The history of higher education in America has been characterized by
change. At the turn of the century, only 232,000 students--less than 1
percent of the U.S. population--attended college. By the eve of World
War II, the number of undergraduates had reached 1.4 million. Decades of
rapid expansion followed the postwar era, and today U.S. college
students number more than 13 million. That's a lot of change in a
relatively short period of time. And as attendance patterns have
changed, new institutional structures have emerged to serve new student
needs.
Driving these changes have been society's expectations about what
students need to learn--its changing definition of learning--as well as
the delivery of mechanisms, or technology, available to serve that need.
Colonial colleges, whose mission centered on the moral preparation of
civic leaders, relied on the residential campus to create a community of
shared values. Shifting the emphasis of institutional mission to the
practical application of knowledge, the land-grant movement used the
lecture as an efficient mechanism for professors to share the results of
their research. The teaching infrastructure that emerged remains the
predominant pedagogical model at most of our campuses today.
Is our definition of learning changing? And if so, why? What now
constitutes the learning we are seeking? Is it mastery of a body of
knowledge, critical thinking ability, communications skill, preparation
for a career or useful life, the ability to find needed information, the
ability to interact with others? If colleges and universities themselves
change in response to society's definition of learning, how are our
institutions responding to today's meaning of the word? Does our current
teaching infrastructure, with its emphasis on the traditional classroom,
provide an effective mechanism to serve a newly defined view of
learning?
It seems to me that our definition of learning is changing in a number
of ways. We are beginning to have different ideas about what students
need to learn. Driven by the information explosion, or the knowledge
explosion, our expectations about what a college student should learn at
the baccalaureate level are changing. Increasingly, viewing a college
education as mastery of a body of knowledge or a complete preparation
for a lifetime career is becoming outmoded. Instead, we recognize that
graduates need to have acquired skills, such as critical thinking,
quantitative reasoning, and effective communication, along with
abilities, such as the ability to find needed information and the
ability to work well with others.
For example, the Big Six accounting firms have declared that no one can
master the full content of a discipline in an undergraduate education.
Rules change so fast that accountants must continually relearn them
throughout their professional life. The Big Six want graduates not who
know everything, but who have the capacity to learn. It is difficult to
think of a profession that does not share that requirement. How many of
our institutions are rethinking and redesigning their curricula to
reflect the shift from teaching content to enabling students to develop
lifelong learning skills? How many of our faculty understand the
implications of the information explosion and have reengineered their
courses accordingly?
We are seeing dramatic changes in who is learning. Only 43 percent of
the nation's undergraduates are under the age of 25 and attending a
four-year college on a full-time basis. What we think of as traditional
undergraduates--those who are 18-22 years old, attending full-time, and
living in college housing--constitute less than one-fourth of all
students in higher education. Adult students, who are primarily part-
time and nonresidential, now make up higher education's new majority.
Their view of higher education is frequently that of the consumer. As
Patricia Kovel-Jarboe has noted, adult students are more likely to
define quality in the language of the quality improvement movement,
namely, satisfaction of customer needs, than in the traditional measures
of quality used in higher education, namely, rich resources as
represented by the size of libraries, staff-to-student ratios, and the
number and size of grants and contracts won by faculty. Adult students
look for increased competition between higher education providers to
work to their advantage as consumers. How prepared are our institutions
to serve this new majority? How well do we understand the consequences
of not responding to its needs? Are our faculty ready to respond to
students who regard themselves as equals of faculty and as purchasers of
their services?
Emergence of New Learning Environments
We are also experiencing changes in when students learn. Rapid shifts in
the U.S. economy--reflecting changes in the global economy--lead to the
disappearance of old jobs and the emergence of new ones. Forecasters say
that the average work life in the future will consist of six or seven
different careers, each requiring new skills, new attitudes, new values.
The American Society for Training and Development estimates that by the
year 2000, 75 percent of the workforce will need retraining. For most of
the U.S. population, lifelong learning is becoming a necessity. Whether
serving adult students when they return or preparing traditional
undergraduates for a lifetime of continuous learning, all institutions
are being affected by these trends. As we think about teaching and
learning issues, how many of our colleges and universities continue to
view their primary business as residential undergraduate education for
recent high school graduates? How many of our faculty have considered
the implications of a society in which continuous learning is the norm?
We are witnessing changes in where students learn. No longer confined
exclusively to the classroom, credit-bearing learning now occurs in
workplaces, from the office to the factory floor to submarines under the
sea; in malls; in hotel rooms; and in the home. Facilitated by the power
of information technology, classroom learning now extends beyond a
single campus to distant sites across the town, across the state, and
across the country. How many of our institutions understand this
profound shift away from the concept of the university as a place? How
many of our faculty are thinking about new pedagogies that reach out to
students, wherever they are?
We also have new tools available to assist us while we learn. Steve
Ehrmann of the Annenberg/CPB project has pointed out that we live in a
world richer in information and in the tools for using information than
most of us can exploit because we lack the skills to use them. New
visualization tools give us capabilities in addition to text in order to
imagine, to analyze, to communicate. Powerful creative tools are
available to produce newsletters, design homes and offices, create
music. Electronic communication tools are creating global communities;
computing and networking are shattering and reshaping individual jobs
and entire industries. Are our colleges and universities preparing
graduates not only so as to master these tools but also so as to enable
them to acquire the higher-order thinking skills needed to use the tools
effectively? How many of our faculty can use these tools skillfully
themselves?
The Nature of Learning
Finally, increasingly we know more about how people learn. Our growing
sophistication about the nature of learning points inevitably to the
virtues of individualized learning and to the creation of customized
learning environments that accommodate the diverse learning styles our
students possess. Harvard's Howard Gardner in his book Frames of Mind:
The Theory of Multiple Intelligences suggests that there are at least
seven human intelligences, two of which--verbal/linguistic and
logical/mathematical--have dominated the traditional pedagogy of Western
societies. The five nontraditional intelligences--spatial, musical,
kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal--have generally been
overlooked in education. If we can develop ways to teach and learn by
engaging all seven intelligences, we will increase the opportunities for
student success.
Another widely used tool, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), has
contributed to our understanding of individual differences in the
learning process. The MBTI describes four patterns of preferred learning
styles: the ES (concrete active), the IS (concrete reflective), the EN
(abstract active), and the IN (abstract reflective.) These patterns are
not evenly distributed in the general population. The ES pattern is the
most frequent, representing 50 percent of high school seniors; the IN
pattern is the least frequent, representing about 10 percent. Recent
studies have shown that the largest group of college students consists
of concrete-active learners, who learn best from concrete experiences
that engage their senses, that begin with practice and end with theory,
and so on. As Charles Schroeder recently pointed out in Change magazine,
the overwhelming majority of college faculty prefer the IN (abstract-
reflective) pattern, creating an increasing disparity between teacher
and learner. How many of our institutions are aware of the results of
this important research and are moving to customize their courses? How
can our faculty respond to diverse learning patterns when their primary
pedagogy consists of classroom lecture?
Meeting the Challenge
Clearly, our current system of teaching and learning is changing as
institutions respond to the changing definition of learning. Information
technology is playing a central role in those changes, driving the
information explosion and making it possible for us to think about new
ways of responding to new demands. In fact, the lack of affordable,
widely available information technology may be the primary reason why we
have not seen significant changes in our methods of teaching and
learning until recently: it simply wasn't possible. For example, even
though distance learning has been around for a long time--primarily in
the form of correspondence study--the existence of affordable
information technology with the capability of offering instruction
anytime, to anyone, anywhere has given new impetus to the changes in
who, when, and where students learn. Significantly, what we know about
the ways students learn is converging with new multimedia capabilities.
But what we have witnessed thus far are piecemeal changes, mere
indications of what a new infrastructure might look like that would
systematically serve the new definition of learning.
Our current system was developed to serve a different student population
and is based on old assumptions about teaching (e.g., viewing the
teacher and the classroom as the only delivery method) and learning
(e.g., mastery of a body of knowledge as the way to prepare for life.)
What was once the most effective and efficient way to teach and learn--
the research university model of faculty who create knowledge and
deliver it to students via lectures--now cracks under the strain of
meeting new learning demands. As an old technology, the traditional
classroom suffers from severe limitations, in both its on-campus and its
off-campus versions. We need a better system of learning to enable
students to acquire knowledge. We need to create a support system for
faculty who want to teach in this new way. We need a national learning
infrastructure.
[Next: What would a national learning infrastructure look like?]
Carol A. Twigg is vice president of Educom. [email protected]