This three-part series began with a discussion of the ways in which our
definition of learning is changing. During the past two decades,
dramatic shifts in who is learning--as well as in when and where they
are learning--have resulted in a mismatch between a view of the
residential college as the ideal collegiate setting and the actual needs
of higher education's students. In addition, the knowledge explosion is
calling into question long-held beliefs about what students need to
learn during their undergraduate years, while newly emerging tools for
accessing, creating, displaying, and assessing information are
transforming the nature of the learning process. Finally, our
understanding of how people learn is growing, suggesting that increased
individualization of the learning process is the way to respond to the
diverse learning styles brought by our students as they enter and
reenter the world of higher education.
How effective is our current system of teaching and learning in serving
the new definition of learning? Not very. Inhibiting its effectiveness
are outmoded assumptions about who students are and about the teaching
and learning process. Classroom-based, residential institutions were
developed to serve a relatively homogeneous student population, a
population quite different from today's students. Prior to the 1960s,
college students were similar in age (young), sex (male), ethnicity
(white), and economic means (affluent.) The size of the nation's student
body was relatively small, reaching about 3.2 million in 1960. The
collegiate experience, itself a homogeneous one, constituted at that
time a rite of passage with widely accepted milestones along the way.
Notions about the small liberal arts college as the best form of higher
education reflect that long-past era of shared purpose in educating, or
socializing, a common student body.
Today's student body is characterized by heterogeneity: in age (only 43
percent are under age 25), sex (women account for nearly 55 percent of
all undergraduates), ethnicity (more than one student in six is
nonwhite), and economic means (students from all socioeconomic groups
attend college.) Now that approximately 14 million students attend
college, American higher education is a mass phenomenon. Residential
education alone simply cannot serve the needs of today's students: it is
too restrictive, it is too expensive, and it is often inappropriate.
Clearly, residential education remains a suitable option for the
minority of college students who match the pre-1960s profile. But for
the millions of working adults who have already experienced their own
rites of passage as they entered adulthood, all-night bull sessions in
dormitories, pep rallies, and football games somehow lack in appeal.
Old assumptions about teaching and learning go hand in hand with old
ideas about a homogeneous student body. Our current system supports a
process whose focus is on teaching. Its premise is that students need to
be taught a body of knowledge that enables them to prepare for a
lifetime career. That system is, however, a relic of the past, when the
teacher and the classroom were the only means available to deliver
information and knowledge. That outmoded delivery system can be
described as a teaching infrastructure.
What Characterizes the Teaching Infrastructure?
Institutions of higher education
Our highly autonomous institutions are organized according to a teacher-
centered model of education. The rationale for the campus, and for
maintenance of its extensive physical plant, is based on the assumption
that students must travel to a place in order to be taught. Contrast
that idea with its opposite expression--students must travel to a place
in order to learn--and the emphasis on teaching versus learning, as in
today's system, becomes obvious. Students clearly do not need to travel
to a place in order to learn. Under the current system, it is convenient
for faculty to have students come to them in order to learn what faculty
have to teach. Because students are confined to learning what a
particular faculty attached to a particular institution have to offer,
this arrangement in itself limits what students can learn. Our
institutions are reminiscent of other kinds of industrial age
organizations such as the factory and the department store--
characterized by size and centralization--in contrast to the
distributed, networked organization and mail-order shopping services of
the 1990s.
Faculty-centered curricula
Faculty members and their interests dominate the teaching
infrastructure. The infrastructure is based on the abilities and
interests of faculty members themselves, who then build individual
courses, curricula, and requirements around those interests. Faculty
members have great latitude in organizing courses, selecting teaching
and learning materials, and making conscious decisions about how best to
represent and communicate their evolving views of their academic and
professional specialties. Faculty members also select course materials
for students based on highly individualistic judgments about such
materials' educational value. Design all too frequently begins with the
question, What do I want to teach? rather than, What do students need to
learn? The concept of course design itself is indicative of a faculty-
centered approach: faculty design, faculty select, faculty present. In
the process, the student is often little more than a passive recipient
of the outcomes of the faculty member's decision-making process.
Student services provided by professionals
Because the American professoriat has decided that its primary business
consists of research and teaching, a panoply of student services are
provided by an ever-increasing corps of student service professionals--
services that were once provided by the faculty. The entire admissions
process, from recruitment of prospective students to their selection and
orientation, is handled by an admissions staff. Once admitted, students
have their housing arrangements and classroom assignments managed by
still more staff. Core student academic needs such as advisement and
counseling, once an important faculty domain, are largely--and poorly--
met by professional staff (or sometimes by computerized degree audits).
What little faculty involvement there is in the advisement process all
too often consists of nothing more than an impersonal sign-off on a
registration card. The poor quality of most student services and the
total absence of college faculty from the process are indicative of the
teacher-centered environment; that is, student services exist to free
the faculty rather than to serve genuine student needs.
Shortcomings of the Teaching Infrastructure
From the Pew Higher Education Roundtable to the Wingspread Group on
Higher Education, calls abound for the restructuring of higher
education. The primary goals of the restructuring movement such as
increased access, improved quality, and reduced cost cannot be achieved
without serious examination of how the teaching infrastructure stands in
the way. Access to higher education is constrained by the traditional
classroom, which limits enrollment to those students who are able to
attend classes at fixed times and places. Such an arrangement may have
been appropriate when only a minority of the population required such
advanced knowledge, but today's students need greater flexibility in
when and where they learn.
In addition, the pedagogical model utilized in the current, teaching
infrastructure, based on industrial age concepts, cannot offer a high-
quality learning experience. Fixed in time and space, the model declares
that an academic year of two semesters together with courses that meet
for 50 minutes on alternating days of the week is the only way to
structure learning. Most students pursue their courses in large, on-
campus groups, where lecture is the primary teaching paradigm. Credit
hours serve as the standard of achievement, as in "I received three
credits for that course." This one-size-fits-all model may have been
appropriate to a homogeneous student population mastering a relatively
standardized curriculum, but it conflicts with what we now know about
the nature of learning. By their very nature, courses simply cannot
respond to individualized learning issues. The lecture method prohibits
student involvement and active learning. What we know about high-quality
learning, consisting of the use of such techniques as mastery learning,
cooperative learning, and discovery learning, implies a learning-by-
doing model rather than the passive, classroom-based model that typifies
a teaching infrastructure.
Finally, a teaching infrastructure is expensive to maintain. In addition
to the high cost of maintaining a physical plant, the instructional
model based on teaching is costly because it is labor-intensive. The
often cited analogy of the Mozart symphony (it takes the same number of
person-hours to perform a Mozart symphony today as it did when Mozart
was alive) tells the tale. Used as a justification for arguing that
higher education is one of those activities whose efficiency can be
increased only at the margins, the Mozart analogy implies some kind of
Platonic ideal of fixed full-time-equivalent (FTE) ratios. Most higher
education funding schemes follow that assumption as well. This teaching
model is simply incapable of meeting the learning needs of the 21st
century at a reasonable cost. Think what it would cost the California
State University System to serve its anticipated 700,000 new students
using a fixed FTE-ratio model. But why would we want to perpetuate a
model that suffers from such severe shortcomings in student access and
quality, even if we could afford to?
A National Learning Infrastructure
It is clear to me that we need a new infrastructure to serve our
changing definition of learning, an infrastructure that turns the
teaching infrastructure on its head to focus on the learner. Unlike
today's teaching infrastructure, which relies on highly individualistic
institutions, a learning infrastructure will be national in its scope
based on collaborative efforts among institutions that scale beyond the
local level. What would a national learning infrastructure look like?
Many of our current structures will remain, but their content will be
radically different.
Institutions of higher education
Institutions of higher education will continue to assist students in
organizing their learning experiences and in linking them to appropriate
instructional resources. The provision of high-quality student services
will move to the top of the list in a learner-centered environment.
Institutions will retain their degree-granting authority, determining
the learning outcomes required for the degree and certifying that
graduates have achieved them. But an institution's role of providing
instruction for its "own" students will be radically different. The role
of the physical plant will diminish as networked learning resources
become more available. Faculties will continue to be important, but not
as teachers: rather, as mentors, group project leaders, and designers of
instructional experiences. Thus, because of the widespread availability
of self-paced learning materials, direct faculty intervention throughout
the learning process will lessen.
Student-centered curricula
In a learner-centered environment, curriculum development will begin by
asking what students need to learn. Through a process of individualized
assessment, we will find out what students already know and how they
learn best. Assessment will be both holistic--comparing where students
begin in relation to the outcomes needed for the degree--and particular-
-repeating the process for the skills and knowledge needed for specific
subject matters. Vast quantities of information and learning materials
will be easily accessible via the network. Learning materials will not
be course based, but, rather, will be modularized to respond to
individual learning needs and preferences. Materials will be delivered
in a variety of formats depending on the individual's learning style.
Evaluation of student learning will be an integral part of each set of
learning materials, thus eliminating much of the labor-intensive grading
process.
Just-in-time learning
A national learning infrastructure will support an information age
pedagogical model in which learning can occur anytime, anyplace,
anywhere. Institutions will operate year-round; semesters and fixed
class meetings will be a distant memory. Students will take as much or
as little time as they need to complete the learning required. Just-in-
time learning will be the norm. Students will access only those learning
modules they find necessary, whenever and wherever they need them.
Self-paced, independent study
A national learning infrastructure will make possible a new kind of
student. Tomorrow's students will resemble today's research faculty and
will possess qualities of increased independence and self-reliance. No
longer will students be passively taught by teachers who organize the
learning experience for them. Students will learn how to find and use
learning materials that meet their own individual learning needs,
abilities, preferences, and interests; they will learn how to learn.
Faculty will encourage and guide students to use the rich information
resources available to students and will guide students to work
collaboratively when appropriate.
Electronic collaboration
Physical contact will be less important to students, except perhaps on
residential campuses designed explicitly for 18-year-olds. Even on those
campuses, however, physical contact between students and faculty will be
reduced, while video-based electronic contact across the network will
increase. Students will spend time in small discussion groups or working
on collaborative projects with their peers when appropriate. Again,
faculty intervention will be limited, for one of the explicit goals of a
learner-centered environment is greater independence for students.
Conclusion
A national learning infrastructure can overcome the limitations of
today's teaching infrastructure. A robust national information
infrastructure (NII) is the base upon which a learning infrastructure
will be developed; without it, we cannot meet the access needs of
tomorrow's students. Without it, we cannot develop and distribute the
interactive learning materials we need to improve the quality of higher
education. Without it, we cannot conceive of scalable pedagogies based
on student learning rather than faculty teaching. Because the NII's
development is driven by powerful social and economic necessities, there
is little doubt that the NII will be a reality (i.e., the technological
infrastructure will be developed). But will the higher education
community be prepared to take advantage of the opportunity the NII
presents?
The difficult task before us is to navigate the transition from a
teacher-centered environment to a learner-centered one because of the
vast amount of change required in higher education. But the time is
right, and new voices with a vision of that future are raised every day.
More and more in our community are beginning to understand and to agree
with Alan H. Leader, dean of the School of Business at Southern
Connecticut State University:
"The purpose and outcome of our educational enterprise is learning, not
teaching. Teaching is what we do. Colleges do not exist in order for us
to teach but so that students can learn. We should be able to describe
the outcome of our educational activities in terms of added value to our
students, i.e., additions to a student's knowledge and skills as he or
she progresses through our degree program. The focus must be on the
student, not the instructor."
This is the difference between a teacher-centered environment and a
learner-centered one; these are the ideas that will guide us as we
create a national learning infrastructure.
Sidebar
Mentoring vs. Teaching
SUNY Empire State College has offered individualized instruction since
1971. Here, ESC mentor Dr. Louvan Wood, a recipient of SUNY's Excellence
in Teaching award, describes his view of faculty work in a learner-
centered environment.
There are two significant differences between being a mentor and being a
professor. First, professors concentrate on developing material for
abstract students; the focus is on the subject matter. Mentors
concentrate on the individual student and relate material to that
student. Ideally, of course, both foci are present in all instruction;
the difference lies in which one takes precedence, as compromises are
made in day-to-day work.
Assuming that any faculty member possesses a solid foundation in an
academic discipline and a facility with English and other appropriate
ways of communicating, the quality that an individual needs to be a
mentor as opposed to a professor is the desire to approach educational
work in a student-centered fashion. From that desire, several more
specific qualities follow: ability to listen, respect for people,
willingness to expend a lot of energy on one person, willingness to
approach subject matter in a variety of ways, and willingness to think
through a lot of educational issues from the beginning rather than
relying on precedent.
The role of the mentor is to help each student to develop and to execute
the best possible degree program. Best has two meanings: first, in the
sense of coming as close as possible to each student's goals and,
second, in the sense of a liberal, academic education. The effort to
meet both aspects of best does lead to compromise; for example,
students' professional goals do not always lead to a strong liberal
education. The tension between these two goals is part of every college.
Developing a degree program implies a number of activities. A mentor
must draw out of a student a description of the student's goals and
needs, including the student's implicitly held ideas of education, and
identify any difficulties with academic skills. A student's goals and
needs may be implicit as well as explicit. Part of my job is to explore
purposes with each student to try to articulate implicit needs as much
as possible, taking care not to decide a student's needs without some
level of concurrence by the student. Such needs often include skills
necessary to master content as well as the content itself.
Executing a degree program means that the mentor will find--or teach the
student how to find--appropriate resources. Finding appropriate
resources also means finding ways to address skills: making sure a
student can use a library, write a paper, or comprehend mathematical
prose--whatever skills are necessary as a precondition for the student
to learn.
Individualization implies allowing students a good deal of flexibility
in time. For academic purposes, I see no justification in requiring a
study to be finished in 16 weeks. So long as the work is not so diffuse
that the student loses the thread and has to do extensive review, I see
no educational reason not to continue to work with a student.
Carol A. Twigg is vice president of Educom. [email protected]