Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education: Reviewed by Donald M. Norris
Ms. Kamenetz’s latest book, DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education sets an even higher goal. Its purpose is to inspire people to think seriously about changing profoundly our approach to postsecondary education, personal learning, and employment. The American model for universal higher education is acclaimed around the world. It has even becomes a sort of “cargo cult” for developing countries. But the author finds our current version to be too expensive, too complex, and too bundled. Moreover, American higher education is based on physical campuses that have been participating in a form of competitive arms race of campus amenities, expanded services, and proliferating administrative functions and staffs.
In conclusion, this is a provocative, important book. It frames these important issues in a direct, journalistic style that is sure to attract a wider audience than insiders’ books on the subject. Ms. Kamenetz will surely be tempted soon to write the sequel (perhaps “Fixing DIY Disasters: How US Graduates Got Their Groove Back”?), either looking back from the future or looking to the future, maybe influenced by higher education futurists such as Paul Lefrere (9) and their projects on DIY universities for global audiences (like www.role-project.eu). Either way, I anticipate that she will be able to report on lots of failed experiments in the sustainability of free-to-consume courses, whether self-assembled (DIY) or not, and she will find a smaller but respectable number of viable, sustainable, fully transformed instances of higher learning, which deliver the success that the US needs and that enable learners to live their dreams, within their means. Meanwhile, the US continues to need globally-elite levels of excellence and innovation, sufficient to generate the surplus wealth that we need to invest in our futures. If Ms. Kamenetz’s readers can take us past the free-trumps-fee game of today, to the more thoughtful and globally-aware debates that can accompany the choices that people make in DIY learning, that will be all to the good.
Labels: change, DIY U, environmental scanning, futuring, information technology, Kamenetz, learning, Norris, transformation
What If College Is Not For Everyone?
 At a time when many in higher education leadership, like the Lumina Foundation, among others, are calling for change to graduate more and more students with degrees, others are focusing for the moment on the question: What if a college education just isn't for everyone? " It's fine for most kids to go to college, of course, (but) it is not obvious to me that that is the best option for the majority," says Mike Gould, founder of New Futures, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that provides scholarships for low-income students pursuing anything from a four-year degree to a massage-therapy certification. "Some education may be a good thing or it may just be a lot of debt." The problem, Gould and others say, is that many high schools focus so much on college that low-achieving students fall through the cracks. A Public Agenda report this month raises similar concerns about high school guidance counseling. It follows up on a December survey that concluded most young workers who don't have a college degree "are in their jobs by chance, not by choice," and that guidance toward a career path "is hardly clear and purposeful."
Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring: - March 24–26: Cambridge, MA - "Strengths and Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats"
- April 5–7, San Diego, CA - "Smart Planning in an Era of Uncertainty"
- April 7, Houston, TX - "Sustaining Higher Education in an Age of Challenge"
Labels: access, affordability, costs, learning, matriculation, value
College Degrees Without Going to Class
More than one-fourth of all college students are taking at least one online class. In its "Room for Debate" series, The New York Times recently asked a number of commentators "Who benefits most from online courses — students or colleges? Are online classes as educationally effective as in-classroom instruction? Should more post-secondary education take place online?" Respondents include: Greg von Lehmen, provost and chief academic officer at University of Maryland University College ( as good as classroom lessons); Robert Zemsky, professor of education and chairman of The Learning Alliance at the University of Pennsylvania ( another false gold rush); Anya Kamenetz, author of the forthcoming DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education ( better and cheaper); Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University and the author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future ( making the personal connection); Karen Swan, James Stukel Distinguished Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Illinois Springfield (flexibility and time); and Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics at Cornell University and director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute ( needs more tech support). A good discussion.
Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring: Labels: environmental scanning, futuring, learning, online learning, technology
Waste Not the Learning Productivity Crisis: Transforming Educational Opportunity into Educational Assurance
This 74-page monograph (PDF) by William H. Graves is a "Web Bonus" from EDUCAUSE Review, which says of the monograph: "The time is right for higher education to pursue “best for the world” strategies enabled by the strategic use of information technology to improve learning productivity by serving more students more effectively while simultaneously creating a privately and publicly affordable, stable financial model for learning—securing education’s future as an affordable first‐priority imperative for students, families, donors, employers, and governments." Graves begins the piece with three quotations: If we can learn in the cloud, why is education still the slowest form of learning? —Anonymous student The medium is the message. — Marshall McLuhan (1964) Education is the slowest form of learning. —Anthony Schwartz (1964) McLuhan’s meme about the entwinement between human communication and its enabling technologies remains insightful, even after an Internet-mediated global community of intertwined minds, cultures, and economies subsumed his television- facilitated “global village.” Virtual communities form ephemerally and more naturally from the bottom up than from the top down. This new human dynamic is virally innervated by what the technorati call the “computing cloud,” where we engage content and each other via Google, YouTube, Facebook, free blog sites, and other “cloudware.”
Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring: Labels: Graves, learning, learning productivity
Pursuing Needless Innovations
Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) argues for the value of "traditional" learning and matriculation, and wonders why America's elites don't seem to want the great education they got, for the rest of the population. (Here is the Zephyr Teachout essay that we think is the one he refers to. It's also worth reading. Ekman's essay is here, from University Business: Most Americans today don’t harbor resentments against their alma maters. Nor is the popular critique of higher education mainly a matter of outrage over high tuition. Rather, the public criticism of colleges is, to a surprising extent, aimed at the educational experience itself. Discarding the baby with the bathwater, Zephyr Teachout’s widely-circulated essay argues that the traditional classroom-based college will soon be replaced by online education, and that the differences in reputation among colleges will no longer matter. I don’t know where Teachout went to college, but her view—especially that a college’s prestige won’t matter—seems more wishful than realistic.
Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring: Labels: academic planning, innovation, institutional planning, learning, learning spaces, liberal education
The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s
SCUP members have shown themselves to be extremely interested, professionally, in generational differences in learning style. After all, if you are planning for the future of your campus, it's essential that it be ready to accommodate what the students bring with them, including the technology tools they use. And that's true not just for physical space, but for virtual space and functionalities as well.
In The New York Times, Brad Stone writes that his two-year old daughter calls his Kindle his "book," which gave him some pause. He's not even sold on the Kindle and she's going to grow up understanding that something like the Kindle is in fact a "book."
So, he looked around a bit and found what we at SCUP have been seeing: There are "mini-generation gaps" that are much smaller in terms of the years we traditionally think of as "generations." “People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. “College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.” We really have our jobs cut out for us, trying to be appropriately prepared for the communications and learning preferences of young people when those preferences can change with every 2-4-year cohort, not just every generation.
Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring: Labels: academic planning, generations, IT planning, learning, learning space design, learning styles
Teacherless Classrooms: Can We?
"Today the dream has returned, [we have] systems through which chunks of teaching can be 'scaled up' and beamed to hundreds of thousands worldwide.” in Campus Technology magazine, Trant Batson calls this "the FedEx or UPS view of learning; knowledge disconnected from the knower; knowledge with no social or cultural context; knowledge ripped from the conversation, its conversational threads torn and dangling; knowledge as a commodity. How far adrift have we gone that the idea of beaming 'chunks of teaching' to hundreds of thousands worldwide could be called a 'dream? I thought we tried that with television, didn’t we?" Then he makes this twist: A large lecture hall is not the answer, nor is sending lectures out through iTunes, or other media channels. Knowledge is not a commodity. And learning is not performance. Learning is conversation. So, then, the question becomes: How do we extend the conversation to more people and how can that conversation be authentic and lead to active and experiential learning?" Labels: faculty, futuring, learning, trends, Web 2.0
Academe and the Decline of News Media
We're watching the traditional business of "news" crash and burn. What effect will the decline of news media have on higher education? This series of thoughtful essays in The Chronicle Review could provide you some deep thinking over the American Thanksgiving holiday coming up: After noting that he would prefer newspapers without a government to government without newspapers, Thomas Jefferson added, 'But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them' . . . I talk to my students about the news every chance I get. They're so smart; they're so curious. I'm fascinated by how they get their news. What shocks me is that so many of them so rarely follow a story to its bottom. They can talk about anything, brilliantly, for five minutes." Labels: learning, news, news media, publishing
Academic Libraries: 'Nothing More than Computer Labs with SOfas and Coffee?
Johann Neem posits that "across the country deans of libraries are giving up the fight and changing their mission rather than fighting to save an important academic institution. Rather than make clear why we need academic libraries, the library’s leaders are seeking instead to become vague learning environments which, when boiled down to their essence, are nothing more than computer labs with sofas and coffee." He sees a dual threat to academic libraries and other support areas: Declining funding and the campus professionals more tied to their "fields" - such as library science - than to the core purposes of the library. (He sees similar problems in student affairs and higher education administration in general.) Labels: assessing student learning, learning, libraries, mission
Intellectual Entrepreneurship: An Authentic Foundation for Higher Education Reform
The "blurb" we wrote for this Planning for Higher Education article says "Our relationship with the traditions and purpose of a humanistic education, it appears, are at odds with the career environment most students inhabit after graduation." The authors, Gary D. Beckman and Richard A. Chewitz, provide case studies of innovative entrepreneurship initiatives at the University of Texas, Austin, as well as background and discussion of the concept of "entrepreneurship education" in academic programming. "From our perspective, entrepreneurship—broadly conceived—is an intrinsic human right to change the status quo, and intellectual entrepreneurship is a philosophy and pedagogy to exercise this act by educating citizen-scholars—agents of change who own, are accountable for, and put their knowledge to work for the betterment of themselves and society. As we collaborate in the development of campuswide efforts to bring entrepreneurial thinking to the arts and sciences, we have the opportunity to envision entrepreneurship education in an authentic manner that is sustainable across campus, relevant to communities, and, most importantly, empowering to stakeholders." Labels: academic planning, academic programs, entrepreneurship, learning, pedagogy
Building a Learning University: Creating a Community of Purpose With Educators and Stakeholder Groups
The type of university needed for the new age of higher education will have to engage in a continuous process of self-review and refocusing over its lifetime. This will require systematic and purposeful processes of strategic planning that draw on the active participation of a broad range of stakeholders who, in their work together, align the institution’s policies, processes, and practices to make them more responsive to the changing needs of students.
Before this, however, the university needs to commit to a core purpose centred on student learning and what this means to how it does business. How do we get to this purpose? Surely, developing an innovative mission statement, hiring the best practitioners money can buy, and mimicking best practices should do the job for us.
Sadly, it does not.
Labels: academic planning, integrated planning, learner-centered, learning, new institution, strategic planning, students
Liberal Education and Undergraduate Public Health Majors: Surveying the Landscape
Who knew there was a growing interest in undergraduate education in public health? There is a high level of interest, commitment, and activity among nearly all surveyed institutions in defining learning outcomes either in majors, in general education, or in both. However, when we put those outcomes into the context of public health, senior academic administrators have not identified the specific health outcomes as important to their overall efforts. Well-designed undergraduate public health programs are ideally suited to align with essential learning outcomes of liberal education, but the connections are not yet clear to many of those who are driving the movement for curricular reform. This alignment, especially at institutions where the public health elements are not gathered in a program, requires intentional efforts to match outcomes and designs.
Labels: environmental scanning, learning, program development, publish health, undergraduate education
It's the Learning, Stupid: Learning Matters Most!
This is the Howard R. Bowen Lecture given by Lumina Foundation president Jamie P. Merisotis at Claremont Graduate University on October 14: Learning doesn't just matter. It matters most . . . All of these efforts, and others that I lack time to mention today, are rooted in and serve to amplify two basic truths: The first is that learning - all types of learning - can be objectively measured. And the second is that these measurements are absolutely vital in ensuring the relevance and value of a college credential. Labels: assessment, learning, learning outcomes, Lumina, quality
Learning and Technology — “In That Order”
We've had many SCUP Links from Malcolm Brown over the years. This is another good one, where he reports on some in depth discussions with thoughtful students about the use of technology in learning: Over the past several years, I have been impressed by how fruitful it can be to solicit students' ideas when making plans for technology in support of learning. Judging from those experiences, I thought it might be worthwhile to construct a New Horizons column from a "geographically distributed" focus-group session, inviting students from a variety of institutions to suggest what educators should be thinking about as we plan our learning environments for the next two to four years. With the help of colleagues, I was able to enlist the help of fourteen students, all of whom responded with thoughtful contributions, summarized here.In sum, the sentiments most often articulated were: (1) too much or unfettered technology is bad and directly hinders learning; and (2) the use of technology should not come at the expense of personal interaction both in and outside the classroom. Perhaps the most succinct formulation of these ideas was: "I believe the most important thing to keep in mind about learning and technology is that they should be considered in that order" (CV). Labels: academic planning, it, learning, technology
How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education
Anya Kamenetz, writing in Fast Company magazine, examines the confluence of Web 2.0 and the Open Education movement in light of some entrepreneurs who think they can transform the business of higher education: Is a college education really like a string quartet? Back in 1966, that was the assertion of economists William Bowen, later president of Princeton, and William Baumol. In a seminal study, Bowen and Baumol used the analogy to show why universities can't easily improve efficiency. If you want to perform a proper string quartet, they noted, you can't cut out the cellist nor can you squeeze in more performances by playing the music faster. But that was then -- before MP3s and iPods proved just how freely music could flow. Before Google scanned and digitized 7 million books and Wikipedia users created the world's largest encyclopedia. Before YouTube Edu and iTunes U made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free, and before college students built Facebook into the world's largest social network, changing the way we all share information. Suddenly, it is possible to imagine a new model of education using online resources to serve more students, more cheaply than ever before. Labels: Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, environmental scanning, futuring, it, learning, technology, transformation
Ten Things I No Longer Believe About Transforming Teaching and Learning with Technology
For more than this decade, the TLT Group has been at the forefront in experimenting with and learning from technology tools to transform teaching and learning. Steve Erhmann recently began a series of essays soliciting responses to which he will reply, about the ten things that - after so many years of paying attention - he no longer believes about teaching and learning with technology. "The first five weeks deal with five specific rewards for investing in technology (visibility and the resources it can attract, better learning, larger enrollment, cost savings, and time savings). Let's start with what I once believed about buying hot new technology in order to attract resources by making your program more visible." Labels: it, learning, teaching, technology, TLT Group
Online Learning Produces Better Results Than Face-to-Face?
How College Affects Students: A Third Decade of Research
The Learning Paradigm College
The Department Chair: Leading the Charge to Build Student Character and Leaders
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by Ernest Pascarella and Patrick Terenzini. "I have utilized this volume both in my administrative and faculty capacities and have encouraged staff and students to tap it as well. . . . [It] immediately joins other classics that have earned their place on the bookshelf of any scholar and practitioner of the college student experience." - 
by John Tagg. "In The Learning Paradigm College, John Tagg champions the argument that because high school students have changed, undergraduate colleges— i.e., those colleges “both within and independent of universities, the institutions that prepare students for the baccalaureate degree”—must also transform their educational approach. He then sets out to explain how." 