What is Liberal Learning? (No, really...)

This is the third in a series of posts about my own deepening understanding of liberal learning.   The first summarized a talk by Michael Roth on the values of liberal education and the second speculated about why it had taken me so long to learn to see the beauty in an equation. 

Eric Liu, author of A Chinaman’s Chance, opened a door for me in his recent keynote at AAC&U when he talked about a "virus" that's loose in the world. Liu described the virus as a passionate belief that there is only one correct, virtuous way to see and to act in the world. Folks with this virus believe that something is inferior or wrong about people with any other view. This virus can be a belief in the primacy of one's country of birth, one's skin color, religion, or ideology (for example, the passionate belief that the world can be totally understood and improved by paying attention only to market forces).

Liberal learning, asserted Liu, is the antidote to this virus. Liberally educated people:

• Understand their worlds from varied and conflicting perspectives, as economics and as ecology, as a balance of power and also as the sum of its accidents and also as the result of individual decisions.
• Realize that all their options are, to some extent, imperfect and subject to criticism and opposition. Nonetheless, they are intellectually and emotionally prepared to use evidence, to act, and to live with the consequences.
• Can use evidence and reason to question accepted truth. I know from a variety of perspectives and from many sources of evidence that this way of seeing the world, and acting in the world, doesn't come quickly or easily. 

In fact, liberal learning is the toughest and most time-consuming part:

1. of effective education for work,
2. of education to be an effective citizen, and
3. of education that enables you to transform yourself.

All three of those goals are important.

But my caution light goes on whenever I hear people who simply advocate higher education for work. Period. Without a liberating education, those employed graduates will only be able to do the job the way others do it. They won't have the ability to question accepted wisdom, to bring others around to their novel point of view, and to change what's done, or how it's done. And they won't be prepared to change jobs or careers (without going back to school for a different form of training).

That was Liu's point: training people for a specific job is not enough to assure a healthy democracy because effective citizens need to question their way past slogans and opinion leaders. It's not enough in a society that values innovation. It's not enough to help someone become (perhaps somewhat to their surprise) into a different person (I entered college at 18 with life-long desire to be an engineer and graduated as someone who looks a lot more like the me of today, not just in career aspirations but in perceptions and capability).

Liberal learning ought to be the toughest and most valuable feature of education for jobs and professions. It needs to be the toughest and most valuable part of learning to be an effective citizen. And it is certainly the toughest and most valuable part of a college education whose graduates habitually question their own comfortable beliefs and perceptions.

Perhaps the most important challenge to champions of higher education is to figure out more affordable ways of strengthening the heart of liberal learning.

To love the beauty of an equation, what do you need to learn? (Some Observations about a Liberal Education, and Three Roles for Technology)

My last post, summarizing a talk by Michael Roth on the values of liberal education, was the first in a series that are part of my own redefined, re-energized sense of the goals of a college or university education. The post that follows was originally written in 2006.

In 1967, when I was a first-year student in engineering, I took physics. To derive a mathematical equation to describe how a pendulum sways back and forth, the professor began with Newton's Laws. Then he wrote line after line of algebra down the blackboard, each line representing a step in the reasoning. The climax at the bottom of the board: a surprisingly short equation which, the professor told us, was called the Equation of Simple Harmonic Motion. T is the time it takes the pendulum to swing, L is the length of the pendulum, and g represents the strength of gravity. One implication: how long it takes a pendulum to swing depends only on how long the pendulum is, not on how hard you push it.

The professor then pointed out that this equation doesn't just describe the swinging of a pendulum. The same equation, he said, also describes the vibration of a weight suspended between two springs. And it also describes the flow of electricity in a simple electrical circuit that consists of a battery and three elementary components (a resistor, a capacitor, and an inductance, as I recall) linked together with wire. Then the professor leaned forward over the lectern and asked passionately, "Isn't that beautiful?" I was in the second row and I wrote it all down, concluding my notes with the word 'beautiful,' just in case "beautiful" turned up on the next quiz.

Several months later I learned the same equation again, this time in a calculus course, and the lecturer said the same thing. And "beautiful!" I wrote once again in my notes. And I heard "beautiful" down a third time, two years later, in an introduction to electrical engineering.

Two years later, I had become a doctoral student in management at that same university. I shared an office with Lew Erwin, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering. We had been undergraduates together and were good friends.

"So why did you leave engineering?" Lew asked me one day. I was already enough of a manager to answer a question with a question, so I retorted, "Why did you stay in engineering?"

He thought for a moment and then responded, "Well, take something like the Equation of Simple Harmonic Motion. It describes the motion of a pendulum, and a mass vibrating between two springs, and electricity flowing through a simple RLC circuit, and I think that's beautiful!" What happened to me at that moment has happened again every time I've told the story. And it's happening as I write these words. My eyes teared up, my jaw dropped, and I said in awe, "My god, it is beautiful."

Almost twenty years later, I was listening to a couple of physicists at the University of Maryland, Joe Redish and Jack Wilson, talk with one another. By this time I was a program officer with responsibilities to find and then support innovative work in higher education. I'm afraid my attention wandered after a while as they talked with one another. One of them said something like, "Yahda yahda yahda equation of simple harmonic motion." And suddenly all of those things that happened in college came up back to me and for the first time I wondered, "Why was it that three excellent instructors worked so hard to teach me something, and failed completely, when a couple years later a simple remark did the trick?"

So I wrote a little paper for myself, comparing two quite different notions about why this might be so.

1. Maybe I'd matured, in the way that William Perry once described college students maturing. Perry's research suggested that younger students tend to see the world in black and white terms, with the professors the sources of truth and knowledge. After a couple of years of development, they can conceive that there might be more than one truth but, at this point, they have only themselves as a point of reference. "Everyone has a right to his own opinion," is a comment that's a hall of this stage. Only later, often not until after graduation, can students use evidence and their own values to choose among several 'truths,' using evidence reason to take a stand and to act.
2. Or perhaps I'd seen the beauty so easily because, by this time, I'd done research myself and had learned how hard it is to describing something complicated and real in a simple, useful way, and how much harder it is to come up with such a simple, useful conceptual description that would 'work' for three different situations that, on the surface, looked completely different. (By that argument, the way to help freshmen see the beauty is to make sure they do this kind of research when in high school).

I finished the paper unsure of which explanation was more persuasive. It seemed a good agenda for future research.

I sent a copy to Lew Erwin, by now a professor himself at our old university. Next time I saw him, I asked "So which of these two theories is right?"

"You're wrong," he laughed. "Both your theories are wrong. You learned about the beauty of the equation from me because it was me who told you. I'm your friend. That's certainly how I learned it. At nights sometimes, I would sit on the roof of our fraternity with my friend Phil Abbot, looking at the stars and talking about things like this."

Lew went on, "I've been teaching for a while now and I've figured out that a teacher may be able to teach what to think. But only a friend can teach you how to feel about it."

I think there's some truth in all three explanations. College does help some students develop through a very complex process of reorganizing the ways they understand the world. And research -- research that encourages students to develop explanations and then test those explanations -- can help. But Lew was right, too. Our relations and conversations with friends, often outside classrooms, can change how we feel about things

Lew died young. It was the most horrible of ironies: late one night, as he lay sleeping with his wife, his wonderful heart just stopped beating. I told this story about him, me, and the equation of simple harmonic motion at his memorial service. Ever since, I've told it to others, to let them know what Lew taught me. Please pass it on.

PS. Want to learn about the Equation of Simple Harmonic Motion? Here's one of many sources on the Web.

PPS. What does all this have to do with educational uses of technology?   We know that technology, whether that technology is a computer or a piece of chalk, doesn't cause learning.  However, technology can serve the cause of learning by enabling people to learn in ways that might otherwise be difficult or impossible. 

1. So, if you believe the Perry explanation, technology can give students more choices in how to learn, choices that stretch but don't go beyond the student's stage of understanding. That's a strategy that Perry scholars have recommended.
2.  If you think that research experience was the key, computers and the Internet have vastly widened the scope of meaningful research open to undergraduates and students in K-12 schools.
3. And if you think that being with friends is key, consider how to use modern technology to increase the ways in which people can bump into one another, and commune. 

To repeat, none of these uses of technology would compel all students to learn the beauty of that equation. But aren't they three interesting ways to water the seeds we plant?

How can hybrid (and online) courses be better than campus courses?

Many institutions want to offer hybrid and online courses in order to improve the economic bottom line: to make better use of expensive campus space, increase enrollments, and allow working students to carry bigger loads and graduate sooner. Those aren't bad motivations.

But it's also the case that, in selected ways, good hybrid and online courses can be better than campus courses that rely mainly on lecturing, textbooks, and students doing homework alone.

By "hybrid" I mean courses where the instructor allocates more time to work outside the classroom by shrinking the time that students and the instructor spend on the classroom. The goal: improve learning while not increasing total time spent on the course by students or faculty.

Here are a few ways in which such hybrids and online courses can be superior to traditional classroom formats (especially when classes have more than, say, 30 students). Can you suggest others?

Large campus-bound courses teach one message to all students, a message which may motivate some students more than others, at a pace that may be right for some students, too fast for others, too slow for still others. In contrast, courses that do more (or all) of their work online enable faculty to offer more than one version of lectures, assignments, and even tests. The goal: to excite and engage a larger fraction of all students by giving them challenges that mean something at a pace they can maintain. For example, a class in biology might offer three versions of some lectures or assignments: one version pitched more toward future health care practitioners, another for future engineers, and another for future scientists.  (These different versions need not be created by one faculty member all at once. Faculty might split the effort, or a single faculty member might develop different versions over a period of years.)

Just in time learning: In order to motivate students to come to the class sessions prepared, use online quizzes, discussions, or assignments that are due just before class.  Gathering data just before class can also help instructors create classroom activities that respond to what students have learned, or  what they still misunderstand.

More thoughtful pace of discussion: Traditional classrooms, especially when classes are large, offer few students a chance to answer questions, or discuss issues.  Online discussion (e.g.,, threaded discussions on Blackboard) give all students a chance to talk, with each other, and with faculty. The time-delay gives students a chance to think about what’s been said, and to think about what they want to say. Many faculty have observed that students indeed become more thoughtful when the pace of conversation slows down, and there’s no danger of being interrupted.

Expand the visual dimension: Traditional classroom formats are dominated by words.  But the visual dimension (still, motion) is potentially crucial in many disciplines (e.g., art history, health care, sociology, engineering, ...). For students to develop an educated, intuitive understanding of visual materials, students must be able to (a) call up one or more visual artifacts, (b) discuss those artifact(s) with other students and the instructor while pointing to elements of the visual materials ("Notice the contrast between this and that."). Student discussion of visual materials can often be done more easily and inexpensively online (e.g., using Elluminate, Adobe Connect, Wimba, or other real-time conferencing systems or created narrated presentations using software such as PowerPoint or Prezi.)

Open the conversation: Traditional classrooms have a closed door: discussion is limited to the faculty member and students registered in the class. Online discussions are more easily expanded to include significant others outside that group: outside experts, students who differ from those in class, members of the public.  For an extreme example of this, see my previous post.

Expand the variety of students and classwork settings: Online and some hybrid formats enable a program to recruit a student body of unusual talents and diversity.  For example, some hybrid programs (often masters programs) combine substantial online work with periods when students and faculty gather in one instructional setting (not always on the home campus). For example, Prof. Maida Withers, at George Washington University, leads a new blended (hybrid) master's program in dance. Students applying for admission were required to have identified their settings near their residences where they could practice, choreograph, and present their dances.

Expand the expertise used in offering the program: the more interaction is online, the easier and more natural it is to use instructors and guest experts selected for their fit to the program. Guest experts can speak with a classroom from a distance, but it's even more natural if everyone is online, as natural as a conference call. Some instructors use a 20 minute guest presentation or discussion, involving a different specialist, every week. Assign a reading, and then give students an opportunity to interview the author online.

Increase the specialization of the program: Put all these pieces together: it's possible to offer incredible programs that can be be unusually specialized in order to attract (distant) highly motivated students-- interdisciplinary degrees in HMO management, sustainable recreation, 21st century literature and culture, ...  Such programs might be targeted at small, high-paying, recently created job markets. Such programs could be taught by a combination of local faculty and top experts from around the world. The program design would ideally be hybrid: a mix of online education with gatherings of faculty and students at appropriate sites for intense work and coaching.