"Truly important insights": Bill Gates on Change.edu

I recommend a recent review by Bill Gates—better known these days for his groundbreaking work on health and education issues—of Andy Rosen’s “Change.edu: Rebooting for the new talent economy”:

In “Change.edu,” Andrew Rosen calls for greater relevance, access, accountability and transparency in higher education. He builds a persuasive case that many non-traditional students — such as working adults, parents and those at risk of dropping out — are not well served by traditional institutions. New approaches, he argues, are critical to ensure that more people have the opportunity to obtain college degrees.

As chief executive of Kaplan, Inc., a for-profit educational services company, Rosen offers a prescription that will rankle some traditionalists in academia. But I find his insights truly important for the debate on what needs to be done to improve the success of post-secondary education in America.

Read the full article, which ran in The Washington Post (Jan. 22, 2012) and is posted on GatesNotes.com.

WWW.KNEXT.COM "Leveraging your past to shape your future."

On a personal note, this is an exciting week for me. Almost 40 years ago, I was talking on Main St in Montpeleier, Vermont with a friend, Tom Evslin, about how to assess learning on the computer. He was, and is, a brilliant thinker in new applications for thecomputer, then the net and what is now the world wide web. My question was, why can't we simplfy the cumbersome computer protocols that existed in the mid-70's and do alot more assessing of personal and experiential learning via the computer? Tom said,  "We don't know how to do that, Peter. But someday we will."

With the advent of the world wide web and, more recently, social networking, his prediction has come true.  We do know how to do it. And this week we launched KNEXT a web-based learning support and assentment service that is available to anyone who wants to use it.

My purpose is to change the marketplace for adult learners, as learners and as consumers of higher education. We do the former by putting them in touch with what they already know (leveraging your past to create your future) and the latter by encouraging them to look for the postsecondary institutions and programs that will serve their needs and recognize the learning they have already achieved.

This is part of the great "mash-up" that I wrote about last week. The ability to convert personal learning into college credit at great scale has far-reaching implications for the future of access, success, and opportunity through post-secondary teaching and learning. What a week!
WWW.KNEXT.COM   

Conversations are changing the way we think about education.

For the last several months, I have been thinking about how to become more engaged in the flourishing discussion about change in higher education that is occurring both in the United states and around the world. This conversation is changing the way we think about higher education and how it might be presented. I am struck by how quickly the conversation is changing on several fronts from the recent introduction of the “The Degree Qualifications Profile” by the Lumina Foundation (www.luminafoundation.org) to the seminal article, “Disrupting Higher Education” recently published by the Center for American Progress (www.americanprogress.org). Both documents present ways, means, and rationale for the major changes that are enveloping how we think about higher education and its quality in the 21st century.

As my next step in this process, beginning today, I am going to attempt to connect with and listen to more friends and colleagues using tweets, blogs, and Facebook. I would be delighted if you choose to “friend” me on Facebook, “follow” my blog peterpsmith.blogspot.com , and look for my tweets (@peterpsmith.

And, if you are engaged in similar activities and connect with me, I would be interested in following you as well.

Peter Smith
4/4/11

Access, Innovation and “Colleges for the 21st Century”: Interview with Peter Smith

Peter P. Smith, Ed.D. has a history of driving innovation in higher education that few in the field can match. (Full bio at the bottom of this article.) And he hasn’t stuck to one track; he’s the founding President of the Community College of Vermont, former  Lieutenant Governor of Vermont , university Dean at George Washington U, Founding President at Cal State at Monterey Bay Assistant Director of UNESCO, and now the Senior Vice President of Academic Strategies and Development for Kaplan Higher Education. In 2010, Jossey-Bass published his latest book: Harnessing America’s Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning (2010). (Makes you feel kinda lazy, doesn’t it?)  

KCH: Your work and writing take up the challenge of helping more students attend and complete college. Other well-known professionals in the field have argued, as I’m sure you are aware, that the problem is not that too few students attend higher education, but too many. Thoughts?

PPS: I have three thoughts about this. First, the people making these arguments went to college and graduated, as did their children and relatives. So, my Vermont puckishness would reply, “If it was good enough for them, it should be good enough for others who have been marginalized”. If they are arguing that we have not gotten it right for previously marginalized learners, they are correct. But to then default to the “no college for you” position ignores the promise of opportunity that America makes to all as well as the history of American higher education. Second, we know definitively that with additional education comes better health, longer lives, increased voting and civic participation, and increased earnings.  Those are the outcomes that will create a stronger social, civic, and economic fabric in America. Sounds like a good investment to me. Finally, and importantly, we need more learned/skilled people in America, not fewer. The paramount question facing higher education is how we succeed with previously marginalized people to clear standards of quality.

KCH: You’ve long advocated for recognizing learning that occurs outside of colleges – in the workplace, for example. And you also point out in your book that our colleges no longer have a monopoly on information. Give this state of affairs, should our institutions of higher education migrate toward a focus on the evaluation and validation of learning?

PPS: Absolutely. But as I have ruminated on this subject, and watched the behavior of colleges since I published The Quiet Crisis: How Higher Education is Failing America (Anker, 2004,I have drawn two conclusions. First, most will not do it because their faculty-centric orientation makes faculty teaching and curricular control the focus, not assessment. Second, the few who do will tend to make it a boutique-style program, not a “Best Buy” for higher education assessment. So, it will lack reach. By the time I wrote Harnessing America’s Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning (Jossey-Bass, 2010), I had concluded that we needed new types of institutions in the higher education space, I called them “Colleges for the 21st Century”. And these institutions would operate under a different set of principles and have different characteristics, including comprehensive assessment.

KCH: After dedicating much of your career to the public service within government and state colleges and universities, you’re now at Kaplan University – one of the larger proprietary schools in the U.S. Does the proprietary model offer opportunities for innovation that are not available within non-profit institutions?

PPS: Again, the answer is “absolutely”. One of the main reasons that I chose to work at Kaplan was that I wanted to experience the culture of the “for profit” sector and see if they were any better at embedding and sustaining significant change and continuing innovation.  Although businesses are subject to the same realities of organizational culture as any other organization, they are far more focused on the results, student learning and employment. So, employing teaching and learning practices that are known to be best practices characterizes the culture, not the infighting and autonomy that has come to characterize much of traditional higher education’s behavior. Candidly, however, the accelerating  pace of change outside of established institutions, including proprietary colleges and universities, will require that this sector be extremely nimble, just to keep up. Whether they will be able to do that, or yield to still other new institutions and programs, remains to be seen.
Author: Keith Hampson