Thinking about students
I'm always on the lookout for activities to personally participate in or learn from to better help me understand what life is really like for faculty and students - and staff in other units. And I also think about ways we can systemically improve ITS' overall appreciation for the daily life of others because I strongly believe that that perspective is fundamentally critical to designing and deploying useful services. That's the thinking behind trying to organize a fairly sizable effort for move-in weekend, for example.
Someone shared with me a youtube video this week made by some students at another university. While all story tellers exercise editorial control over their material, this video is sobering even if one takes the most cynical of views - in my opinion. I highly recommend watching it as we think about how students' perspectives and needs should be reflected in our strategic planning discussions.
We are trying to help by figuring out how to make demonstrably effective alternative intelligent textbooks and learning environments in the Open Learning Initiative - see
http://www.cmu.edu/oli
But what we find is that most other universities and faculty don't want to adopt the courses as either textbooks or full courses because of the "not invented here" syndrome. It's a shame...these kinds of web-based, cognitively informed courses could change a lot about the large classes and cost structures. We substantial proof they are not "just as good" as traditional instruction but actually better for many kinds of subjects. But they are expensive and difficult to make (mostly getting the cognitive design right), so these (and other innovations) will change education only if they are widely adopted and everyone doesn't insist on re-inventing them. It's too expensive for everyone to re-invent.
I bet your observation is one that is shared by many (sure is by me). The shift from seeing instruction as [create, deliver, assess] to [create a little+mashup with lots more, facilitate, assess] is an enormous cultural shift. In addition to the cost issue, I think it is also a time to market and flexibility issue. As interdisciplinary teaching/ learning opportunities arise wouldn't it be nice if those opportunities could be seized quickly. Reaching more diverse, differently sized (long tail kind of thinking) learning markets is part of the reduced cost discussion too, I believe. Not that you were dismissing it, just wanted to call it out.
The one quote that is compelling to me is, "When I graduate, I will probably have a job that doesn't exist today." It really demonstrates the need for developing the problem solving skills and creative thinking in the students of today, not the memorization and regurgitation of points that previous generations were expected to accomplish.
The points of today may not all apply in the land of tomorrow.
My first impression watching this was, "I've known all that stuff for years!" I realize that I'm a minority - not many think about this stuff, and even less actually know that change is needed.
What's great is that the "people" now are empowered to voice their concerns in powerful, dramatic ways that get to us on the affective level. It's hard to watch that video and not feel moved emotionally.
IMO, this is what it will take to break the status quo and convince the network of people we all must convince at our respective institutions that change is not only needed - it's demanded.
It's interesting how many of the commentators on the youtube page completely miss the point. I don't believe it's saying that students today have no attention span and waste their education while facebooking, rather I think it's a comment on how they learn and interact.
The facts that really stood out to me were how little they utilised the traditional methods of education, textbooks and lectures, and how much they used the internet.
I think it's amazing and intriguing that many of these students, in spite of low attendance and rarely doing the required reading, produce quality work and obtain their degree and a successful career.
To me it says students today are developing remarkable information skills, even when the course is crafted for them many find it easier and more engaging to use resources they've cultivated themselves than the structured course materials. I think it also indicates how much students today like participation and interaction - they like to communicate and create while they learn.
I think there is a lot of positive in the message of this clip. Or perhaps I've missed the point...
I hadn't read the youtube comments until you pointed them out. I'm patiently awaiting good results from
this project to make youtube comments faster to navigate. But it isn't that the comments are stupid at all (i've become to accustom to comments from soccer highlights), but rather that my own (and sounds like our) reflection is different than those comments. I agree - I take this more of a statement of how orthogonal the traditional methods are to contempory modalities of engagement. There's room for both, I just wonder if we're (higher ed) moving fast enough to take advantage of them.
Very interesting video. The students did a great job of portraying what college can be like. With one teen still at home graduating in a year, I hope that he will be able to adjust to the challenges presented to him as it is to thousands of other students each Fall... hang in there, meet new friends and ... find a job after he graduates.
I love Brett's line:
"What's great is that the 'people' now are empowered to voice their concerns in powerful, dramatic ways that get to us on the affective level. It's hard to watch that video and not feel moved emotionally."
What ever the signs say that the students hold up, the point is, they're saying it. ...and saying it as a result of an Anthropology class at Kansas State. Congratulations to their forward thinking faculty. They were smart enough to effectively use tools that were available to them.
I just want to point out the 10/23 Campus Technology article, 5 Factors Driving Change in IT http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=52239 which is relevant to this conversation and many of our other conversations in ITS right now. In the article Tom Austin, Gartner's vice president states, "The five major...have the potential to completely disrupt vendor business models, user deployment models, whole market segments, and key user and vendor brand assumptions...,"
The "5 factors" are: Web 2.0-style applications, software as a service (SaaS), global-class computing, the consumerization of IT, and open source software.
If you're interested, I did a little looking in to Gartner, Inc.: "is the leading provider of research and analysis on the global information technology industry."
You can go to their site and choose the Education link under Industries.
Another great piece of work from Kansas State.
It's a truism that the technology infrastructure of student life changes rapidly. The tactful observer would notice that IT services struggle to keep pace with change. I keep coming back to how a large IT organization can adapt its culture and structure to accommodate rapid change. In a word: agility.
I also wonder how we can help students, staff and faculty with disabilities enjoy, in their way, the goodness made possible by innovation in technology.