Bernard R. Gifford has woven together an unusual career with roles spanning applied physics, policy analysis, educational administration, philanthropy, college teaching and academic administration. The latest addition to this list is entrepreneurship.
Four years ago, Gifford left Apple Computer, where he was Vice President of Education, to launch a new venture called Academic Systems. The mission of Academic Systems is to work with faculty to increase student academic achievement in entry-level college courses. Academic Systems designs, develops, implements and continuously improves interactive multimedia instructional materials, which are made available to students and their instructors over networked personal computers.
Gifford received his Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of Rochester Medical School, which he says with tongue-in-cheek, "provided me the ideal background for what I'm doing today." The longer explanation follows.
Educom Review: How did you get from a Ph.D. in biophysics to education?
Bernie Gifford: In graduate school I found myself torn between my desire to be a researcher, and my growing interest in the use of policy analytic tools to solve messy, complex social problems. Harvard University resolved my dilemma with an unexpected invitation to spend a year as a John F. Kennedy Fellow in the School of Government. Instead of heading off to England to do a biophysics post-doc, I headed off to Cambridge.
At Harvard, I met the president of the New York City-RAND Institute. The Institute's forte was modeling complex social phenomena, employing computer simulations and complex analytic models. The Institute's president, Peter Szanton, an unusually gifted policy analyst, was searching for his successor, not an easy task, since the work of the Institute had become a political hot potato. Failing to convince a number of pretty smart individuals to take the helm, Peter turned his attention to me. The idea was nutty, but Peter persisted. At least I would get back home to New York City.
A year after I came on board, the Institute's principal protagonist became the Democratic nominee for mayor. Our days were numbered. However, I did manage to organize a research team to design an accountability system for the New York City Board of Education. In making the case for the project to the Board, I apparently made an indelible impression, although not the one I intended. As I later discovered, some Board members concluded that I could be more helpful to them in other ways. By the fall of 1973 I was deputy chancellor of the New York City Public Schools.
I spent four years at 110 Livingston Street, fought lots of battles to change the status quo, even won a few, particularly in the areas of budgetary reform, policy analysis and information systems. But I lost a lot more battles than I won. One situation that got me into hot water was my high profile role in a lawsuit against New York State to correct long-standing funding inequities. Imagine what it was like being publicly identified with this effort, while at the same time lobbying the governor and state legislature for more funds? To make things more interesting, New York City teetered on the brink of bankruptcy for most of my time with the Board. Guess who was assigned the task of figuring out how to administer draconian budget cuts, without bleeding the schools to death? Talk about the impossible! Those were tough times, but I did the best I could. I made some wonderful friends at the Board, a few enemies, but at least I fought the good fight. I came away from the Board much wiser, but more troubled than ever about the condition of public education, particularly in the nation's big cities. I remain so.
ER: Interesting. That explains how you got from biophysics into K-12 education, but what happened between the time you left the New York City public schools and the time you arrived at Berkeley to become dean of the graduate school of education?
Gifford: I spent the next four years as a resident scholar and program officer at the Russell Sage Foundation. It was honest work, but not terribly demanding. I also taught part-time, at Harvard, MIT, Columbia Teachers College and Hunter College.
In the fall of 1981, at the invitation of Robert Sproull, then president of the University of Rochester, and a world class solid state physicist, I returned to my alma mater, as vice president and professor of public policy. Bob's stated goal was to get me ready for a college presidency. And he was supposed to be my friend.
Following my move to Rochester, I was invited to spend a quarter in the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, as a visiting Regents Professor. Near the end of the quarter, I was nominated by colleagues in the School for the position of dean of the Graduate School of Education. They argued that my science background and my experience as deputy chancellor of the New York City Public Schools made me uniquely qualified for the position.
What had happened is that the Graduate School of Education had fallen on hard times, to the point that an influential sub-committee of Berkeley's faculty senate had suggested that it be closed down. Their argument was that the school was so unfocused, it was beyond repair. Instead, Chancellor Heyman decided to rebuild rather than to dismantle the school. He worried that the closure of the school would be interpreted by the larger polity as an indication that Berkeley, the flagship campus of the nation's most prestigious publicly financed higher education system, had nothing constructive or intelligent to contribute to the growing national debate over educational reform.
Still, Heyman's reversal was not a popular decision with the faculty senate. In fact, when he called me in the fall of 1982 to ask me about returning to Berkeley on a full-time basis as dean we talked about my prospects for success. He told me that two outcomes were possible: I would become one of the best deans in the school's history, or I would become the last dean.
The opportunity and the odds struck me as just about right, and, as the saying goes, the rest is history. Although, I hated to leave Rochester so soon after returning, I could not pass up the challenge of trying to rebuild the fortunes of a formerly distinguished institution that had fallen on hard times.
ER: Isn't it unusual to have a dean of education without a doctorate in education?
Gifford: Perhaps. But in this instance my background proved to be advantageous. I set out to build the best doctoral programs in education in science, mathematics and technology in the nation. Being a scientist helped, because when I went after the best faculty prospects in cognitive science and instructional technology, they were willing to listen to me. I spoke their language.
ER: So what happened? Were you successful?
Gifford: I think so. In 1982, the year before I arrived, the School was on the verge of being closed down. It enjoyed little prestige. It had no endowed professorships. External funding for faculty research and graduate student support was minimal. Now, thanks to the School's cadre of new faculty, its fortunes have changed. Its doctoral programs in mathematics, science and technology education are among the best in the world, and are generously supported by the National Science Foundation. Computer science graduates from the best computer science departments regularly apply for admission. The School has four endowed chairs. It has won two high profile multi-million dollar competitions to operate federally funded national research centers.
To put the icing on the cake, in both 1994 and 1995, the U.S. News and World Report rankings of graduate schools of education placed Berkeley ahead of every other public university, and third in the nation, behind Harvard and Stanford. Even though I had left the deanship in 1992, my sense is that I did something right that contributed to where the School is today.
ER: So you're proud of your record at Berkeley.
Gifford: I am, but not simply because of the School's present ranking. I'm proud that I was a part of bringing together a faculty committed to informing instructional practice with solid research on teaching and learning. Like Mike Heyman, I believe that higher education has to have something to say to K-12 education, other than to bash the schools for churning out inadequately prepared students.
ER: And how did you get from Berkeley to Apple Computer?
Gifford: In 1984, I fell in love with the Macintosh. It was the perfect metaphor for educational technology. The Macintosh was user-centered, intuitive, supported self-paced learning and brilliantly employed iconic representations to render the obscure plain. And, it made networking and location-independent communications easy. At some point my account of the Macintosh as a model for educational computing came to the attention of Apple. I received invitations to speak at Apple-sponsored education conferences. I took my compensation in the form of donations of Macintoshes and laser printers to the Graduate School of Education.
As 1989 rolled around, marking the end of my six-year term as dean, I was busy planning my sabbatical leave. Being dean was challenging, but I wasn't sure I wanted do it for another six years. I was drained.
Near the end of 1988, along came an Apple headhunter, and you know the rest of the story. In retrospect, I think Apple had concluded that it was easier to put me on the payroll then to continue to donate Apple equipment every time I spoke at one of their conferences.
ER: What were your responsibilities at Apple?
Gifford: As Vice President for Education, my primary assignment was to pull together the annual strategic plan for the company's U.S. educational activities, to develop programs to support the plan and to represent the needs of K-12 and higher education to the company's executive management team.
As part of my personal agenda, and following in the footsteps of Joe Wyatt, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, I set out to figure out why so few truly substantive instructional software applications were being employed to improve the higher education teaching and learning enterprise. I visited hundreds of campuses and interviewed countless leaders in technology-mediated instruction. These visits served as grist for my Chronicle of Higher Education columns.
Over time, I reluctantly concluded that the predominant assumptions guiding Apple's support for instructional software development were wrong. It had been assumed that if Apple provided high powered Macintoshes, lesson authoring tools, instructional design workshops and financial support for student assistants and released time, faculty working independently on campuses around the country would develop an ever-expanding library of robust instructional software. Well, it turned out that not even Apple's substantive support for faculty software development efforts could change the fact that this was a theory for which there was scant evidence.
This is not to say that some talented faculty, on some campuses, have not developed some terrific theoretically sound prototypes. But the incentive and reward system that governs higher education works against the creation of long-term software development efforts. In their current incarnations, higher education institutions are simply not equipped to build and maintain the organizational infrastructure and resources required to develop, support and continuously improve "commercial quality" instructional applications.
ER: Is this what led you to start Academic Systems?
Gifford: Yes, but not right away. At first, I lobbied Apple to fund a new business unit to develop and market instructional software applications to colleges and universities. That plan never got off the ground, in part because Apple concluded that the potential market was too small. I then examined the prospects of establishing an instructional software development center at Berkeley. That plan got nowhere, because I couldn't figure out how a public university could function in the software marketplace, without compromising itself. It took me a while before coming to the conclusion that there was a desperate need for a new type of organization, one capable of bringing to fruition the next paradigm of technology-mediated instruction, learning and assessment.
I knew that if this new organization were to succeed, it would have to bring together under one roof the technologies, infrastructure and disciplined behaviors of the private sector, and the sensibilities, expertise and collaborative traditions of higher education. From these musings emerged the genesis of Academic Systems.
And after four years of very intense work, we are now seeing the fruits of our labors - faculty around the country who are using the Mediated Learning courses we have developed in mathematics are reporting significant improvements in student pass rates, student retention rates and student attitudes toward mathematics.
ER: Any connection between your early ambitions about wanting "to solve messy, complex social problems" and what you are doing today at Academic Systems?
Gifford: I certainly hope so. Look at our first two Mediated Learning mathematics courses. They are designed to support students who are very different than previous cohorts. These students are more likely to be older, to attend school part-time, to take coursework intermittently, to have attended more than one college, to have attended high schools where they were not well-served, to be in the labor force, to be first-generation college students and to be members of minority racial, ethnic or language groups. Many arrive on campus underprepared for college-level studies. Frequently, these students drop out because they are placed in instructional situations that fail to take into account their unique learning assistance needs. From my perspective, the challenge of making higher education more responsive to the needs of these so called "non-traditional students," and for that matter all students, is indeed "a messy, complex social problem." In fact, it is one of the most difficult problems we face in higher education, to translate greater access to a college education to increased academic achievement for all types of students.
ER: How is Mediated Learning different from previous generations of computer-assisted instruction (CAI), such as Plato?
Gifford: The objectives of Mediated Learning, like those of Plato, are to enable students to exercise more effective control over the pacing and sequencing of their own learning, to obtain feedback when it is most likely to make a difference and to secure timely information on their own learning progress. In short, the objective of both systems is the creation of teaching and learning environments that are more learner-centered, more flexible, more effective and more efficient.
Mediated Learning is different from Plato in at least four substantive ways. The most obvious difference between the two approaches are technological. In addition to incorporating interactive multimedia capabilities, Mediated Learning is supported by far more robust authoring tools, database and networking technologies then Plato. These new technologies, however, are not the entire story.
Plato lesson design efforts were guided by classic behaviorist theories of instruction, resulting in the production of lessons that generated a large number of microscopic-level interactions between learner and instructional materials. Mediated Learning lessons are informed by more contemporary theories of cognition and learning, leading to the production of representation-rich lessons that are designed to increase the learner's ability to actively examine knowledge from multiple perspectives. Also, the lessons are of varying levels of granularity and tend to be less tightly structured than their Plato counterparts.
And consistent with behaviorist theory, Plato designers sought to create a hermetically sealed teaching and learning environment in which students engage in computer-mediated autonomous learning. Besides supporting autonomous learning, Mediated Learning is structured to support other teaching strategies, including direct instruction, one-on-one coaching and small group collaboration. This is where the relational database capabilities are particularly helpful.
Finally, in Plato the function of networking and communications technologies is to facilitate efficient information exchange between computer and student. This is consistent with behaviorist notions that instruction and learning is all about transmitting knowledge. In Mediated Learning, the core assumption is that there can be no productive learning without frequent exchanges between instructors and their students, and that the purpose of networking systems is to facilitate every possible means of exchange, and that these exchanges should not be limited to one data type, nor should these exchanges be limited by location or time.
ER: Are there any particular kinds of institutions where Mediated Learning is accepted more quickly, more readily?
Gifford: So far we are not seeing any distinct barriers that seem to be institutionally related. Mediated Learning has been successful at community colleges and at state universities; on urban campuses and suburban campuses; with traditional students and with non-traditional students. For example, Mediated Learning is being employed at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, a very selective institution, as well as at Brevard Community College, an open enrollment community college in the state of Florida. It is also being used in diverse instructional environments within a single institutional setting.
What we have discovered so far is that faculty members all ask the same question: How will this help my students learn and what must I do to be able to use this technology effectively and efficiently? So to answer your question, there might be some differences but so far we have not been able to detect the differences.
ER: How do faculty like the Mediated Learning approach? How do students like it?
Gifford: The short answer is that faculty and students are embracing Mediated Learning. Many of them love the flexibility the approach gives them. As you well know, anytime you introduce a new approach to anything, particularly in higher education, which, to say the least, is hardly the most supportive environment for change, you must go through the complete implementation cycle, and Mediated Learning was no exception to this rule. The first stage of this cycle is skepticism, and I want to assure you that not one faculty review group we encountered was willing to give us permission to skip over this stage. Although the conceptual foundations of Mediated Learning are not entirely new, and the approach draws upon a rich body of research in cognition and instruction, the case still had to be made that Mediated Learning could improve learner productivity.
The second stage was resistance. Some faculty groups persisted in their resistance to Mediated Learning, or any other form of technology-mediated instruction, no matter what we said, what proof of effectiveness we provided, or what instructors or students who were using Mediated Learning had to say. For the most part, however, the number of faculty groups who proved to be unwilling to consider any alternative to the familiar lecture-presentation model turned out to be surprisingly small.
The third stage of the implementation cycle is small-scale experimentation and continuous improvement. I believe this is the stage we are now completing. Mediated Learning requires instructors and their students to behave differently. These were not easy changes, but everyone now appears to be more comfortable in their new roles. And we are learning how to improve Mediated Learning's technological and pedagogical infrastructure, to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and flexibility of the entire teaching and learning enterprise.
The fourth stage of the cycle is acceptance. What we are seeing on those campuses where Mediated Learning is now being used a second and third time, is that instructors and students are very, very comfortable with their new roles and their new environment. More important, we are beginning to see increased student success. Fewer students are dropping out of their classes. More students are passing their courses. The question for us at Academic Systems is can we move and improve Mediated Learning fast enough to keep up with the expectations we have generated?
ER: Is Mediated Learning suitable for other disciplines besides mathematics?
Gifford: Yes. A very strong case can be made that the theory of instruction informing Mediated Learning is sufficiently rigorous, cohesive and comprehensible to be applicable to other first-year college courses that, like mathematics, are hierarchical, linear, stable and adaptable. A high percentage of first-year courses have these characteristics, including, among others, first year courses in language, science, economics and statistics.
ER: Are you currently on the Internet, and how do you see your Internet efforts changing your relationships with your higher education partners?
Gifford: With the assistance of one of our key technology partners, Macromedia, we have begun to place sample Mediated Learning lessons on AcademicNet, our Web site. Working with some of our current campus partners, we expect the first full implementation of Mediated Learning courses over the Internet in the next year. Initially, students will be required to use CD-ROM-equipped personal computers, to which they can connect a host of WWW-based technologies, including a very sophisticated relational database application that will be used for maintaining learner performance information, instructional updates, bulletin boards, archival information, instructional materials and other similar materials.
Our long-term goal is to work closely with our campus partners to figure out how to use the Internet to create an attractive alternative to classic models of location-independent instruction. Currently, most of these models are built upon the questionable assumption that the classroom lecture can be broadcast to students located beyond classroom walls, without incurring any degradation in instructional quality or student learning productivity.
ER: As someone who has been an executive in private industry, how do you see the role of corporate America in changing education?
Gifford: I don't think corporate America is going to change higher education by teaching us how to solve our own problems. Corporate America is going to change education by voting with its feet, by cutting back on its support for the instructional status quo, and by increasing its support for new approaches to the teaching and learning enterprise, especially those that show promise of increasing learner productivity. There is much to be learned from the example of General Motors (GM), which recently announced its intentions to revisit all of its educational activities, including many of its long-standing relationships with higher education institutions.
There is even more to be learned from the behavior of American Federation of Teachers' locals around the country, who increasingly are bargaining for the right to provide continuing teacher education programs for their own members, a function that was once the exclusive province of higher education.
Whether it is GM or AFT, the lessons for higher education should be clear. The status quo is on trial. In both the private and public sectors, influential organizations are actively looking for new approaches to the teaching and learning enterprise that are more learner-centered, more flexible, less location-dependent and that make intelligent use of technology.
To the degree that higher education is responsive to those needs, it will be able to take advantage of the increasing national interest in improving instruction and learning. To the degree that higher education institutions ignore those needs, they will not be in a position to take advantage of the new opportunities afforded by the changing educational and technological landscape.
ER: What do you do for fun?
Gifford: Play baseball, teach at Berkeley and spend time with my family. I still harbor hopes that someone is going to start a baseball league for old fogies and draft me. Of all the things I've done in my career, I enjoy teaching more than anything else. I continue to learn from my Berkeley students, and I hope they are learning something from me. My family keeps me humble.
Bernard R. Gifford is founder, chairman and chief instructional officer of Academic Systems. [email protected], <http://academic.com>