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.

The prototype version of MITx is scheduled for launch in spring 2012. MITx is an outgrowth of MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), which began in ...]]> While many colleges and universities are trying to adapt to the forces affecting higher education today, a recent move by the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology is about to cause a seismic shift.

The prototype version of MITx is scheduled for launch in spring 2012. MITx is an outgrowth of MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), which began in 2002. Building upon the inventory of nearly 2,100 MIT courses, MITx will offer the online teaching of MIT courses worldwide and the opportunity for able learners to gain certification of mastery of MIT material.

The launch of MITx represents a milestone both in terms of access to higher education and higher education credentialing. The significance of this event is that this shift is coming from MIT, more often thought of as a premier global university than a radical institution.

Beginning with a portfolio of selected courses, MITx is expected to grow over time. It will offer a compendium of courses needed for demonstrated competence in a given subject, including lectures, syllabi, online tests, feedback, group discussions, labs and interaction with MIT faculty.

Online learners who demonstrate mastery of subjects will earn a certificate of completion of MIT coursework. As with MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), the teaching materials on MITx will be available for free, as will be the teaching on the platform. Those who have the ability and motivation to demonstrate mastery of content can receive a credential for a modest fee. MIT is in the process of determining a fee structure for both individual and groups of courses.

The credential would not be issued under the name MIT, but rather a body within the institute. MIT plans to create a not-for-profit body that will offer certification for online learners of MIT coursework. That body will carry a distinct name to avoid confusion.

MIT will also make the open-source software infrastructure on which MITx is based freely available to educational institutions. Through an online interactive learning platform, this infrastructure will establish ways for other universities, as well as interested individuals, to join MIT in improving and adding features to the technology.

Disruptive or creative destruction

The open-educational-resources movement began around a decade ago. A term applied to free and open digital publication of educational resources—such as course materials created by universities—these resources are accessible to anyone, anytime via the Internet. Open-source offerings do not carry college credits per se nor can they be used toward earning a degree.

Now in its 10th year, MIT’s OCW includes nearly 2,100 MIT courses and has been used by more than 100 million people.

MIT is not the only university to understand the value of OCW. Stanford, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Notre Dame, the University of Michigan, the University of California Berkeley and numerous other distinguished higher education institutions have joined in the movement.

Hundreds of English-speaking open courseware initiatives now exist across the U.S. as well as in England, Canada and Australia. A big boost for the idea of "open access" to the world's knowledge is a recent announcement to let the public view, for free, some of the trove of information available through JSTOR, a service that helps scholars, researchers and students discover, use and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive of more than 1,000 academic journals and other scholarly content.

But this new iteration, MITx, represents a wider disruption—and perhaps even a creative destruction. It begs the question: Is this the catalyst that will change how we think about traditional higher education?

Reading the signs

At a time when higher education is essential for succeeding in a global economy, we have reached a crossroads with a vast university system that has difficulty accommodating demand because the cost is prohibitive. Access is becoming increasingly out of reach.

Consider the confluence of forces driving us to reconsider how we look at traditional higher education. Those forces include disruptive technologies (Internet, open courseware movement, etc.), but also tuition tipping points, the changing labor market, the economy and changing demographics.

The annual price tag for a college credential has risen about three times as fast as inflation, and there is no sign that it’s slowing down. Debt burdens—$110-billion in student loans borrowed this last year—point to questions about the value of a degree and the nature of credentials.

This suggests to some that going to college at any price may no longer be worth it. Indeed, approximately half of Americans think the higher education system is doing a poor or fair job in providing value for the money spent, according to a survey last spring by the Pew Research Center.

Higher education game-changer?

Revolutions come as a result of a response to dominant power. Self-directed learning (SDL) may be that tool for some who lack access because of time, place or circumstances. Different from traditional higher education, it can be a viable means of access to knowledge acquisition with a value-added element. Learners avail themselves of the relevant knowledge when and where they wish.

While a similar argument was made about the “distance learning” revolution 20 years ago, it’s different this time with MIT (through MITx) offering not only free content and sophisticated online pedagogy, but most significantly, a credential from a world-renowned university for a very modest fee.

Are we about to see the kind of paradigm shift in higher education that was seen in the health care industry when funding formulas changed dramatically? It could be an earthquake for the majority of colleges, which depend on tuition income rather than big endowments and research grants.

The era of high-level SDL promises free access, rapidly increasing quality and advanced educational content. With access to relevant knowledge to their career and a credential of mastery from an MIT or for that matter Stanford (which is embarking on a similar endeavor to that of MITx), what would stop individuals from making an informed choice? Credentialing from world-class institutions, at anytime and anyplace, and at a highly affordable price could be a very attractive option.

When combined with the free online textbooks at sites like Textbook Revolution and TextBooksFree, plus other course books from Google Books, World Public Library and Project Guttenberg, MITx will provide students wtih access to a high-level collegiate learning experience totally online for a nominal fee. It's easy to imagine that these students will form their own virtual study groups, affiliations and various other aspects of traditional student life. The only thing missing from a face-to-face MIT or Stanford education may, in fact, be the “live” campus experience.

What remains to be seen is whether employers desperate for high-level talent will start to bring the drawbridge down and relax their education screens to include nontraditional “self learners," especially if these learners have received certificates of completion or mastery from distinguished world-class institutions such as MIT or Stanford. As these "graduates" demonstrate value to their employers, it might open the door to many more nontraditional self-learners.

A threat to higher education or a wake-up call?

The wider significance of MITx to higher education may not be so much the strategic tension between tyranny of the degree versus the transformation of learning into a simple commodity that cheapens the challenge of mastering subject matter. Rather, it may be that MITx threatens traditional higher education in general. For some who see universities as credit-producing machines—students as input and revenue dollars as output—it may seem so. Private higher institutions are already tuition-driven entities and public higher institutions are becoming increasingly so.

This shift advances a question many have asked before and one that is particularly relevant today. What commitment does higher education have in creating learning opportunities that break barriers to education?

Is higher learning more than taking a class? Is it more than subject content and testing for knowledge acquisition? Is it membership within a community of learners?

If the latter is the case, then access to higher learning—lifelong learning—must be seen as higher education's primary role and as an asset for all members of the community.

MITx and other similar programs coming out of “high-end” universities are realizing that public higher education has had it right all along. It's a question of access—precisely what public higher education has embraced since its inception as the core of its mission. Aligned with this core mission of access comes both affordability and student success in the forms of retention, persistence, graduation and preparation for the job market.

With funding support of public higher education dwindling, providing access becomes even more challenging. The rise of new forms of self-directed learning and nontraditional credentialing will increasingly be a part of our higher education fabric and fill gaps by recognizing learning areas that employers may value but traditional grades and diplomas often miss, such as certain computer technology skills, critical thinking know-how and interpersonal proficiencies.

Consider the fact that the marketplace has overtaken the government as the dominant force shaping and reshaping American higher education. MITx is addressing the market by lowering the existing barriers between residential campuses and the millions of learners around the world by making MIT educational content accessible and providing those learners with an opportunity to earn an MIT-related credential.

Whether MITx will directly threaten the operating margins of universities (especially for-profit universities) remains to be seen, but higher education continues to be disrupted.

In a global economy, the real question for traditional higher education now becomes whether we continue to offer higher learning to those who can afford the high prices and let the market address the issue of access.

Philip DiSalvio is dean of University College at University of Massachusetts Boston.