Should we promote "digital learning" as a banner for institutional transformation?

 Edward Maloney and Joshua Kim wrote a provocative blog post in InsideHigherEd. Here's my comment:


Eddie and Josh,

You wrote, "A model for digital learning is a set of integrated ideas, concepts and
frameworks that help us build hypotheses and make sense of data."

I think that, to advance digital learning, don't think of it as digital learning.

Based on my study of six institutions that have been gradually transforming themselves to improve quality, equitable access, and affordability:
1. Technology is essential for making such gains, e.g., as a tool for undergraduate research, as a tool to help institutions make sense of big data about their educational process, as a way for people to collaborate across barriers of time and space, as a platform on which students, faculty, and others can reflect about a student's achievements and learning; (and so on)

2. However, technology is not, and should not, be seen as THE way to describe educational transformation.

Advances in technology and increases in its availability are just one of many important enablers of transformation of higher learning, each helping reinforce the other. Some others include:

• Pressures for institutions and degree programs to be more accountable for their outcomes, especially affordability, equitable access, and what graduates are now able to do;
• Increased national and institutional attention to educational strategies such as high impact practices, essential learning outcomes, backward design, and authentic assessment; greater faculty comfort with such strategies;
• Transformative leadership from many positions in the institution;
• Changes in academic culture, e.g,, increased percentage of faculty who see evidence-based improvement of outcomes to be possible and essential; prioritizing continual improvement of outcomes; legitimacy and rewards for faculty and staff who invest significant time working with other faculty (including faculty from other departments) and with staff to achieve such improvements.
• More learning spaces with lower density, furnished with movable chairs and tables;
• Changes in accreditation practices so more attention is paid to quality, access, and affordability outcomes;
• Changing public opinion about the goals and values of higher education (is digital learning the way to brand this change to the public?)
• (and so on)

So should our announced focus be Digital learning? evidence-driven learning? culture-driven learning? improved learning through transformative leadership? accreditation-driven learning? or none of the above?

Analogy: if your family business were making salt, perhaps you'd write a cookbook entitled, "A Pinch of Salt." Perhaps that book would pay too little attention to other ingredients and how best to use them. So it wouldn't be a very good cookbook.

I've been engaged with improving higher education for fifty (?!) years, with special attention to educational uses of technology. I've seen way too many tech-driven educational improvements flounder because they were too siloed: they allowed technology spending to siphon budget and attention from other enablers; they suffered a fatal collision between rapid, somewhat turbulent rates of change in digital tools and resources versus human capital's comparatively glacial rate of change.

Make Transformation Possible by Changing Barriers into Assets

The headline could apply to lots of important topics today. In this case, I'm referring to the possibilities for the gradual transformation of our institutions of higher education.

I've been studying six colleges and universities for the last three years. Each has been working for five-ten years with some success to improve quality, equitable access, and affordability, simultaneously.

Each institution wants to attain such gains on an institutional scale, and in ways likely to thrive into the future. So each has treated barriers to transformation as malleable, not fixed:

• Many years ago, Georgia State began reorganizing so that a variety of administrative and academic units could work together smoothly to improve graduation rates while maintaining or improving quality. [The link in this bullet, and in those below, lead to more information about the institution's pursuit of 3fold gains.]
• Governors State University has built close, long-term working relationships with area community colleges to increase transfer rates and prepare students for its challenging upper division academic program.
• Southern New Hampshire University's College for America, an online project-based curriculum, educates working adults within their workplaces; the university-business partnerships help keep education grounded, motivating, and supportive.
• Guttman Community College was founded to support a variety of kinds of experiential learning. Its scheduling system enables class meetings so long that, in the middle of class, students can spread out into the city, do brief fieldwork assignments, and return for an immediate discussion of their findings. Doing without academic departments has helped faculty collaborate across disciplinary lines.
• The University of Central Oklahoma has implemented a Student Transformative Learning Record (STLR- pronounced stellar). In this ePortfolio, students can post achievements from courses, extracurriculars, and other experiences. They reflect on those experiences and describe how those experiences document their growing expertise and developing values in six crucial dimensions.
• The University of Central Florida got in on the ground floor of online learning, committing in the 1990s to train and actively support every faculty member teaching online. Rapid growth of online programs has enabled major savings in plant, maintenance, and operations.  Meanwhile, a substantial fraction of all full-time faculty have received extensive education in how to teach well online and, indirectly, on campus.

That's a little taste of what has emerged from these six institutional case histories. In early 2020, Quality, Access, Affordability: Pursuing 3Fold Gains in Higher Education will be published by Stylus. 

"Technology as Lever": the story of my most influential article is as instructive as the article itself

"Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever," written by Art Chickering and me, is undoubtedly my most influential article - cited thousands of times.

• The article begins by listing the Seven Principles, in case you're not already familiar with them. They were formulated by Chickering and Gamson in the mid 1980s as a summary of teaching & learning activities that research showed were particularly powerful.

Personally, I've been influenced almost as much by how the article came to be written.

PROLOGUE

For technology to influence educational outcomes, it isn't enough to have and use the technology. That technology must be used to carry out an activity that is, even without that technology, educationally powerful. The question should not be"Does technology X improve learning outcomes." Instead it should be "When technology X is used to support a particular teaching and learning activity, does that activity improve learning outcomes?"

So what might those powerful teaching and learning activities be?

At conferences and in campus visits, I started asking faculty what technology-assisted activities seemed most powerful and most likely to have widening use in the coming years.

Eventually, I came up with a list of about seven such patterns of activity (e.g., active learning, working in teams on a realistic and motivating project). A little later, my colleagues Robin Zuniga and Trudy Banta pointed out that my list paralleled Chickering and Gamson's "Seven Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Education." So I started using the Seven Principles instead because of the extensive research showing their effectiveness.

Robin and I used that insight to develop an item bank for student surveys on their uses of technology for specific activity: The Flashlight Current Student Inventory. Thanks to Gary Brown and his colleagues at Washington State University, an early online survey tool was created to manage and extend those survey questions. Use of the Flashlight Online tool spread eventually to a couple hundred institutions.

GENESIS
In the mid 1990s, I bumped into Art Chickering. He knew of how I was using the Seven Principles. "Why don't we write an article together about how to use digital technology to implement them in undergraduate education?" he asked. .

I was highly skeptical. Examples of technology enhancing seven principle activities seemed so self-evident. I literally could not imagine anyone reading or valuing such an article. Chick persisted so I asked him to send me a first draft. If, when I'd read it, I thought I could help, I'd send him a rewrite. He did, and then I did.

Eventually, our article appeared in the paper Bulletin of the American Association for Higher Education, where I worked. It was 1996 and AAHE had just created its first site on the World Wide Web. There was very little content on it yet. I suggested to the websmith that they link the text of our article to the AAHE home page.  The initial URL: http://aahe.org/ehrmann.

VIRUS
Readership started strong and multiplied each month. For at least a decade, the article drew over 4,000 hits a month. Impressive for an article I thought no one would read!

I got some insight into why the article was so influential on a visit to the University of South Carolina (USC) in the late 1990s. In a talk, I described one way in which technology could be used to implement a Principle: giving rapid, useful feedback to students. When I was in high school, teachers had given the same comment on papers so many times that explanations and suggestions had disappeared. If a passage seemed awkward to the teacher, they'd write "K" in the margin. Not helpful!

 Today, I said, USC faculty can ask for student work to be submitted electronically. Then they can use the "Comments" feature to type detailed feedback about specific elements of the student's work. Better yet, the next time you want to make a similar comment, you can copy the initial version of the feedback and, if necessary, adapt or improve it. The more times similar feedback is given, the better and more helpful it can become.

Here's the kicker: Later in my visit, Bill Hogue, the CIO, introduced me to another audience of faculty. Bill remarked that he'd heard my talk the previous day.Then he explained the time-saving idea for improving feedback on student work. Bill added that he'd never considered using a computer that way.

The ideas I'd thought too obvious to need explanation were in fact 1) powerful, 2) easy to comprehend, 3) easy to spread from person to person by word of mouth, and 4) could be useful to the listener no matter how much or how little relevant experience they'd had.

MORAL
I'm writing my first book in quite a few years. The hidden assumptions beneath my draft may well be the most important ones for the book to explain. Perhaps those insights will be simple and powerful enough that readers will want to share them with their friends.