Month: October 2021

How best to adapt to today’s post-Golden Age realities, according to professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin Steven Mintz.

Seven years ago, Clay Shirky, who is now NYU’s vice provost of educational technologies, wrote a provocative and prescient blog post, which argued that higher education’s biggest challenges — especially its increasing reliance on non-tenure-track instructors — arose from the attempt “to preserve a set of practices that have outlived the economics that made them possible.”

Entitled “The End of Higher Education’s Golden Age,” Shirky wrote that colleges and universities clung to assumptions and expectations that arose during the period of rapid growth that stretched from the end of World War II to the early 1970s, when “the number of undergraduates increased five-fold, and graduate students nine-fold” and when states more than doubled their higher education appropriations and federal research grants quadrupled.

Several “Golden Age” assumptions, now sadly outdated, persist:

That demand for higher education is virtually inexhaustible, and, as a result, institutions can take enrollment growth for granted.

That full-time, first-time-in-college residential students represent an ideal that colleges and universities should prioritize in admissions.

That most students want and need an educational experience that is basically the same as that offered three-quarters of a century ago.

That rising costs can be addressed through tinkering, including modest increases in tuition and fees, government aid, and a limited reliance on adjunct instructors.

That there was no inherent conflict between tenured faculty’s teaching and research responsibilities; that teaching loads and mentoring responsibilities can fall and research expectations can rise without posing any particular problems for their institutions.

Each of these assumptions has proven profoundly misleading.

Enrollment declines have persisted for a decade. This decline poses particular challenges for small and regional institutions in the Northeast and Midwest.

Nontraditional students are as important to institutional and societal success as traditional students. Students who commute, work full-time, caregive or who have transferred represent a majority of those pursuing degrees and have different needs than those who traditional students who defined higher education’s Golden Age.

Student needs have shifted and intensified. Institutions have been forced to devote significantly more resources to financial aid and the support services that nontraditional and post-traditional students needed to succeed.

Two- and four-year institutions have found it difficult to effectively serve the growth sectors. Traditional degree and training programs have had very mixed success in serving students from low-income backgrounds, community college transfer students and working adults’ needs for retooling, upskilling and skills training.

Higher education’s cost challenges cannot be met through tinkering. To cut costs, institutions have relied increasingly on non-tenure-track faculty, and underresourced institutions have eliminated or consolidated programs. To increase revenue, colleges and universities have had to become much more entrepreneurial, admitting more international students (and, at public institutions, more out-of-state students), establishing online professional master’s programs, and treating ancillaries as revenue generators.

A caste system has emerged, in which the interests of tenured faculty and nontenured instructors and professional staff have diverged. To reduce the teaching loads of tenured faculty and free them of responsibility for advising and teaching introductory, language and composition courses, while keeping instructional costs stable, institutions increasingly relied upon lower-paid non-tenure-track instructors: graduate students, adjuncts, lecturers and postdocs and an expanding number of nonteaching professionals (including professional advisers, disability specialists, instructional designers and educational technologists, psychological counselors, and staff to run teaching, math, science and writing centers).

What made Shirky’s blog post especially controversial was his claim that higher education’s major beneficiaries are tenured faculty and senior administrators, whose salaries rose even during the Great Recession and whose perks now come largely at the expense of adjunct faculty and other contingent staff members.

The argument that tenure screens out more than it protects by creating a sharp divide between insiders and those outside the charmed circle is now increasingly voiced on the left as well as the right.

As a friend put in response to a recent forum on the future of tenure, “It’s like castles in the late Middle Ages — cannons just mean you build thicker and thicker walls to protect fewer and fewer people.”

As Shirky’s blog entry made devastatingly clear, addressing salary inequities between the tenured and nontenured teaching staff cannot be met simply by trimming administrative bloat or eliminating waste.

At his institution, cutting administrative salaries by 25 percent would save about $5 million (in 2014 dollars), but raising adjunct salaries would cost $250 million, about 17 percent of NYU’s academic budget at the time.

Reducing inequalities within individual institutions and across higher education more generally will require far-reaching shifts in mind-set and priorities. Otherwise, we are just perpetuating “an arrangement that works well for elites — tenured professors, rich students, endowed institutions — but increasingly badly for everyone else.”

So how, then, can higher education adapt to students’ changing needs and new demographic, economic and cultural realities?

Solutions aren’t easy. Unionization can, to a certain extent, address some inequities in salaries and working conditions but can also result in unanticipated outcomes. At CUNY, for example, a contract that significantly increased the pay of part-time adjuncts had the effect of reducing their numbers while increasing reliance upon untenured lecturers with full-time appointments, who were cheaper on a per-class basis.

Other pressures are brewing. We’re witnessing:

A push by state legislatures to cut college costs and expedite time to degree by encouraging completion of gen ed classes during high school as a way to cut college costs, making the community college transfer process more seamless and requiring four-year schools to enroll more transfer students or allow two-year institutions to award applied bachelor’s degrees.

Growing demands that deep-pocketed private institutions increase their enrollment, either modestly or radically.

The emergence of cheaper, faster paths to employment, including short-term, noncredit and corporate-sponsored certificate training programs.

What should colleges and universities do to adjust to our post-Golden Age realities? Some strategies are obvious:

Hope that the Biden administration will provide the funding necessary to sustain and strengthen the current model through a combination of debt relief, expanded federal financial support and encouragement of the enrollment of international students.

Make greater use of personalized, adaptive courseware, autograding and peer evaluation to allow faculty to scale gateway courses and of degree maps, degree progress monitoring tools and data analytics to track student progress, prompt timely interventions and supplement person-to-person advising.

Increase online course sharing to ensure access to specialized or difficult-to-staff programs.

Expand offerings of career-aligned certificates and certifications, which can be embedded into career paths or pursued separately.

There is, however, an alternative that I think is worthy of attention: change the game.

Perhaps you remember the conclusion to the 1983 American Cold War science fiction techno-thriller WarGames: “The only way to win is not to play.”

Sometimes, the way to win is to change the game.

As a thought experiment, let’s think of how we might change the game to better serve students with very different needs, levels of preparation, circumstances and aspirations. We might:

Expand enrollment at the more selective institutions. Not by expanding facilities, but by rethinking the academic calendar, having juniors and seniors live off campus, and adopting a HyFlex model for the delivery of the most popular classes — while hiring more faculty to maintain quality.

Create an educational journey less centered on traditional lectures, courses and seminars. There are alternate ways to deliver those classes’ content, for example, by using courseware supplemented by online lectures and various forms of support, or through novel kinds of blended experiences that involve less time in formal classrooms.

Make experiential and project-based learning much bigger parts of the undergraduate experience. Downplaying traditional classes might free students to devote more time to other educationally impactful experiences: taking part in internships (some of which should be on campus in various institutional offices); working on supervised research projects, either alone or in groups; participating in field-based and service learning activities; or contributing as team members to a faculty project.

Ensure that every student is part of a learning community, not just in their first semester or first year, but at a number of points in their education. These communities might offer a space where students can undertake projects, make presentations based on their findings or creative endeavors, and critically reflect on their learning.

Fund public institutions in ways that take account of their students’ needs. Let’s alter the current model in which there is an inverse relationship between students’ learning needs and the level of public support.

The biggest challenge facing higher education is our willingness to rethink entrenched practices and legacy assumptions.

When I arrived at Oberlin College in the fall of 1970, the new president made a modest proposal: to eliminate almost all requirements and make students responsible for designing their educational journey. His goal: to produce more self-directed graduates.

Times have changed, and higher education needs to adapt to new realities: to the diversity of our students and to the financial and equity challenges faced by most colleges and universities. The solution, I am convinced, lies in our willingness to think outside the boxes that narrow our sense of possibilities.

 

With the COVID-19 speeding up the shift of higher education online, it might seem that the golden era of online education has finally come. However, while some educators sing praise of Zoom lectures and are going to keep this tool in their teaching kit even when the crisis is over, others ring the alarm creating awareness of Zoom fatigue. So, what about Zoom? Is it a blessing or a curse?

The major shift higher education is going through can be called seismic changes only partially. It is true that the situation was greatly influenced by the novel coronavirus pandemic. But it is also cannot be denied that the recent move online is a direct result of a long-delayed response to demographic and economic shifts and of the technological change, which has been underway since around 2010, when universities and private entrepreneurs first began to experiment with Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs.

Back then, these early MOOCs could hardly compete with the mainstream providers of traditional, campus-based higher education and were mainly viewed upon as a complementary tool for those who cannot afford going to college for financial or social reasons. Even today, the many discussions around the topic demonstrate that online learning, which has morphed from the earliest MOOCs and has been forced upon the most conservative universities and colleges by the pandemic, is still in the middle of its own evolution.

Most Zoom sessions offered to the students in 2020 looked more like a hasty adaptation in the times of a crisis. Everyone and his brother has discussed the limitations of using Zoom, which was not originally developed as a pedagogical tool.

Not all classroom formats translate easily onto Zoom. It works well for small-scale seminars and critiques, which do not lose intimacy and close contact of campus-based classes even online. Bringing in guest speakers works remarkably well, allowing faculty to introduce a wide range of voices into their classroom conversations. On the screen, everyone can see and hear and participate.

However, videoconferencing could hardly be the answer when it comes to classes requiring practical instructions and other hands-on teaching methods, which are often the key for fine arts and design education.

Zoom lectures are not so unambivalent either. They might work, if the instructor is compelling. Still, it is no secret that the fastest way to lose the attention of students on Zoom is to talk at them. It is even more complicated for learners to follow the lecturer when they find themselves gazing into a sea of black boxes, while all kinds of distractions are close at hand in their “home office.” “Students’ faces slip from one screen to the next as new people join in. They disappear into a tiny side panel once anything is shared. Unmuting becomes a weary standard of the class period (“can you hear me now?”) And everything in everyone’s background–the dogs, the posters, the siblings, the furniture–melds into a visual cacophony. On Zoom, the peripheral truly takes over,” Debora Spar, senior associate dean of Harvard Business School Online, explains.

Class conversations on Zoom also seem to be very different from those held in a classroom of brick and mortar. Inevitably, a few students will dominate the conversation leaving quitter ones and those experiencing problems with their internet connection excluded and shut out. This requires teachers to be very directive on Zoom, asking some students to speak and diplomatically cutting off others to bring taciturn ones into the discussion.

Participating in a synchronous online class taxes powers of both the student and the instructor. Though the reasons why online meeting tools are more exhausting are not fully understood, this effect likely has something to do with how our brains process screen as compared to physical presence.

When asked to describe their online learning routine, students talk about spending most of their day in front of the screen. With classes and homework running entirely online, some claim they click their camera on as soon as they roll out of bed, others complain that screen time feels like a 24/7 commitment. Even when they are not actively on a Zoom call, Canvas discussion boards and Google Docs absorb all their studying time. This pattern induces what many call “Zoom fatigue” — exhaustion from blue light and remote interactions, which is strongly related to our brain’s inability to differentiate Zoom meetings from everything else we do onscreen, drawing down the same reserve of focus. This also brings to the lack of any physical mobility between classes.

Synchronous Zoom sessions is even more exhausting for international students, who are faced with a time difference from their classmates and professions. E.g. for learners in China studying in US universities and colleges classes could start at 11 pm and run till 2:30 am.

Besides, growing popularity of Zoom sessions reveal socio-economic differences that are harder to notice on physical campuses. This teaching method places low-income students at a disadvantage. The underprivileged group cannot afford the cost of an Internet upgrade and therefore can experience connectivity issues, which might cause video or audio interference and impair their ability to participate in discussions on Zoom.

Dr. Joshua Kim, Director of Online Programs and Strategy at the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL), is convinced that when it comes to Zoom and teaching, less is more. He suggests following a three-to-one strategy, holding one hour of Zoom for every three hours of class and making that time more conversation-based. Instead of taking three Zoom meeting a week, he recommends using those time blocks to hold three separate Zoom sessions and letting students signing up for just one discussion per week – to reduce the overall time students spend on Zoom.

Lucy Biederman, assistant professor of creative writing at Heidelberg University, believes that the role of Zoom in online college teaching is overestimated. In her opinion, when faced with closing campus in March 2020, most of the instructors turned to Zoom as an alternative to teaching in a physical classroom and remain dependent on this software without taking a broader picture. Biederman points out that videoconferencing software wasn’t an essential part of higher education before the pandemic, and warns against using this technology solely for technology’s sake.

Derek Bruff, director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, also believes that learning objectives should guide how college instructors use technology, not the other way around. He has coined the term “intentional tech,” meaning “knowing what kinds of learning experiences you’re interested in creating for your students, then finding technologies that help support those experiences.”

This means that educators can support their student in ways other than Zoom, choosing best-suited technologies depending on the course goals. Besides Zoom, synchronous and asynchronous options include other technologies, such as Slack, Canvas, Google chats and Google Docs, as well as own open courseware and open-source platforms.

What is indubitable is that we are now at the beginning of a new stage, which will develop into a very different model of higher education in the nearer future. The tools of online learning, with Zoom sessions playing the lead role, are undeniably powerful, even at this point. As we use them to help traditional teaching deal with the current crisis, we need to focus not on how we return to the old normal, but rather what a new normal should be.