Survey on Working Mothers

I just want to underscore the sentence,”Helping students solve problems teaches them how to think.”  I contrast teaching and training when others use the terms interchangeably by noting that training is learning to perform a task or tasks repeatedly and hopefully successfully.  Today’s universities need more diversity with respect to academic backgrounds and experiences on the administrative staff to even get on board with such a radical concept as the one you’re describing, to help teach today and moving forward with the innovative tools available.  I’ve made the transition, so this topic is close to me; Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics, practicing Exec. Dir. of Technology.

If I were running this center, I’d be curious to see what would happen if the primary learning objective for a set of first year undergraduates was to understand, philosophically and historically, the notion of “disciplinarity” vis-a-vis higher learning. If we really want people to harness knowledge for the sake of identifying and solving problems, I think there may be no better way than to invite students to directly understand the epistemic apparatus that has supported knowledge advancement for centuries. I’m not talking about a spate of “101″ courses but, perhaps, a single course of study that would, in part, place the 101 courses in context.

Higher ed desperately needs a laboratory to test the propositions of outcomes-based learning.  Abolish seat time and credit hours, require students to demonstrate competencies, and evaluate whether learning is transformed in the ways that its proponents predict — and also discover whatever unintended consequences not foreseen by its proponents.

The current generation of China’s leaders are engineers applying engineering solutions (think Tiananmen Square); the next will draw upon the social sciences & humanities (not sure if the results will be all that different).

Many of these solutions already exist in our universities. You do not hear about them because there are no big grants backing them up. We will spent more money on cosmetics research than on an orphan drug that saves lifes.

I hope this effort succeeds.  However, one of the fundamental criticisms of engineering education (from NAS, ASME and many other places) is that it silos students quickly, teaches that problem solving speed is more important that creativity, is incremental rather than transformative, discourages ambiguity and openended inquiry. In other words, a traditional engineering education model does not often do what we’d envision complex problem solving should be about. Now-not all engineers are the same in this respect, and I hope DeMello will make progress. To do so, however, requires a fundamental rethinking of engineering (and most science), education.

A blog post I put up here at the Chronicle yesterday goes a little farther in discussing how engineers conceive of the next generation of education: 
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2011/09/27/education-as-a-complex-adaptive-system/
This reports on an editorial published by some guys from Boeing on how their company implements education among its employees. They work with education as a complex adaptive system. 

Part of me welcomes the change that the GT people are thinking about. Part of me wonders if higher ed’s over-arching structure will make it fundamentally impossible to implement. 

Higher ed remains one of the last truly vertical industries.  As with other formerly vertical industries, there’s a huge boost in productivity that occurs when you substitute best-of-breed horizontal solutions for each of the component parts of the institution.  Computer-based open courseware is the key to breaking apart today’s institutions, because the quality of the material becomes independent of where it’s being taught.  Once you have some fairly simple standards for how courseware is presented and how students and teachers interact with it, you’re left with the following functions:

1) Brokerage.  You need something to facilitate the rendezvous of a teacher with a group of qualified students, using virtual facilities when possible and physical classrooms/labs when necessary.  Brokerage can also link students with tutors, paper graders, and even test proctors.

2) Certification.  Today, a university implicitly certifies the quality of its course content through its reputation, and it can only explicitly certify the grades of the students for the course they took at the institution.  A modern certification clearinghouse would be able to certify the content and quality of a particular course from any source and the competence and reputation of the teachers who wish to teach the course.  But a clearinghouse can also maintain a cradle-to-grave record of any student’s performance on every course he or she’s ever taken under the auspices of the certifier.  Think of a universal credit transfer system and you’ll get the idea.

3) Infrastructure.  Where possible, courses get taught virtually, using audio, video, and data conferencing, but there will always be a role for physical labs, athletic facilities, and secure test-taking locations.  But there’s certainly no need for a broker to maintain all of its physical plant in one location, or even to manage the facilities themselves.

4) Course conductors.  These are the lecturers, TA’s, tutors, graders, and proctors who walk the students through the courseware and evaluate their performance.  Are these associated with a particular university?  Maybe.  But if they carry their own certifications and reputations for teaching the material in a particular course, why aren’t they free agents, able to charge what their reputations will bear, with an ability to acquire students that’s limited only by the relationships they maintain with various brokers?

The biggest problem with this model is that it completely uncouples teaching students from the research that the faculty is undertaking.  That’s a great thing for the students, since it dramatically increases their access to the knowledge they need to be successful.  But I’m not sure if it’s a good thing for our society overall if research can no longer be supported by tuition.

Better yet, let any high school kid who wants to take classes (some or all) at the local Community College/College.    All credits to apply to their high school degree, all tuition to be paid for by the state.   This will let those kids that aren’t interested in going to college take classes that lead to a job.   If the kid is motivated, he could graduate high school with a concurrent AA degree, and be ready to apply for a good job the next day. 

And the kids that DO want to go on to college, have somewhere to go for advanced placement classes once they have burned through all of the stuff offered by their local high school.

Best of all, if the high school is second rate, the kids have an escape route.

Be careful what you wish for. Herbert Hoover was our only engineer president and you know how that turned out.

I doubt revamping college admissions is going to help much. So long as a college degree is seen as the ticket to a higher-paying or more satisfying career, students trying to get into college will ferociously work to game the system. There are ways around this, but none that will avoid leaving the college open to a lawsuit. Except admission by strict lottery, and I can’t imagine any admissions office giving up that much power.

The Big Ten schools have one employee for every three students. Pitt has one employee for every 2.5 students. That’s in the fall term; spring term …  Maybe engineers could design a less labor-intensive system and pass the savings along to the taxpayer = tuition payer. 

“Learning no longer happens with the teacher in front of a roomful of students taking notes.” 

Talk about sweeping overgeneralizations.

“…give them the knowledge.”

Give them knowledge?  How exactly does that work?  Sounds no different than the “open-the-zipper-on-the-top-of-their-heads-and-drop-it-in” approach.

Engineers indeed have experience and skills solving problems, engineering problems, that is. These are the identical, limited skills that can make them exceptionally poor organizational leaders.  ”Turn the crank and out will pop the solution” is good engineering but is not leadership.

Engineering deals with too many precise measurements but leadership deals with too many fussy logics!

impossible. The text book companies would not allow this, and since a great deal of content is linked to pictures that are in these books, the university is legally obligated to make sure that access is restricted to course participants.  Isn’t the free market a wonderful thing?

IMO leadership positions require high levels of people and social system skills rather than technical skills, such as engineering may provide.  Leaders usually work with people, individuals and groups, and have to get the individuals and groups to work together, rather than getting materials and technology to work together. 

Developing new, futuristic ideas is probably not a one person job (as if the president is going to think up new ideas in his or her spare time) rather its really a corporate function involving multiple expertise where the president acts as a leader, not a technician. 

Innovative idea are often developed but go nowhere because organizational climates resist rather than foster change.  In order to be effective in bringing about change, leadership will need the skills required to foster a climate that welcomes and advances innovation. 

Innovative institutions such as WGU/WGU-Indiana, or Excelsior exist, but have to out compete other institutions in order for their approaches to proliferate. 

More economical forms of public higher education might result if states aggressively adopt programs such as dual-credit, and facilitation of Dantes/CLEP credit.  The catch is that education is education because that is what many students want and need. The goal of higher education is to educate, not just to punch tickets.  Maybe a solution will be to provide low-cost rapid credit systems really designed to facilitate students in getting credits they can earn quickly, along side and integrated with full service classroom / online high education systems.

Bart Schuster
Arrive2.net
Twitter.com/arrive2_net

I met my liberal arts credit requirements with courses in economics and biomedical ethics.  That knowledge has proven far more useful than the required engineering electromagnetics course I took.

Major problem is at the engineering work place  where managers without engineering background hold pay and sway. Engineering is hard work and the managers appear to make “use” of the talent below to glorify themselves.

Dual-credit extends the problems inherent in the motivations of high schools.  The teachers are told that the students MUST pass, so pass they do, whether prepared or not.  I’m not criticising the teachers; they either pass the students or lose their jobs. 

The result is that 40 years ago the lowest college math class was calc I.  Now colleges have as many as six courses lower than calc.  They may start as low as fourth-grade topics.  Grade inflation has hit colleges, but not remotely as bad as high schools. 

Instead of more dual-credit and AP classes we need to have the students actually learn their high school material.

I believe that International Service-learning in Higher Education is one of many progressive methods available to create global citizen engineers-architects-and educators.  If you are interested in starting a dialog on this forum to change the Higher-Education paradigm, contact me (Jonathan Seward) at the following:   jseward@espoch.edu.ec

The Khan Academy would revolutionize education if people just knew about how powerful it is.  College lectures are really pointless. In my undergrad days, I would go to class and not pay attention at all then go do the homework by looking at the book or better lectures/tutorials on Youtube. You can find a lecture on almost any subject in the world on the internet. If the current education system used Khan Academy style homework problems, a ton of time would be saved. Why pass a student if they only know 80% of the course material(especially important for math)?

I would like to underline the sentence “You’re unlikely to discover many engineering degrees. Just 2 percent of college presidents are engineers.”, in reply to your pointed line.
It is clear in the beginning of the artice that motivation of the author is the rare incidents of president being engineers. Believe me, in thrid world countries including India, Pakistan, Iran and their neighbors the most of office bearers are engineers and unforunately, hardly 20% (wil guess) impliment the ENGINEERING to those organziations where they serve.

There’s no system, not even dual-credit, that can’t be disrupted by bad enough local policies or practices.  Most school districts require qualifying courses, such as precalculus,  before students can enroll in calculus, and apparently the district you are refering to needs some kind of meaningful system to qualify students to enroll in the dual-credit calculus classes. 

Truly, a school district should not be passing unqualified students through courses, dual-credit or not, by inflating grades as you suggest they do. Perhaps the dual-credit classes conducted within your school district should have standard start and end of course exams.  The start of course exam could determine if the student is qualified and the end of course exam could prove they have really learned the required material.  Such exams would hold the system accountable. (However, I have to mention that the dual-credit classes I am familiar with were conducted by community college instructors, not school district teachers.) 

I haven’t seen any evidence that the problem you suggest with dual-credit is widespread.

Bart Schuster
Arrive2.net
Twitter.com/arrive2_net