Ahead of the Class: Mapping Education’s Next Transformation
To meet society’s changing needs, our antique
educational system has to change or it will get a failing grade, many argue. At
the recent Wharton “Reimagine
Education” conference, innovators came together to propose
new paradigms and digital solutions to upend the traditional practices of
higher education.
The conference was created by Jerry Wind,
director of Wharton’s SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management, and Nunzio
Quacquarelli, CEO of Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), a global provider of higher
education and career information solutions. They spoke with Knowledge@Wharton
about the latest innovations in education, where the best ideas are coming
from, and the skills that future graduates will need the most.
An edited transcript of the conversation
follows.
Knowledge@Wharton: Tell
us about the conference. What are some of its key takeaways?
Nunzio Quacquarelli: The
mission of the conference is to identify the most innovative pedagogies in
learning and in nurturing employability. Jerry and I have known each other for
26 years, and a few years ago, we got together and [realized] that there was a
real need to try and identify which institutions were being innovative in this
arena. And also, QS is known for producing the QS World University Rankings. We
are the most popular ranking system in the world today, and we know that
rankings have limitations. They can’t really identify excellence in teaching or
learning. So this conference is a solution to that need to identify which
institutions around the world are really innovating, really pushing the
boundaries.
Jerry Wind: Another aspect [of the
conference] is that it’s not just to report what’s there [in higher education],
but actually to stimulate more innovative research in this area.… We have a
global competition. We’re basically following … the wisdom of the crowd, and we
are encouraging universities and businesses around the world to innovate, to
come up with more innovative experiments that can be scaled.
The real reward for me from the conference was that what Nunzio
and I started [in 2014] is actually stimulating people to think more creatively
about how we can address the challenges in education. One of the key takeaways
from the conference — one that reinforced our beliefs and premise in starting
it — is that education cannot just continue as it is today. … One of our
speakers, Shiv Khemka, actually illustrated that very vividly when he talked
about the fact that in India today, if they were to continue teaching the way
they [have been teaching], they’d need about 800 new universities. They’re
getting a magnitude of 25 million new students in higher education a year.
There is no way the college educational
system can [handle it]. So the conclusion is absolutely clear: We need more
truly breakthrough innovations in pedagogical approaches to higher
education. The
traditional classroom model does not work, and we have to rethink it. Twitter What we are going to try to accomplish with the
competition is to encourage universities around the world and businesses — and
ideally, collaborations between the two — to try to come up with those
innovative solutions.
Knowledge@Wharton: What
do you think are the main challenges facing higher education today, and can
technology help?
Wind: Well, technology is a
must. You cannot solve the problems of a country like India or China or others
without it. Or the U.S.: If you talk about the number of high school dropouts
that we have, if you talk about the issue of functional illiteracy among high
school graduates — you cannot solve those problems with the traditional
approach. You need totally radical, new approaches to education. And the
solution is not just to have MOOCs [Massive Open Online Courses] out there.
The solution is to try to rethink education and to basically ask
the question: How can we use technology to enable us [in the following ways]?
Number one, personalization; two, a better way of engaging the learners; three,
… balancing technology with the absolutely critical component of the human
interaction between mentor and student? And four, how do we do it in a way that
is scalable, so that you can actually achieve the objective?
We hope that by integrating technology — not looking at
technology separately, but as part of a new learning paradigm — we’ll be able
to come up with better education, better results, more impactful results.
Results that are addressing the employability issues we have, addressing the
challenges of people throughout their life cycles — we’re not talking just
about the 18- to 22-year-olds. We’re talking about the fact that, throughout
the lifecycle of a person, we need continuous upgrading of capabilities and
skills. That’s something we have to start addressing.
So the hope is that the conference will stimulate people to
challenge their traditional mental models about education and engage in really
bold experiments, taking advantage of some of the incredible advances and what
we have learned about education over the years.
Quacquarelli: Higher education has been
a sleepy industry. It hasn’t been disrupted. It’s been able to carry on, as-is,
for hundreds of years. And in the next 10 years — or even sooner — it’s all
going to change. There will be elements that are retained, but there is going
to be fundamental change. Whether it’s degree certificates being passed through
MOOCs — like the micro-MOOCs which MIT is offering on the edX platform —
whether it’s experts from around the world sharing their knowledge across
institutions, peer-to-peer learning, peer-to-peer assessment and grading,
edutainment, games. As Jaime Casap of Google said, Generation Z is used to
devices, they are used to being entertained, and education has to respond to
the new profile of this generation. And it’s happening. There are people out there
innovating and developing these tools.
Knowledge@Wharton: One
of the ideas that came out of this conference was that of co-creation and
closer collaborations between professors and students when it comes to
learning. Can you talk more about this and why that is a trailblazing concept
in higher education?
Wind: First of all, the
foundation of this is in business. Every business knows that the best way to
try to engage customers is to engage them as co-creators, whether as
co-designers or as co-producers. Think about a company such as Build-A-Bear.
Now, the kid is building the bear and so is the company. Or think about all of
the user-generated content that you have in advertising. Companies — at least,
enlightened companies — realize you cannot look at a consumer as a target and
bombard them with stuff that you are developing, because first of all, you
don’t know what they really need or how they will respond.
Education has been very slow in reacting to this. It’s still
using the old, archaic model — the faculty standing, the students sitting in
the classroom. And we, the faculty, know best what education we should provide.
But to allow the students to co-create their own curriculum? [That’s rare.] Let
them decide what they need, or better yet, how we work together. Do that, and
you’ll get much greater results, much greater engagement.
Knowledge@Wharton: How
receptive is academia to all of this change? Or is there fear of all of this
innovation?
Wind: Huge fear, and in
general, there is reluctance to take risks. One of my comments [at the
conference] when I ran the design workshop was, “You need courage to try to
implement it, because we know what has to be done, they know what has to be
done, and the question is: Are they going to be able to overcome the resistance
to change in the various institutions?” So the idea is, it’s not only waiting
for the president to say, “Go do it.” the idea is for everyone, if you have the
responsibility, to start taking the initiative and experimenting with new
models. Don’t wait for someone else to do it.
Quacquarelli: There’s this huge fear
when you’re going into the unknown, and if you try and leap in one direction in
a holistic way, then there probably is a big risk of failure. But if you adopt
the approach Jerry recommended, which is adaptive experimentation, then you
basically try new things and you measure the impact. And if it works, you
continue. If it doesn’t work, you change tracks again. I think that was really
good advice.
Knowledge@Wharton: What
is the most exciting innovation to come out of this year’s conference?
Quacquarelli: The overall winner [of
the innovation contest] was an organization called Osmosis that comes out of
Johns Hopkins University. It’s a bunch of medical students and PhDs, and their
concept is that the learning requirements for a medical student in America
today or worldwide are huge. The volume of knowledge they have to assimilate is
huge, and in fact, the dropout rate among medical students in the U.S. is in
the tens of thousands, which is costing universities huge amounts of money
because those students just can’t pass the exams. So they’re using technology
to support the learning of those medical students with videos, quizzes, memory cards
and other support tools that actually are integrated within the medical
curriculum for each element, and support the student’s learning.
What they can clearly demonstrate — and the reason they won –
was that students were highly engaged with this new form of learning, and it
was effective. They were significantly increasing the success rates of those
students, which is what we’re looking for. Because it’s provided through
technology, it’s clearly scalable. They’ve got 300 medical schools using it now.
They can extend that number of medical schools. They are finding a solution
that can help avoid the high dropout rate among medical students, which is a
real improvement in the efficiency of medical education.
We had a second winner called Kaizena, and it was focused on
feedback. Most students get a grade when they put in an assignment, and the
grade tells them whether they passed, failed, whether they were great or poor.
But they don’t actually learn from that. To learn and to improve, you need
feedback, and the problem with the way we traditionally provide feedback is you
might get that paper back in two weeks’ or three weeks’ time with some notes,
and by that time you’ve moved on. So you can’t absorb that feedback; you’re in
a different space. This is a tool that allows the professor or a peer community
to provide feedback almost instantaneously, while you’re doing an assignment.
You can submit it, it can be viewed, they can embed video, they can do voice,
or they can provide written feedback. So as you’re conducting the assignment,
you can actually learn and improve that assignment. It is improving the quality
of the output of the students. And again, they could demonstrate real
engagement, really high adoption rates, and also real improvement in the learning
outcomes of those students.
Those are two really high-quality innovations that we came
across.
Wind: Let me give you a few
other examples — not necessarily a particular one, but things that illustrate
the direction that I think is very important.
Ben Nelson, who is the founder and CEO of Minerva, was our
keynote speaker [in 2014], and we asked him to come and give us an update. He
has this really innovative approach, a new way to think about college. [For
example, as part of its curriculum, Minerva Schools encourages students to live
in as many as seven cities known for their technological, economic, political
and cultural impact.]
So, number one: The market response [to Minerva] has been
absolutely incredible. He started with 20 students. For the second year, he got
11,000 applications, from which he selected 100 people. Obviously, the market
responds to innovation. This would be a strong message to everyone. And two:
Everything he talked about was how they’re continuously innovating and
experimenting — continuous experimentation.
The second area that really stood out [were insights that came
from] Bill Rankin, who talked about a very strong link to the findings in
neuroscience, and how the neuroscience of learning should help guide us in what
we are doing. I think it’s great that we’re seeing the explicit links in this.
The third is the initiatives bridging the gap between academia
and industry, as illustrated by a very innovative new program that’s initiated
by the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, [Israel]. It’s a younger
university, about 21 years old, but they’re initiating a new program that
integrates [the process of] teaching. Co-teaching is done jointly by faculty
and industry mentors. It’s basically a 12-month program, and three months of it
[involve] being in a startup accelerator, and at the end of the program, the
students have a startup that they can launch.
It’s another great example of the trends that we see. So I think
of those three things: continuous experimentation; linking to new disciplines
like neuroscience and bringing that into the learning area; and the closer link
between industry and academia.
Quacquarelli: One of Bill Rankin’s
points was that the brain learns by doing better than just by absorbing. We’ve
seen that a lot of the interest for “Reimagine Education” has also been very
action-oriented. Particularly in the sciences, you’ve got virtual laboratories,
virtual experimentation; or in engineering, you’ve got very low-cost
experimentation with the creation of music speakers or other elements, which
are enabling more students to actually learn by doing and learn by
experimentation — whether they be high-quality students at elite universities
or disadvantaged students in Africa or India. And that’s a very rich field that
technology can enable much more.
Knowledge@Wharton:
Employers often talk about the employability skills gap – that what graduates
learn in school doesn’t necessarily give them the skills they need for their
first jobs. How can innovation in education begin to close that gap?
Quacquarelli: Employers don’t know
what skills graduates need because they’re changing so rapidly. The jobs you
prepare a graduate for today aren’t going to be there in five years’ time.
There are going to be new jobs requiring new skills.
So actually, what employers want is what institutions are
developing — core competencies. [These are] core cognitive skills, critical
thinking, reasoning, communication skills, and soft skills [such as]
interpersonal skills, team-playing skills. Those are things that need to be
developed and enhanced. A lot of universities around the world are focusing on
innovation in this area.
Wind: Let me add some other
characteristics that employers are looking for. First of all, let me recognize
that employers are not all traditional large Fortune 500 firms. Close to a
third of the U.S. workforce are independent — they don’t want to work for a
large company. They are either starting their own company, work for start-up
companies, work from home as free agents and the like. This is a huge market
and they have needs as well.
So when we’re talking about employability, let’s not forget this
growing segment and their needs. But within this — for those who want to work
by themselves at home, or at other places [including] the larger companies — I
think the recognition that all problems require interdisciplinary solutions is
critical.
The idea here is not to become a dilettante by touching every
discipline, but to have in-depth knowledge in one discipline, and also the
ability to bridge to other disciplines. That’s generally recognized as
absolutely critical. Another one is the ability continuously to learn, because
most of the jobs that we’ll see in the next 10 years do not exist today. If you
go 10 years back, can you imagine thinking about a job as a search engine
optimizer? No way. It didn’t even exist at the time.
So fundamentally, we are to prepare people, as Nunzio said, for
jobs that do not exist today. [What they will need are] interdisciplinary
skills, the ability to continuously learn and experiment, the ability to adapt
to new technologies and use technology effectively, and then all of the
fundamental things that Nunzio was discussing. http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/ahead-of-the-class-mapping-educations-next-transformation/?utm_source=kw_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2016-03-23
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