Are We Riding the Wave of the Future?

There are a lot of different ways that technology can influence classrooms, faculty, students, and campuses. In a Fast Company article last week, Michale Karnjanaprakorn presented a useful breakdown of the five buckets of technology innovation in education delivery:

1. Gadgets and blended learning: “Classrooms can be anywhere at anytime.”
2. Social learning and collaboration: “Teachers are using [new] platforms…to share content and lessons with each other online so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel or keep content to themselves anymore.”
3. Open resources and classrooms: “Educational resources, data, and technology are becoming more accessible than ever....”
4. Adaptive, personalized learning: “Teachers are figuring out how to teach each student the way he or she learns best, and assessment is viewed as an ongoing process, since learning is not a constant.”
5. Creative certification: “The more people are culling unassociated resources and experiences to learn specific skills, the more urgent it is for there to be a place for them to record their efforts and success, to study with peers, and to present their learning portfolios to future employers or partners in a meaningful way.”

Often in the higher ed reform world we debate the broad merits of “online education” or “technology use” without really specifying what we’re talking about. Thanks to CCRC research, we are confident that delivering underprepared students a full course through online lectures doesn’t work very well. But we’ve seen in DEI how powerful some uses of technology can be in dev ed. The North Carolina Community College System is collecting best practices in a searchable online innovations database, and a few DEI colleges are using technology to individualize instruction. 

Karnjanaprakorn makes it all seem a little too simple, though. He doesn’t give much space to the major changes in infrastructure, policy, and practice that would be necessary to implement these in our current higher ed sector. (Of course, he may be suggesting a completely different structure for that system….) Still, institutions may be generally supportive of everything in those five buckets, but they must also consider the amount of capital required to do any of it well.  There are also questions about whether (or how) bureaucratic systems can escape the “weight of history”, as Uri Treisman says,  to make space for effective use of technology—and whether they can do it while ensuring equal access to technology for low-income students. Finally, one hopes there will be commitment—and capacity—to gather and make sense of the data required to see if this new technology actually achieves the results expected. 

Since Karnjanaprakorn digresses into a reiteration of the “who needs college?” argument at the end of his article, we have to choice but to follow him there. We think college is the right choice for a lot of people, and we can tell you why in just one chart:

Click Image to Enlarge

Associate’s degree holders make almost $150 dollars more per week than people who don’t go to college, and their unemployment rate is 3 percentage points lower. Whatever means we end up using to deliver it, it’s clear that connecting people to education and credentials remains essential to their economic security.

Links we like!

• A new study from CCCSE makes the case for mandatory requirements. Inside Higher Ed has the details: “Community colleges have a growing arsenal of tools that research shows will help students earn credentials—like academic goal-setting, student success courses and tutoring. Yet the study found that relatively few students take advantage of those offerings.”
• Math is a huge barrier to completion for many students. An article from Joanne Jacobs in U.S. News & World Report tackles an important question: are we “overmathing” our students? Jacobs looks at Virginia’s decision to change math requirements for non-STEM students, and she highlights the work of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to redesign developmental math through Statway and Quantway.
• “I would suggest that it is time to move from a deficit to an asset model of student success. From a model where we keep trying to ‘fix’ our students to one where we turn the mirror on ourselves and consider that we might have to fundamentally transform how we approach the role of math in preparing a competitive workforce.” Check out the full post from Luzelma Canales of the Lone Star College System in Texas.
• Last week, we linked to a few articles on using technology to “flip” the classroom and individualize learning. A new post from Katie McKay on Digital Is reminds us that equal access to technology for students is increasingly important.
• JFF’s response to President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address reaffirms the principle that “creating integrated, accelerated educational pathways directly tied to the skills needed by regional employers is the best road to success for those struggling to improve their lives.” That’s a statement we can all agree on!

Sir Linksalot

• Have you heard of flipped classrooms? Last week on CNN’s Schools of Thought blog, high school Principal Greg Green explained how his entire school has implemented the flipped class structure:
  

  Teachers record their lectures using screen-capture software (we use Camtasia) and post these lecture videos to a variety of outlets, including our school website, and YouTube. Students watch these videos outside of class on their smartphone, in the school computer lab (which now has extended hours), at home or even in my office if they need to. Now, when students come to class, they’ve already learned about the material and can spend class time working on math problems, writing about the Civil War or working on a science project, with the help of their teacher whenever they need it. This model allows students to seek one-on-one help from their teacher when they have a question, and learn material in an environment that is conducive to their education.

  According to Green, this new structure is really changing the student experience: “Our attendance rate has increased, our discipline rate decreased, and, most importantly, our failure rate—the number of students failing each class—has gone down significantly.” Inside Higher Ed covered a similar style of teaching at Central Michigan University. Would this structure work in a developmental education program?  

• Innovation requires creativity. But when we’re generating new ideas, whether for curriculum design, educational delivery, or strategies for scaling up, how do we identify the good ones? “Taking a break is important,” says the research, “but make sure you do something that makes you happy, as positive moods make us even better at diagnosing the value of our creative work.” 

• How can colleges help students identify credentials with labor-market value? Our friends at Jobs for the Future got a shout-out last week in The New York Times for their Credentials that Work initiative, “which uses new technology that scrapes information from online job postings and provides real-time labor market information.”

• On Tuesday, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching hosted a webinar with updates on their developmental math work, Statway and Quantway. The presentation slides and webinar recording are available on Carnegie’s website. 

• Diego Navarro, the founder of the Academy for College Excellence, is hosting an interactive webinar on “Supporting the Students of the Future: Retention of Vulnerable & Tentative Students.” You can register now for one of two upcoming sessions: February 29th at 12:30 pm Pacific Time, or March 23rd at 11:00 am Pacific Time.

Balancing Tech-Time and Face-Time

In a feature story in today’s edition of Inside Higher Ed, Adapting to Developmental Education, Steve Kolowich reports on private companies—from publishers to test-makers—that are marketing products specifically designed for college developmental education instruction, many of which include sophisticated diagnostic tools to tailor instruction to a particular user:

“It is similar to what Google and Netflix and other web applications are using, where they measure activity that user is doing and bringing back the data … based upon actions that you’ve taken,” says David Liu, Knewton’s chief operating officer. “Not only do we data mine all [your] activities as a student, but we also begin to understand some of the tendencies you have and compare you to cohorts that we have using the system.”

Technology-supported tailored instruction has been in the news elsewhere this week; in her coverage of this week’s annual meeting of the American Council on Education, EdWeek reporter Caralee Adams lifts up how such innovations can save scarce faculty and space resources. DEI colleges are showing how this can be done: Housatonic Community College’s “Open Entry/Open Exit” program allows students to move through material at their own pace and allows fewer faculty members to serve a greater number of students. El Paso Community College is expanding its “Math Emporium” model, which allows students to work only on the concepts and skills in which they are deficient, completing courses in less time.


But tailoring takes serious coordination. Yesterday on this blog, Kathleen Cleary of Sinclair Community College called for “technology to help us organize the sheer logistics of more individualized instruction.” Are these adaptive programs the way to get there?  Cleary notes that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all tailor, so colleges must “take advantage of peer and social learning” to find methods that work for all students. Models like the School of One are one way to incorporate technology and face-to-face instruction. How does your college integrate tech-time with face-time?

Abby Parcell is MDC's Program Manager for the Developmental Education Initiative. 

Guest Post: School of One in 26,000?

Yesterday, Mickey Muldoon introduced us to New York City Public Schools’ School of One program. Today, Dr. Kathleen Cleary, Dean and DEI Project Director at Sinclair Community College, explores how this concept might be applied to developmental education at the community college.

I attended the Big Ideas Fest at Half Moon Bay in December and heard an inspiring presentation on the School of One in New York City.  According to its website, “the mission of School of One is to provide students with personalized, effective, and dynamic classroom instruction so that teachers have more time to focus on the quality of their instruction.”  Each student receives a different schedule each day to allow them opportunities to learn in different modalities and to maximize the ways he or she learns best.

I left the festival pondering how the School of One mission might play out in a community college setting, particularly with developmental education students.  I was immediately struck by the challenges of scaling an individualized approach to instruction.  At Sinclair Community College, a 26,000-student campus, we currently offer developmental mathematics in multiple modalities: classroom-based instruction that heavily emphasizes inquiry-based and group learning; online classes to reach students who are unable to come to campus; an intensive boot camp experience for students who only need a quick refresher to catch up on their math readiness; and finally, a technologically-rich lab setting where students learn the material at their own pace, with an instructor and tutors to guide them along the way.  At first glance, the lab setting would seem to be the closest fit with the School of One philosophy, and, in fact, 80% of students surveyed would take a class again in this format.  Their success rates are higher than those for the traditional classroom or online formats, but not all students are able to learn this way, either because they are home-bound, or because they are social learners who benefit from the peer and instructor interaction of the traditional, group-based classroom.  How do we find the best fit for each individual student and scale that for the 7,000 developmental education students we serve?

My current thinking is that we need to become much more sophisticated in our ability to use predictive analytics: a student who places into developmental education after passing Algebra II in high school has completely different needs than a displaced worker who may never have gotten through Algebra in the first place.  We need technology to help us organize the sheer logistics of more individualized instruction, but we also need to take advantage of peer and social learning through processes such as block scheduling, learning communities, and far more robust orientation programs.  Finally, we need to figure out how to build more flexibility into our system, so that if a student discovers he or she is not a good fit with a learning modality, we can quickly move the student to a different type of class and not make him or her sit through an entire term in a form that compromises the student’s ability to succeed.

It would take champions from student services, information technology, and instruction to figure out what it would take for a School of One model to work in a large community college, but the benefits for developmental education students could be substantial.

Kathleen Cleary is Project Director of DEI at Sinclair Community College.