kettering Foundation reported a very similar phenomenon:  that there was a “sense of drift and stalled momentum” in the civic engagement movement because of “imprecise and even conflicting language,” a “highly fragmented and compartmentalized” set of networks, and a “remarkably apolitical” civic agenda.

The data, unfortunately, confirm this state of affairs. I have begun calling this the “ten percent engagement ceiling,” as only about 10% or so of faculty appear to use any type of experiential field-based learning and less than 10% of students report taking a service-learning course. As researchers at Siena College’s Siena Research Institute starkly put it regarding data from their National Assessment of Service and Community Engagement (NASCE) surveys, “NASCE shows that in many areas, little service is done and few students are deeply engaged.”

So what we have is a deeply embedded and seemingly dysfunctional pattern: We demand transformation in how we bridge town-gown divisions, foster community revitalization, and emphasize civic and democratic engagement; and then we go back to business as usual until the next rhetorical cycle.

Until now.

For all of a sudden, there is no more business as usual. Online education in California and New York, and everywhere else for that matter, is quickly becoming the norm for an increasingly substantial number of postsecondary students. There is no longer any surety, no guarantee, that there will be a place for place-based learning.

So where does that leave us? Does online learning undermine the raison d’être of community-based models of teaching, learning and research? Can face-to-face engagement with local communities survive, much less have resonance, in an automated, machine-driven, web-based pedagogical environment? Does the civic have a place in a placeless world?

Perhaps.

Perhaps, because suddenly, we have to figure out what community voice looks like in a networked and too-often anonymous learning environment. Perhaps, because we now have to rethink what community impact means and looks like when the “community” may be global and distributed. Perhaps, because we now have to recalibrate and rearticulate what social justice means. Perhaps, because notions of respect, relevance and reciprocity—foundational to the community engagement field—have become unmoored from the locations we thought them to inhabit.

Put otherwise, this disruptive MOOC-driven moment is forcing us—and helping us—to disrupt our own deeply engrained patterns of how we view and enact community engagement.

This is exciting stuff. The community engagement field has been in a slow spiral of diminishing returns in exhorting the next generation of students, faculty and higher education leaders to embrace civic learning and practices. Service-learning had begun to feel like one of those “been there, done that” experiences for students and faculty committed to a better world.

But now, faster than you can register for “Democratic Development” on Coursera’s platform, the world has changed. For the world can now register for that course. And according to the course description, the instructor hopes that “students in developing or prospective democracies will use the theories, ideas and lessons in the class to help build or improve democracy in their own countries.”

Wow. Imagine 10,000, 100,000, a million, students taking such a course. And then changing their local and global communities.

Or perhaps not. For as we have begun to discover, the vast majority of such MOOC registrants never make it past the first week and only about 10% end up finishing the course. What is thus truly unknown, and what we must figure out, is how we come to think about and enact community engagement both within and against the coming online transformation.

This is the state of community engagement in the disrupted university. It is a precipitous moment where traditional models and norms no longer apply so easily or thoroughly. In some cases, there are immense opportunities to be gained as faculty discover how to make their work public and bring the public into their work. In other cases, there are immense opportunities to be lost as marginalized populations and communities become ever more disenfranchised from the institutions just blocks away, yet gigabytes apart.

This moment is an opportunity that could lead us to new and better means and modes of engaging and improving our communities. Or it is a moment just before the civic engagement bubble bursts. Or maybe even both.

In the end, MOOCs may save us. Or not. But at least they have given us the opportunity to figure it out.

Dan W. Butin is an associate professor and founding dean of the school of education at Merrimack College and executive director of the Center for Engaged Democracy.

I am not a machine.

This makes my college students happy. Though, to be honest, they assume as much since I walk into the classroom, make some small talk and launch into my lecture. After a few minutes, I may stop, ask for questions, prompt some discussion and perhaps tell ...]]> An education dean reflects on MOOCs …

I am not a machine.

This makes my college students happy. Though, to be honest, they assume as much since I walk into the classroom, make some small talk and launch into my lecture. After a few minutes, I may stop, ask for questions, prompt some discussion and perhaps tell a few bad jokes. Which should prove once and for all that I am human and fallible.

My students seem to gain from these lectures, the formal discussions and the informal banter. Most of them write coherent essays on the assigned topics, pass the midterm quizzes and submit fairly decent final projects. Some students are superb; others, well, they just barely make it through. Each year is like that, and each year I work on getting better. Semester by semester, year by year, I improve my teaching, provide new experiential activities and community-based projects, switch around my readings, and watch yet another set of students gain from my classes. I am proud of what I do and take seriously my job of preparing the next generation of future teachers.

But sometimes, late at night when I cannot sleep, I wonder if I am doing them a disservice. Maybe, just maybe, if I were a machine, the class would be better.

Let me explain.

According to the recent New York Times Education Life section, this was the “Year of the MOOC.” That’s “massive open online courses.” It’s what Times columnist David Brooks called a “campus tsunami” and Thomas Friedman declared as the “college education revolution.” That’s because anyone, anywhere can now take a course from some of the best instructors and institutions in the world just by logging on. Students watch short clips of the professors’ lectures, submit their quizzes to be graded by computer-automated systems and, for those who finish with a respectable score, get a certificate of completion.

In less than a year, close to 2 million students have enrolled in such courses and hundreds of thousands have finished. More students, for example, have registered for Coursera’s Modern Poetry course this semester (30,000+) than go to the University of Pennsylvania. Which is where, by the way, the instructor of that course teaches. So in one semester, the entire student population of the University of Pennsylvania could take his course. For free. In their pajamas. From home. Did I mention that some universities have begun to provide transfer credit for completion of such courses? And that one blogger couldn’t stop gushing about this “delightful course” and the “dynamic, charismatic teacher we all wish we could have had in school.”

So let me be blunt: higher education is about to be fundamentally disrupted for a vast number of students. For the tens of thousands in California who could not get into a community college course because of state budget cuts; for the hundreds of thousands who drop out of postsecondary education every year due to expenses or boredom or life taking an unexpected turn; for the millions in developing countries who have minimal access to a quality education.

All of them and many others will be able to take these online courses and be treated to an educational experience that very few have ever had: They will be able to listen to a world-class professor, access a trove of curated resources to deepen and expand on such lectures at their fingertips, get instantaneous feedback on their assignments through built-in automated tutorial systems that adapt to their level of learning, and have access to a worldwide community of peers commiserating and discussing and debating the topics in the course.

And just think of what can be done, a la iTunes or Netflix: add closed captions in whatever language is best for you; speed up or slow down or skip around the lectures; click on similar subjects to get a deeper understanding of the issue or follow a thematic riff to see where it leads; have the system, based on your previous clicks, provide suggestions for further readings or ask you to repeat the assignment to make sure you have mastered it.

This is crazy stuff. All I offer is a twice-a-week class for 75 minutes at a time and once-a-week office hours. Sometimes my lectures are great; other times I am happy to just make it through. Sometimes, truth be told, the discussions drag. I do my best to keep students’ attention, but I have no surefire way to know if they really “got” my main points. I love what I teach, but, honestly, it’s a lot of work to lecture about the same things year after year. I am, after all, only human. I am not a machine.

Which raises the question: What do I offer that cannot be done by a MOOC? Why should students roll out of bed, get dressed, drive 10 miles through rush-hour traffic, desperately try to find a parking spot on campus and get stressed that they might walk in 10 minutes late for my 9 a.m. class?

It is certainly not for the content knowledge. Somebody out there surely knows a heck of a lot more about John Dewey or Paulo Freire than I do. And it is not for that all-too-fuzzy “human connection” of getting to know your son or daughter. Many faculty have 30 or more students in each course of the three or four or five courses they teach each semester. There is no way I’m going to truly get to know your child no matter how hard I try. And I’m not even talking about the 300- student lecture hall.

Rather, what the college classroom truly offers is an apprenticeship into thinking. I can provide my students with a conceptual map of how to think about teaching and begin to plot out where different ideas and strategies fit on that map. I can take their insights or misunderstandings and play out their limits and possibilities. I can take a current issue and begin to peel away layers to reveal particular assumptions and implications. And I can begin to teach them how to do the same thing themselves.

This is what it means to move students from novice to expert thinkers, able to apply specific knowledge, skills and protocols within a particular situation and with authentic outcomes. A MOOC can’t do that. Computer systems are still too linear and too literal, too dependent on problems having solutions and thus unable to deal with true ambiguity or nuance. A MOOC can’t go “meta” and step outside itself to reflect upon and change its own assumptions and patterns. That is ultimately why students should come to my class: to stretch their understanding of the possible, to test their assumptions and make sense of the complexity of world.

I should note that we in higher education are actually pretty bad at offering this kind of teaching. Most of what we do is based on a transmission model of education, and most of what we transmit is low-level content knowledge to help students just get the basics. This is why MOOCs have become such a sensation. If all we have experienced is being lectured at, then, sure, Wikipedia, the Khan Academy and MOOCs should replace us.

I hope, instead, that MOOCs will prompt us to refashion what we do in the college classroom and how we do it. For we all yearn for that “dynamic, charismatic” teacher who can rock our world. We want our education to matter. In the end, MOOCs may indeed transform higher education, but they cannot transform my students.

Dan W. Butin is an associate professor and founding dean of the school of education at Merrimack College and executive director of the Center for Engaged Democracy.