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The Pivot

6/9/2017

We are partnering with a start-up accelerator to deliver a blended program that is based on the principles of lean and agile. And, this learning experience has great parallels to our situation at Café Learn today.

Pivoting is critical. If you ever played basketball, you get the concept. In order to take yourself out of a jam, you plant your lead foot, swivel your body around that anchor, and shift into a new direction. Same with startups.

The unicorn world is replete with famous pivots: Starbucks began by selling coffee beans and pivoted to become the coffee house of a generation. Twitter started out as a podcast aggregator, before pivoting to become the great messaging aggregator (and more). Flikr famously started out as a multi-player game before pivoting around its photo-sharing tool.

Café Learn created a great tool for delivering teaching and learning in the way that we all learn today: high impact learning—everyday. That means learning is delivered short bursts, evergreen and personalized, tied to measurable performance improvement, social and mobile. Our initial market--higher education institutions--don’t have a sense of urgency around changing the way their learners learn. So, we turned to markets with an imperative to change now—and for whom our mobile-first app helps them drive change. We have pivoted to focus on workplace learning and on thought leaders who have great content, and need new ways to deliver the learning around it. So far, it’s a winner! We may have to make a few more pivots, but then we are high impact learners—everyday!

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Investing in Higher Education

7/6/2016

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If you are involved in higher education, as an administrator, instructor, student, content developer, or product creator, there’s no doubt you’re already well aware that the cost of education is not merely a political talking point. There’s been consistent coverage of both unfortunate and hopeful realities of investing in higher education; from student loan default to students getting deeper and deeper into debt but not finding jobs, to the proliferation of free online course and content sites, to the discussion of free public tuition.

We at Café Learn want to help instructors easily bring their best to their courses at the lowest cost to their students. We also know that educators should be able to share their ideas easily and scale what they do from term to term, and institution to institution. Since launching, we have worked directly with instructors and their classes, and during our exchanges, we have become very tuned-in to the realities today’s current instructors and students face. And, by the way, today’s student is not what she was a generation ago. We also understand schools and students need and desire to matriculate without delay and graduate on time.

Over the next few weeks, we will be doing a deep dive into the cause and effects of student debts, and look closer at our country’s borrowing and lending structures. We will ask tough questions, and hopefully, reveal some truths that should be scrutinized by a larger audience.

Let’s not delay. Former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, a self-declared democratic socialist, fired up many young people with his campaign initiative for free public university tuition. While young people were completely behind his idea, many detractors thought him and them naive, that there is no way tuition could be free, that perhaps community colleges could be free...but that they are already pretty inexpensive anyhow. The part of this conversation that never bubbled up to public discourse is the fact, dollars and cents truth, which even if tuition could be brought down or eliminated the significant cost that students pay each term goes to administrative fees, not tuition. So, even if a state system found a way to eliminate tuition (and there are a number looking into doing just this) students would still be strapped with these expenses.

Investigation into the rise of student tuition and fees has been going on for some time, it’s not simply a political point for 2016. John Hopkins University professor of political science Benjamin Ginsberg published The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, 2e in 2011, and much of his research was adapted for the Washington Monthly’s article Administrators Ate My Tuition the same year.

The article adaptation highlights Ginsberg’s finite research on the expansion of university administrations in comparison to both instruction staffing and student enrollment. Ginsberg clearly illuminates that faculty-to-student ratio remained consistent, administration ballooned:

Between 1975 and 2005, total spending by American higher educational institutions, stated in constant dollars, tripled, to more than $325 billion per year. Over the same period, the faculty-to-student ratio has remained fairly constant, at approximately fifteen or sixteen students per instructor. One thing that has changed, dramatically, is the administrator-per-student ratio. In 1975, colleges employed one administrator for every eighty-four students and one professional staffer—admissions officers, information technology specialists, and the like—for every fifty students. By 2005, the administrator-to-student ratio had dropped to one administrator for every sixty-eight students while the ratio of professional staffers had dropped to one for every twenty-one students.

...as colleges and universities have had more money to spend, they have not chosen to spend it on expanding their instructional resources—that is, on paying faculty...

Keep in mind, that for the past 40 years, more and more instructors faculty are hired for part-time positions:

Forty years ago, America’s colleges employed more professors than administrators. The efforts of 446,830 professors were supported by 268,952 administrators and staffers. Over the past four decades, though, the number of full-time professors or “full-time equivalents”—that is, slots filled by two or more part-time faculty members whose combined hours equal those of a full-timer—increased slightly more than 50 percent. That percentage is comparable to the growth in student enrollments during the same time period. But the number of administrators and administrative staffers employed by those schools increased by an astonishing 85 percent and 240 percent, respectively.

Ginsberg outlines three central causes behind the rise of the number of university administrative positions:

There are more administrative responsibilities now than forty years ago. The growth in student population has created a need for more support, and more space. Also, simply consider the advent and necessity of IT systems and support, and investment in such administrative, and operational departments are imperative to sustainability. There’s also more need for marketing, to help with fundraising and recruiting.
Over the decades, state and federal mandates to collect, analyze, and archive records have increased, as have the need to meet licensure and accreditations, especially for private institutions.

Finally, there are many administrative responsibilities that instructors don’t want to deal with and have no issue delegation to administrative support.

At the same time, institutions have rationalized that there are fiscal advantages to using part-time, “adjunct” faculty. Today it is estimated the 50-75 of higher ed instructors are part-time...maybe that’s why they don’t have time to manage simpler administrative chores?

***
So, where is the money going?

In May of 2015, Demos published research showing trends in university spending in a brief called Pulling Up the Higher-Ed Ladder: Myth and Reality in the Crisis of College Affordability. The brief’s data is from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Delta Cost Project Database. The authors divided 4-year universities into two categories, “research institutions—schools that have a high level of research activity and award a significant number of doctorates—and master’s and bachelor’s universities—schools that primarily award master’s and/or bachelor’s degrees. Research institutions consistently enrolled about 60 percent of all undergraduates at public 4-year institutions in the decade covered by the brief, while master’s and bachelor’s universities accounted for the remaining 40 percent.”

The research found that declining state spending had been the main reason for rising tuition, between 78-79 percent, and administration costs account for five-six percent of the increase. They also found that construction accounted for about six percent increase in tuition if you add that to administration the latter’s percentage rises to 11-12 percent, respectively. It is crucial to note that the data showed the decline in state appropriations accounted for 100% of the increase in community college tuition.

Here are snapshots of the data:

This chart clearly illustrates how cuts in state funding dramatically effective the rise in costs for community colleges.

The following graph shows the direct correlation between state funding cuts and the increase in tuition.

The data we’ve shared in this article indicates that though the rise in administration expenditures has directly affected the cost of tuition, it is the cutback in state funding that is the main reason for the rise. We believe that there’s been a lot of blame placed on administration growth from outside and inside of academia because there’s no doubt that administrative costs have grown while full-time faculty positions have not, and spend on instruction has not kept up with the spend on administration.

It’s much easier to point the blame, data-based as it is, within a single community rather than a public prioritization. The data shows that decrease in state funding is the central and growing reason for the rise in the cost of a higher ed degree. When our economies suffer a recession, large or small, education is always cut. Unfortunately refund bounce back is flat to laggard. Education is not a priority, not K12, and not higher ed. Our country holds a manifest destiny, pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps mentality that is weakening not only the pipeline to our workforce but the future for everyone.

It’s no wonder many young voters supported Sanders call for free public tuition. They were not looking for a handout; they were looking for a hand up, an investment for themselves, their families, their communities, and our country. The US has the most robust economy in the world, by far, and the size of California’s alone just past France. Come on; we have the wherewithal, ingenuity, innovation, and most importantly need to invest in education and make it a national priority.

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#UnexpectED

6/6/2016

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This past semester, we sponsored a writing contest in Professor Karen Swett's communications sections. Professor Swett teaches at California State University, at Northridge, (CSUN), and we approached her to learn what pivotal experiences her students had with active learning, which teaching and classroom communication techniques left lasting impressions and were UnexpedED. We ask that students submit short-form essays to detail their insights.

Cindy Martinez is currently attending California State University Northridge. She is entering her third year and will declare either English or Liberal Studies as her major. Her expected graduation date is May 2018. Cindy's career goal is to become a teacher and impact the lives of students. She would like to stress the importance of education and help them develop skills that they will use in their pursuit of higher education.
Here is Cindy's experience with the #UnexpedED:

I Get It!

When in school one is exposed to a variety of teaching styles: ones that make use of PowerPoint, others that that use online platforms for the courses texts, and some that are more interactive and discussion based. These different styles open many doors and opportunities for learning, retention of the material, and comprehension. Many times one goes through classes where the activity is rather simple, nonetheless the concepts are difficult to grasp. My first upper division course ENG 302, a linguistic class that teaches grammar, is a course that I finally understand, though it required two instances that finally made me say, “I get it!”
One of these instances was when I spoke to the professor regarding my concerns. We were learning how to make syntactic trees, an exercise which requires one to break up a sentence into smaller meaningful units and to determine whether the words would attach to a noun phrase or verb phrase. It also involves analyzing the tense and being able to account for the auxiliaries. I expressed my concerns to my professor stating how I kept connecting the trees “branches” to the wrong item and not understanding how something so straightforward was plaguing me with trouble. She explained, “It’s all about patterns.” She went on to compare this to mathematics and clarify one important similarity. I thought, ”How is an English course with Linguistics involved have anything to do with mathematics?” She explained how in mathematics many of its aspects involve pattern recognition. She urged me to sit down and noticed how in each tree the items before the verb belonged to the noun phrase and the ones after belonged under the umbrella of the verb phrase. As I continued to work through the trees, I could see the order and evident patterns in each. It became much easier as I referred to trees I had done before and followed the structure in a flexible manner. The more I practiced these trees the better I became at explaining these patterns and understanding the process behind it all.
My next experience involved a classmate. I was once again in a stump, but this time in expressing a question as well as passive and active voice in a syntactic tree. This classmate had explained a previous concept to me complete with colored markers indicating each process. I approached her, and she whipped out her notebook filled with color-coded examples. She explained how using different pens helped her understand and recognize each step of the activity. I was a little surprised by how such a simple task could make things so much clearer and more organized. She continued to explain to me how one must move the ending noun phrase of a sentence to the front to create passive voice.
These are just a couple of examples of when I have been pleasantly surprised by what I have learned. I deem these two experiences successful because each taught me not only about the concepts but how to relate it to other fields and how to take simple steps to enhance my learning.

Noel Haro is a Communication student and Los Angeles native. He wrote his essay in reflection of an important person that helped him during his freshmen year at a university.
Here is Noel's experience with the #UnexpedED:

One of my most valuable learning experiences took place my first semester at the California State University of Northridge in 2013. The first class I attended on that campus was English 114 with Professor Stephen Florian. This class was my professor’s first experience teaching on a college campus, and he turned out to be my favorite professor because of his personality, teaching style, and understanding of students’ situations. Most of my classmates in that class would agree that he was an outstanding instructor because about 80% chose him as a professor for a second time since freshmen are required to take English for their first two semesters.
During the first semester I had Florian, he divided the classroom into groups. The groups consisted of 3 people and the beautiful thing about being in these groups was that we were not being graded in any way for our interactions, and we did not have any projects due as a group. The groups were organized so that we could meet people and get into our comfort zones. Being in groups with students made the environment better because we felt a sense of belonging. In our groups, we shared our essay’s and gave each other feedback. My group members in that class were named Ozly and Tori, and being in a group with them was a helpful college experience.
Another thing that Professor Florian did well was meeting with us on a personal level. On one occasion we had to meet with him for about half an hour and talk about an essay we were working on. During this meeting, my professor read a paper that I had written about my Prom experience, and he complimented my boldness on writing about personal matters. He complimented my writing style; I could not have been any happier as a student at that point in time. As a freshmen, I was so proud to be praised by a College Professor, and his words encouraged me to continue my educational process at CSUN.
I found it amazing that the professor met with us outside of class to help us out. Not being able to connect with professors has been an issue for me throughout my higher education experiences. I believe that students will perform better academically if they believe that the professor cares about them. The learning experience depends a lot on the professor. Professor Florian helping me become a better writer was one of the best moments in my higher education.

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Learning Outcomes for the 21st Century

6/6/2016

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A new book by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, “Improving Quality of American Higher Education: Learning Outcomes and Assessments for the 21st Century”, analyzes the ideas of faculty from 6 most common college majors - biology, business, communications, economics, history, and sociology - on what they consider the major competencies in their disciplines. Here you can see a list of such learning outcomes for each of these disciplines. In their insightful interview to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the authors call on faculty to discuss these competencies among themselves, and even share and get feedback from their students. As they say, “We think that this is particularly useful today when people are asking questions about what the inherent value is of pursuing a particular course of study.” Do these learning outcomes apply to how you teach? Share with us!

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The Best Places to Find OER

5/31/2016

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As we have previously mentioned, one of the hardest things about incorporating open education resources into your curriculum is finding vetted and easy-to-access open education resources. To help you with this search we’ve put together a list of Higher Ed sites and organizations that promote the use of OER and make it easy for you to search for what you need.
In March, EducationDive published a write up of their Higher Ed OER suggestions, here’s their list:
Faculty Enlight (Barnes & Noble)
MERLOT (California State University)
Open Course Library
Open Textbook Library (University of Minnesota)
Openstax

In addition to the sites mentioned by EducationDive, you can look to the following:
Cool4Ed
OERCommons
OCWSearch (a collaboration between the Open Education Consortium and MERLOT)
P2PU (Peer 2 Peer University)
University of Arizona OER site (great sources of Images)
Open Washington Initiative (funded by the State)
The SPARC listing of OER initiatives in North America

Let us know which resources you’ve found useful!

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Which OER Resources Do You Use?

5/17/2016

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The school year is drawing to a close, and some of you may have started creating a list of course resources for the next semester. Have you thought about teaching with Open Educational Resources? How do you go about choosing them?

Your institution may subscribe to many well-known OER databases that would help to alleviate the common issues of quality and to license when choosing OERs. Another way to look at OERs is to see them as a pedagogical tool. As DeRosa and Robinson write: “By replacing a static textbook — or other stable learning material — with one that is openly licensed, faculty have the opportunity to create a new relationship between learners and the information they access in the course. Instead of thinking of knowledge as something students need to download into their brains, we start thinking of knowledge as something continuously created and revised.”

As many of you know, the Café Learn’s platform has at its core the dynamic Idea Exchange – a virtual space for instructors to add and curate course material sharing them with other instructors. Here you can discover activities and tips from your colleagues who may teach in the same discipline at another college. You can also add your own content. In addition, the design of the Idea Exchange allows you to use this material in a pedagogically sound way by integrating a piece of content into an activity that would appear in your students learning path linked to your particular learning outcomes, or based on your students’ progress in class.

We welcome your thoughts on the use of open educational resources in your classrooms.

Blog post by Tatiana Tatarchevskiy, Café Learn Community Engagement Manager

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What Needs to Happen to Make OER Ubiquitous

4/30/2016

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A move to open and free education resources is now a trend; there’s even an official Open Education Week. Nonetheless, embracing and using OER (open education resources) is much easier said than done, and there are a few reasons for this.

There are two barriers to quick adoption of OER: 1. migration from comprehensive “textbook” to granular and disparate content, and 2. the lack of easy discoverability of non “textbook” content.

Today, the majority of publisher content and OER state initiatives focus on textbooks. But, many instructors are moving away for comprehensive textbooks-whether they be commercial or open--regardless of the OER movement as they are looking for content that is more modular and customizable to their specific curricula. The modular approach is just as desired when looking for OER, so “textbooks” that are open and free are not necessarily improving teaching and learning.

In order to make the use of OER more effective and efficient, instructors need:

Better discoverability for granular uses of OER
Easier ways to collaborate with other instructions in curation of OER
Professional development, from digital literacy to integrating OER with best practices in teaching and learning
Top down combined with bottom-up support/funding/mandates/structure

The highest quality repositories of OER are filled with first-generation OER that is comprehensive and similar to commercial textbooks. These include California State University System’s MERLOT the University of Minnesota’s Open Textbook Library and the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges Open Course Library. The question is, how we help instructors and institutions access, create, and share content? How and who in the OER movement will facilitate ways to champion adopters of OER and mainstream it? Café Learn is certainly one such tool, and others are emerging. We want to know what you’re doing and what you are using.

Blog post by Carrie O'Donnell, Café Learn CEO and Co-Founder

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Learning Analytics and Class Networks

4/1/2016

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Figure 1 First-day slide showing results from a prior class

Background
There can be little doubt that understanding how instructors instruct and how learners learn is important and challenging in higher education. There is currently much discussion regarding the subject of learning analytics and how meaningful results from such analyses can inform students, faculty, institutions, and other key stakeholders.

One dimension that is central to quality learning analytics, as information for students or information for instructors, is the ability to challenge core assumptions about the learning environment. Students may hold beliefs that may or may not align with instructor desires. Of course, instructors may hold beliefs that may or may not be linked to student outcomes.

Student Networks
In my experience, one of the most overlooked areas of evaluating and assessing student performance is the aspect of student networks. Of the many types of student networks, the understanding how students form self-initiated, study-partner networks are particularly important for improving academic and professional success. Ideally, this understanding should lead to interventions that can assist underserved and underrepresented student groups specifically.

With respect to out-of-class study partners, my observation is that most instructors don’t know which students are studying together (and, therefore, which are studying alone), much less other salient information such as the scope, nature, degree, technical discourse, technological exchange medium, and directional value-proposition of the relationship.

Fortunately, network theory, and just as important, network practice and readily-accessible tools, are available to assist in this classroom analytical endeavor. Understanding class networks in various ways is a natural complement to existing learning analytics regarding student performance, such as those provided by important courseware firms such as Café Learn.

Motivation
Students are facing an increasing number of large lecture hall classes and an increasing number of hybrid or online classes. Higher education students should be spending at least as much time studying out-of-class as they are for contact hours in-class, and the students live a networked life on social media. Most instructors would like to assume that their students:

know to form study-partner networks without a faculty-imposed requirement
can demonstrate skills that are attractive to potential study-partners and choose study-partners well
are able to leverage the strengths in the study-partner relationship and implement interventions to overcome any deficits in the study-partner relationship

As mentioned already, challenging conventional wisdom and closely-guarded beliefs is key. Understanding study-partner networks in some depth can help instructors how students learn, and therefore, improve learning outcomes.

Study-Partner Networks—Basic
The simplest approach might be to simply ask the following question: “Do you have a study partner?” Fortunately, in contemporary academic life, instructors have access to more electronic tools to gather such data. Also, merely asking the study-partner question reinforces that idea that study-partners matter. Perhaps the best use of such network data is to combine that data with final class grade data at the end of the current class and use the combination of both as a motivational tool for the subsequent class. Most instructors teach the same course in a following, often immediately subsequent semester or quarter. Effectively, the results from the learning analytics for one class can serve to inspire and motivate students in the next class. If the process of collecting, analyzing, and presenting the study-partner network data can be automated in whole or in part, then the benefits can accrue to the students with only a small cost on the part of the instructor.

I teach all levels of business students from undergraduate freshmen to graduate students; but mostly, I teach undergraduate juniors. Additionally, I teach at a large, urban, comprehensive university that has nearly two-thirds of its students as transfer students. For an introductory course in Principles of Management and Organizational Behavior, I simply add the results of the study-partner learning analytics to the first-day motivational lecture for students. A class such as this involves a visceral understanding theory and practice of human motivation; this topic is precisely aligned with the idea of an optimal study-partner network.
The slide that I used most recently as part of my first-day motivation presentation is shown in Figure 1 below. I’ve been using basic study-partner results for more than five years in this course. Initially, slightly more than 7% of the students chose a study-partner (data not shown); currently, as can be seen from Figure 1, almost one-third of the students selected a study-partner (the data shown is from Fall, 2015). In all semesters, the difference in final grade results between the two groups (study-partner or not) has been statistically significant (the test shown in Figure 1 makes a small adjustment to account for slightly unequal variances across the two groups). The details on such a slide can be altered to suit the level of prerequisite statistical literacy in the class.
Perhaps more important is that this increase in study-partner participation is associated with a gradual reduction in the number of low grades (DUFs) in the course. Presenting the results from this simple study-partner network learning analytic has helped reduce the DUF rate (or rather, increase the persistence rate) by approximately half (again, data not shown). Clearly, these results do not come from a rigorous, control-based study using formal experimental design. There may be context-, course-, or instructor-specific factors involved, but that discussion is beyond the scope of this brief article. Results such as the ones presented here are indeed the real world of learning analytics. There are patterns and practices in learning networks that matter. Recall that the goal here is to help students, sometimes in small ways, to achieve success. Part of that process, at least for this Management course, is not to require study-partner teams but rather to recommend them. It is that self-starting, self-efficacious initiative that is very valuable in class. And digital natives like visuals!

Study-Partner Networks—Intermediate
In the Basic case, we ask one simple question and implement one simple idea, and we observe improvements in one or more desirable outcomes, especially with respect to helping students that may need the help the most. Some instructors see the benefit and may just continue the established intervention even if the marginal improvements are minor (i.e., they asymptotically approach diminishing returns because it becomes increasingly more difficult to substantively improve every possible DUF instance). Other instructors see the benefit too but wish to embrace and extend the study-partner networking model. Collecting more data regarding the study-partner relationship does this.

I occasionally collect the following pieces of data regarding the study-partner relationship beyond the Yes/No response as discussed previously. I’ve collected data on the number and names of other partners, who initiated the relationship, which week of the semester the relationship began, the frequency and nature of electronic exchanges, the frequency and nature of face-to-face exchanges, the balance of the direction of the bulk of the learning between or among study-partners, what types of coursework was studied for (e.g., written assignments, exercises, quizzes, exams, etc.), and a subjective sense of the overall value of the relationship. In addition to self-reported data from a typical survey instrument, some faculty have experimented with collecting student communication data, for example, in email or chat sessions, or more persuasively, in deliberate on-line discussion forums in a Learning Management System (LMS). Each element of exchange is effectively a different network. Additional attributes can be collected too including Sex, Major, GPA, Transfer Status?, etc. Note that study-partners within the same team will likely differ as to the overall value of the relationship so that relationships can also be directed as well as undirected.

A range of visual diagrams can be generated and used in various student-, faculty-, or institutional-contexts. These diagrams are referred to as sociograms. A simple sociogram is displayed in Figure 2. Note that two of teams have three individuals in them, and one team consists of four individuals (the student names have been anonymized). There are open-source software tools—such as R, Python, Gephi, and SocNetV—that generate these diagrams. Note that each additional piece of network data beyond Yes/No is essentially a different part of the study-partner network relationship. Whether all the data should be included, weighted, and displayed together, or whether specific analyses should be done for specific individuals (referred to as ego networks) is a non-trivial matter but one that can be discussed among colleagues.

Even more advanced network analyses are possible. Instructors (or institutions) could generate sociograms answering questions such as; which students took which courses or which course-sections together previously? Beyond exploratory analysis there is an entire range of confirmatory analyses for network data including comparing empirical observations with random graph model expectations.

Figure 2 Sociogram displaying study-partner teams

Summary
This article has discussed how class networks can complement learning analytics in the contemporary higher education classroom. Specifically, the study-partner relationship was discussed but other key learning networks abound.

Blog post by: Wayne Smith, Ph.D., Department of Management, California State University, Northridge ws@csun.edu
Professor Smith currently teaches business and management course at Cal State Northridge. Professor Smith has also taught at Cal State Channel Islands, UC Irvine, and Santa Monica City College, and earned a Ph.D. from the School of Information Systems and Technology at Claremont Graduate University in 2008. You can read more about his work on his website: OCW (OpenCourseWare). Readers are welcome to contact the author for additional details or with questions.

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Let’s Talk Frankly about Unbundling Higher Ed Courses...and Maybe the Whole Higher Ed Experience

2/28/2016

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Image from Data, Technology, and the Great Unbundling of Higher Education, Educause Review

There has been a lot of talk lately about unbundling the college degree. And many colleges are testing this concept by creating competency-based programs. Unbundling is a big idea, and hard to implement. However, unbundling a course is quite manageable, and something that any instructor can choose to do.

In their article in the Educause Review, Data, Technology, and the Great Unbundling of Higher Education, Ryan Craig and Allison Williams suggest that higher education could increase student success and workforce preparedness by adopting some of the practices of leading technology companies. Craig and Williams outline the idea that today’s learner is in desperate need of a higher education experience that goes beyond the course catalog, as follows:

Full-stack providers that hope to achieve the higher education equivalent of Apple's or Uber's success will have to find a way to do three fundamental things: (1) develop and deliver specific high-quality educational experiences that produce graduates with capabilities that specific employers desperately want; (2) work with students to solve financing problems; and (3) connect students with employers during and following the educational experience and make sure students get a job.
Craig and Williams follow up with the example of the success of bootcamp programs. We realize these types of programs are not what every learner is looking for in their higher ed experience, especially if they pursue degrees in liberal arts and humanities (which research shows are worthwhile investments). Nonetheless, Craig and Williams outline the following outcomes-focused approach, which can be applied to teaching all types of disciplines:

Traditional program design is based on a system of credit hour inputs rather than outcomes...A simpler, better system would be reverse-engineered by starting with student outcomes, then moving to the assessments that prove that the outcomes have been achieved, and only then turning to the question of what curricula best prepare students for the assessments. Fortunately, technology allows higher education to make this shift.
Craig and Williams also illustrate how bundling of the entire higher ed experience does not create the best ROI for many of today’s learners:
Bundling has been central to the higher education business model for centuries. Colleges and universities combine content and a wide range of products and services into a single package, for which they charge "tuition and fees." Tuition and fees cover everything from remedial coursework to elective courses to advanced courses in a chosen major and, extending far beyond the academic program... As a result, when students pay for a degree, they are also buying products and services related to real estate, dining, sports, and research. As Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX, asks: "Universities are responsible for admissions, research, facilities management, housing, health care, credentialing, food service, athletic facilities, career guidance and placement, and much more. Which of these items should be at the core of a university and add value to that experience?"

It's a good question, because although these items don't add time-to-credential, as the academic program bundle does, they add to the cost, which has the same effect on return on investment.

To change the bundling of the university experience is feasible but will take time. For now, we (instructors, institutions, content and platform providers) have the option and tools to unbundle courses, or to make courses that are student-centered. What do we mean by unbundling the course?

Ensuring that the course blueprint is based on a measurable set of student learning outcomes (or competencies).
Creating assessments that enable the student to demonstrate mastery of the clear learning outcomes. Providing learning activities that support mastery of the content.
Enabling students to learn by doing, learn from each other, and interact with the instructor to promote deeper learning rather than regurgitation. The goal is transferability--the ability for the learner to transfer the learning to new contexts.
Giving students ability to direct their learning and personalize the pathway.
Micro-credentialing so that students can build a portfolio of outcomes.

These tactics of unbundling are proven, research-based strategies for teaching and learning. While this new approach might seem overwhelming to some, many instructors are implementing such unbundling iteratively, from term to term. The instructors in our Engaged Learning Community are experimenting with their course design, development and delivery and using these strategies to promote deeper learning, and yes unbundling.

What are your thoughts on this topic? Have you been considering new ways to develop your course? We’d love to hear from you.

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How to Drive Off-the-Charts Student Engagement In Your Classroom

2/7/2016

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Eric Mazur Teaching with Peer Instruction at Harvard

I am a huge fan of Peer Instruction. I first learned about the approach while observing a class of 500 non-chemistry majors at a large research university. After giving a short lecture, the professor changed pace. He put a question about chemical reactions on the overhead projector and directed the class by saying, “Ok, take a moment to think about this question on your own first and then respond.” The room was silent for about two minutes. Students then started pushing buttons on clickers to send in their answers. Then the professor charged, “All right, turn to your neighbor and discuss!”
The auditorium erupted. Students stood up, moved around the room, and were loudly and animatedly discussing…chemistry.
In that moment, my life changed. How, I had to know, did the instructor pull that off? The level of engagement I witnessed was unprecedented. I would end up dedicating my career to trying to help design those kinds of educational experiences for others. I didn’t know it at the time but was I was seeing the first part of a perfect implementation of Peer Instruction.

What is Peer Instruction?

What is Peer Instruction?

ABCD Flashcard from San Diego State University

Peer Instruction is a research-based, student-centered teaching method. It was originally developed by Eric Mazur to improve undergraduate physics learning at Harvard University. While students teach and learn from each other in a Peer Instruction environment, this does not mean there is no place for a lecture. Instead in Peer Instruction, faculty leverage the power of student engagement to make lectures come alive.

How does Peer Instruction work?
Before class
To use Peer Instruction in your class, the first thing you need to do is prepare a little differently than you would for a 45-minute lecture.
Start by selecting a concept, idea or topic you want students to learn and prepare a 2-5 minute mini-lecture on that topic. Then, prepare a set of questions or ConcepTests that will test students’ understanding of that content.
Here is an expert tip: Make sure your question does not ask students to simply repeat a verbatim response to something you said in your lecture. And most important of all, be very purposeful in using questions that are directly tied to the specific ideas, concepts, or skills you want students to develop. One theory I have about why Peer Instruction approaches don’t result in improved performance in some classrooms has to do with the kinds of questions posed. If Peer Instruction doesn’t work, I always ask - did I strategically direct students’ attention to the underlying concepts or skills that were tested on higher stakes assessments? (Read more about writing effective questions here.)
Next, you need to pick a method to collect student responses to your questions. You can use high-tech options, such as clickers or classroom responses systems, or low-tech options such as ABCD flashcards.

Turn to Your Neighbor, The Official Peer Instruction Blog

Peer Instruction Resources
Since the 1990s, PI has spread across the globe and is practiced by thousands of educators across the disciplines in a variety of institutional types. For a more detailed protocol for implementing Peer Instruction, see our Quick Start Guide or many of the articles on Turn to Your Neighbor, the Official Peer Instruction Blog. You can also find other users in your field, city or possibly on your campus who are currently practicing the method at the Peer Instruction Network.
After that first experience with Peer Instruction so many years ago, I knew educational experiences of phenomenal quality were possible in science classrooms. I also knew that I wanted to spend my career designing them. So, I spent four years studying the approach as a fellow in Mazur’s group at Harvard University. I have implemented the method in my own classrooms at Columbia University and The University of Texas at Austin, I write a blog on the method, and facilitate a worldwide network of thousands of educators who use and love Peer Instruction. It is my favorite go-to method for driving off the charts engagement in any classroom.

Blog post by Julie Schell, EdD, Director and Clinical Assistant Professor, The University of Texas at Austin

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