7 Things Higher Education Innovators Want You to Know
Experts weigh in on the challenges of student success and the need for innovation in higher ed.
In order to close the growing achievement gap, higher education institutions need to focus on innovation, scale and diffusion, according to Bridget Burns, executive director for the University Innovation Alliance, a coalition of 11 public research universities committed to improving graduation rates and sharing best practices. And most important, institutions need to communicate about what works and what doesn't. "Otherwise we are sentencing other universities to repeat our mistakes and our failures — and students deserve better," she exhorted.
Burns spoke last week at SXSWedu as part of a panel of eight higher ed leaders grappling with the challenges of student success. In the vein of sharing ideas, each panelist weighed in on the need for innovation, speaking for 7 minutes or less — about the same amount of time, Burns noted, that a busy university administrator can spare in a typical workday. Here are their insights.
1) Learning is becoming measurable — and more flexible. "We are right on the cusp of being able to measure student learning for the first time," said Ted Mitchell, under secretary of education for the U.S. Department of Education. "And this isn't just about new tests — this is about new environments for learning" that help teachers and mentors better understand what makes students successful.
Mitchell gave the example of flight simulators, which not only provide students with a way to engage in the activity that they want to learn, but also have data systems that monitor students' learning over time, providing them with structured feedback at just the right moment. This sort of data-centric assessment of learning is happening in more and more disciplines — and that opens the door to more innovation, he argued.
"As we approach the measurement of student learning through competencies and masteries, it unlocks a lot of innovative practice," Mitchell noted. "Once one has identified the skills that students need to master, and accomplished the task of being able to measure those, you can make the learning exercise itself far more flexible." For instance, competency-based education now makes it possible to learn from anywhere, any time — which is particularly important for today's non-traditional students balancing education, work and family, he said.
"If you can measure student learning and mastery of competencies, if that can happen independent of time and space, then let's certify that learning in chunks that are small," Mitchell continued. "Let's look at micro-credentialing as a way of building up skills for students of all ages — of building them up in such a way that they get credit for the work that they've done, what they've mastered, while at the same time they're building a stack of certificates and micro-credentials that then would enable them to move into the labor market, to move on to further higher education." That innovation, he said, is what will change students' lives — and our nation — forever.
2) We need a common definition of college affordability. "Politicians, policymakers, higher education administrators — everyone wants to make college more affordable. But what does that really mean? How do we gauge whether or not college is affordable?" asked Zakiya Smith, strategy director for the Lumina Foundation. There are a lot of different ways to measure the cost of college — sticker price, net price, return on investment, student loan debt — but none of those things really mean anything if we can't come to a common understanding of what college affordability means, she said.