Randy Bass: What is next-generation learning?
Speaker Series – The Future of the University and the Future of Learning
Responses to Randy Bass' presentation
Thank you for inviting such an interesting and inspiring speaker. I very much enjoyed Randy Bass's presentation.
I think Randy Bass's lecture was spot on - we need to think about what we're offering and how it is better than what someone can obtain from the web (I expressed these same points in my reaction to the David Ward presentation).
I also embrace Randy's proposition of integrating co-curricular activities into the credit structure. As it stands now, all these co-curricular activities require additional time and energy above and beyond the time and energy that must be devoted to obtaining 90 credits. By including these activities into the credit structure, as Randy Bass suggested, it is creating a greater opportunity for students to engage in these activities. Also, it is sending a message that the university sees these activities (essentially the formation of a responsible citizen) as holding value equal to that of the formation of intellect and skill. I've already discussed my views on this with Lisa Ostiguy. It was reaffirming to hear Randy Bass advocating for the same.
Another important point Randy Bass made was with respect to how we structure our curriculum. We really need to move away from silo teaching to a more integrated approach in presenting subject matter. That's something that will help set us apart from web-based offerings, which are subject-based. If we are going to survive, we need to provide an exciting environment that fosters cross fertilization of ideas in order to solve world problems. I think that there are too many administrative and physical barriers at the moment for that to happen. It would be great to have a space (similar to the CTL white board idea) where faculty and students from various disciplines can interact and discuss solutions to big problems. You can have a "problem of the week" and invite the community to offer their input - this can be on physical whiteboards or virtual whiteboards.
Dr. Bass' ideas were provocative indeed. I left thinking about all of the various directions the university could grow in. Two ideas struck me as I reflected on his presentation:
1. Dr. Bass' focus was about striving to provide a 'high impact integrative curriculum' in order to offer learning experiences that are valuable, engaging, and meaningful. He mentioned that these high impact practices are typically tied closely to the institutional brand & identity. The Concordia brand is "Education for the Real World". We certainly have some high impact practices already in place, but it would be useful for the Strategic Directions Advisory Committee to identify the existing high impact practices, examine if/how they could be improved or enhanced, an research and recommend high impact practices we should adopt. This work should be done at a macro, meso, and micro level (across the university, within departments and programs, and within individual courses). I believe this analysis would help determine how we can continue to live up to our brand and meet rapidly evolving student needs.
2. Dr. Bass talked about the need to explore opportunities to re-invent constraints while developing learning constructs that are interest-driven, unscripted, peer-supported, productive, with a shared purpose, etc. Using problem-based & service-learning methodologies and leveraging online technologies would support many of these targets, but meeting ever-evolving needs in a timely fashion is also a necessity. The Strategic Directions Advisory Committee should explore how the university can be pre-emptive in their approach to offering students a learning experience that is relevant, provocative and timely. The Continuing Education Department would be a practical way to customize learning experiences 'on-demand' for either non-credit compliments to a formal credit program or as a means to upgrading skills and expertise for professionals. There is more flexibility in the turn around time to mount a course, and they can place more emphasis on experiential learning rather than 'high-stakes' results. We should strive to not only provide education for the real world, but educate in real world constructs.
I thank you for opening this discussion, and wish the committee great success in your work on behalf of all of us at the university.
The Randy Bass presentation was one of the most thoughtful attempts to understand where universities can head in the future I have ever been privileged to attend. His emphasis on the university's three fold mission (the formation of men and women, knowledge creation through scholarship and research, and working for the public good and the common good) is necessary in this alienating age of disconnected individuals. Students need mentoring and the training to see the value of learning as a journey. This is why blended learning and experiential learning will become more important in the future. No MOOC or imaginary "Google Course" can replace good teachers in the real world. Real education for the real world remains solid, grounded, conversational and communal, and Concordia can certainly learn from the Georgetown models.
Yes-let's make more teaching and community outreach a valued part of our mission.
I was impressed by Randy’s presentation. He persuaded me to be more open-minded about the possibilities that some innovations may create. I tend to be rather old school in the way I go about teaching. When I feel pressed to introduce more and more technology into the classroom, I may wish that I had theme music and pyro, but apart from using e-mail and posting assignments to course websites, I’m not generally convinced that gadgetry will improve pedagogy. I do recognize, however, that some adaptation is needful and potentially advantageous. Just like an ethnic minority group invites its own ruination if it stubbornly refuses to adapt and accommodate itself to the dominant culture, no less than it would should it opt to assimilate completely, the modern classroom cannot ignore technological changes – yet it should not simply submit to them either. Technologies that respect and enhance the ways in which human beings learn should be considered. Supposing that new technologies are generative of new modes of learning, and allowing them to dictate how we try to teach on the basis of their untested promise, is, however, misguided.
The most important point to take away from Randy’s presentation is the observation that if universities believe that they can prepare themselves for the demands of the future by focusing ever more on content delivery and job training, then they are only going to guarantee their obsolescence. Universities depend on having professors who want to teach and students who that want to learn in order to remain an institution with a distinctive raison d'être. The personal element in education, both in the relationship between teachers and students, and in terms of the internal development of students themselves, cannot be abolished. Universities should strive to be environments conducive to the cultivation of students as complex human beings instead of treating them like mere receptacles for information and executors of tasks. If you can learn everything about anything by surfing the Internet, and the university becomes merely a credentializing brand, its value will wane. Perhaps it is already the case that a self-motivated person with some aptitude can learn on his or her own almost everything that an undergraduate curriculum offers by going online—but that was always true of good public libraries, too. Still, Will Huntings are rare. Most people, even most bright people, need personal interaction with good teachers so as to learn and develop. Randy’s presentation highlighted possible ways that universities could revitalize rather than eliminate this element of the university experience in order to thrive in the decades to come rather than wither away. I hope that Randy’s ideas regarding the university’s role in the formation of students will not be disregarded as unimportant or impractical, let alone sectarian. Unfortunately, I imagine that many of his proposals are more readily implemented in an American-style private institution where tuition is high. Giving individual students individualized attention is expensive.
More about Randy Bass
In Randy Bass’s view, our understanding of learning has far outpaced our practices of teaching. This disconnect is beginning to force universities to confront their standard ways of organizing students’ educational experiences.
Pressure on the status quo is coming from two directions, says Bass: “On the one side is a growing body of data about the power of experiential learning in the co‑curriculum; and on the other side is the world of informal learning and the participatory culture of the Internet.” These pressures are moving us into a “post-course era” in which we can't assume that the most significant learning takes place in self-contained courses.
In this context, Bass asks, how do universities need to adapt their structures and practices given that so much valuable learning is occurring outside the formal curriculum?
Randy Bass, vice-provost for Education, has been leading a visioning process at Georgetown University focused on how to design a whole-person education for the digital age. As part of this initiative, Georgetown is launching a series of curriculum experiments focused on rethinking how to deliver a high-impact education. The feeling at Georgetown is that the decisions taken in the next two to three years may set the course of the institution for the next 20-30 years.
Disrupting Ourselves: the Problem of Learning in Higher
Educause Review (March/April 2012)
In a concise diagnosis of learning in the digital age, Bass welcomes us to the “post-course era” in undergraduate education. So much significant learning takes place outside of formal courses, Bass asserts, that we need nothing less than a “recentered curriculum.” Courses are not going away, Bass concedes, but the “imagined meaning” that we give to courses probably should.
Bass identifies two key pressures that are being placed on the course-based formal curriculum: “the growing body of data about the power of experiential learning in the co-curriculum; and on the other side … the world of informal learning and the participatory culture of the Internet.”
A recentered curriculum responds to these pressures by moving more experiential and participatory forms of learning into the formal curriculum. New learning technologies can play an important facilitating role in this movement because they make it possible to replicate some features of high-impact informal learning inside of courses and classrooms.
Team-based approaches to teaching, which involve course and curriculum planning in conjunction with those providing academic support services outside of class, help to ensure greater coherence and alignment between instructors and the host of others supporting student learning on campus.
For Bass, “the connection between integrative thinking, or experiential learning, and the social network, or participatory culture, is no longer peripheral to our enterprise but is the nexus that should guide and reshape our curricula in the current disruptive moment in higher education learning.”
Randy Bass is vice-provost for Education and professor of English at Georgetown University. For 13 years he was the founding executive director of Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) where he continues as a senior scholar for pedagogical research. The CNDLS is a campus-wide center, supporting faculty work in new learning and research environments.
He has been working at the intersections of new media technologies and the scholarship of teaching and learning for 20 years, including serving as director and principal investigator of the Visible Knowledge Project, a five-year scholarship of teaching and learning project involving 70 faculty on 21 university and college campuses.
In January 2009, he published a collection of essays and synthesis of findings from the Visible Knowledge Project under the title, “The Difference that Inquiry Makes: A Collaborative Case Study on Technology and Learning, from the Visible Knowledge Project,” (co-edited with Bret Eynon) in the digital journal Academic Commons (January 2009: http://academiccommons.org).
From 2003-2009 he was a consulting scholar for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where he served, in 1998-99, as a Pew Scholar and Carnegie Fellow. In 1999, he won the EDUCAUSE Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Technology and Undergraduate Education.
He is the author and editor of numerous books, articles, and electronic projects, including Disrupting Ourselves: the Problem of Learning in Higher Education (Educause Review, March/April 2012, Border Texts: Cultural Readings for Contemporary Writers (Houghton Mifflin, 1998, 2002), and with Bret Eynon, co-editor of Intentional Media: The Crossroads Conversations on Teaching and Technology in the American Cultural History Classroom (a double issue of the journal Works & Days, 1998/99). He is currently a senior scholar with the American Association for Colleges and Universities.
Bass has an MA and PhD (1987; 1991) from Brown University in English and American Literature. He obtained his BA in English and History from the University of the Pacific.
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