The sacrilege of job training in higher education, and what to do about it -- Part 2

To recap Part 1: funding for higher ed comes from two major sources, state governments and students (tuition), and both parties are increasingly interested in return-on-investment. We believe that a liberal arts education provides many skills and competencies that employers desire. But given the pressure from state government and potential students (and competitors) we must do a better job demonstrating (or documenting) the ROI of the liberal arts.

So how can we do that? First let's look at how we document what we do at this point. A college graduate typically gets a diploma, with associated transcript and GPA. As I said in Part 1, these credentials really only tell an employer that a student knows a lot about her or his major discipline, and perhaps in specific courses of interest. But nothing in those credentials speaks to the things that employers tell us they are looking for in employees, like communication or critical thinking skills. 

We can do better. The answer goes by several terms: badges, microcredentials, nanodegrees, and more. But the idea is the same: provide documentation of learning; in my case documentation of learning (and skill acquisition) other than disciplinary knowledge. 

Several organizations are pursuing this idea, notably the Lumina Foundation, but there are many others. In fact, the credentialing landscape is now so crowded that the Lumina Foundation recently held a conference with the goal of establishing an industry-standard credentialing ecosystem that would benefit students, employers, and faculty. Several learning management systems companies have added badging functionality into their systems. Companies like Portfolium are banking on the profitability of eportfolios. 

The idea is that documenting non-disciplinary skills and competencies that our students already acquire in our major can costs faculty very little, can help our graduates gain employment, and can communicate to stakeholders that economic value of a liberal arts degree. It really can be a win for students, employers, and higher education. A win that wide-spread is rare indeed.

Until the credentialing movement matures and a universal system is agreed upon we can move forward in-house. My department is currently creating non-disciplinary credentials that our students could earn in our existing courses. I'll update this blog as we progress.

The sacrilege of job training in higher education, and what to do about it -- Part 1

Like systems of higher education in other states, the flagship and regional public universities in my state of Kentucky are being slowly starved of funds by the state government. Not only has our Governor reduced state support for my university, he decried that future funding would be based partially on the university's performance on key indicators. Now, these indicators are being negotiated as I write this and of course the metrics will determine how well my university does, and thus how much of the ever-dwindling funds we receive going forward.

What we know at this point about the likely metrics is that the Governor has been dismissive of the liberal arts and favorably disposed to more applied education (the dreaded 'job training'). He even mentioned psychology majors as having poor job prospects (not borne out by the data). The point is that our future funding will (likely) depend on the employability of our graduates. By the way, the other significant source of revenue -- tuition -- is sensitive to the job prospects of graduates. With how expensive a college education has become we can expect that potential students will make choices with return on investment in mind. So we better be thinking about how to convince interested stakeholders of the value of a degree from our university.

Traditionally faculty have taken a dim view of the job-training aspect of what we do, and I've certainly held that attitude in the past. As a social psychologist, I teach courses that typically do not prepare students for a particular job; rather, I believe that learning about social psychology (or empathy) can improve your life in meaningful if not financial ways. This is part of the liberal arts ethos: learning that enriches life. The other part of that ethos often goes unstated unless we are pushed: a liberal arts degree not only reflects disciplinary knowledge but also non-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary skills and abilities, like critical thinking, communication, interpersonal competency, etc. Many times I've heard that our graduates can (and do) work in a wide variety of sectors of the economy, most of them never drawing directly on psychology knowledge they gained in our courses, but using the writing or communication skills they honed in our courses. Of course we send our share of students to graduate school in psychology and they (I assume) use both the disciplinary knowledge and non-disciplinary skills they attained here, but the majority of our graduates do not go to grad school. It is that group that I believe the Governor is most concerned with (the grad schools students often get training and licensure that make them readily employable). 

So what can we do to help the non-grad school bound students, and those interested in their plights? I believe we must take seriously this often unstated belief that we give these students non-disciplinary skills that are valuable. Fortunately, these skills and competencies match up quite nicely with the skills and competencies that employers say they look for in potential employees. I've done just a little research into this and found several sources that describe what employers are looking for:

Association of American Colleges & Universities (2015)	Recovery: Projections of Jobs and Educational Requirements Through 2020 (2013)	KCEP report (2011)	10 Things Employers Want You to Learn in College (2012)
Communicate orally Work in teams Communicate in writing Ethical decision making Critical thinking Apply knowledge Analyze complex problems Information literacy Innovate/creativity Stay current on tech Statistical reasoning Work with diverse others	Active listening Oral communication Reading comprehension Critical thinking Written communication Monitoring Coordination Social perceptiveness Judgement and decision making Complex problem-solving Active learning Time management	Verbal ability Make decisions Mathematical computation Maintains confidentiality Follow instructions Delegate Works well within a team Reading comprehension Time management Instruct/teach Critical thinking ability	Work ethic Physical performance Speaking Writing Teamwork Influencing people Research Number crunching Critical thinking Problem solving
https://www.aacu.org/sites/default/files/files/LEAP/2015employerstudentsurvey.pdf	https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/tll0zkxt0puz45hu21g6	http://www.workforceopportunityproject.com/PDF/Full%20Report.pdf	http://books.google.com/books/about/10_Things_Employers_Want_You_to_Learn_in.html?id=VBRPMnGw1PkC

Even a casual analysis of these lists reveals both considerable overlap across sources and with the list of non-disciplinary skills and competencies mentioned above. This is very good news and seems to confirm many faculties' beliefs about the value of a liberal arts education. But there's still a problem.

The problem is that, while we believe our students leave our hallowed halls with all the knowledge and competencies they will need in their future endeavors, the credentials we confer on them upon graduation only speak (explicitly) to their mastery of disciplinary knowledge. A bachelor's degree in psychology or history tells potential employers that a job candidate knows about psychology or history, and an inspection of a transcript (if that happens) might indicate certain specialization, but neither the degree nor the transcript will say anything about the items in the above table, the very thing that employers tell us they are looking for.

There is a potential solution to this problem, and several foundations and start-ups are working feverishly to bring this solution to the higher-education marketplace. But this post is already too long, so you'll have to wait for the solution in the next post.

SXSWedu Day 4 and wrap up

The final day of the conference was shorter but just as substantial as any other. There were only three sessions before the conference closing set of keynotes. They saved some good stuff for the last day.

Trends in Higher Education Morning Mixer

This early morning session over a light breakfast was hosted by The Chronicle of Higher Education, who has just published an issue about trends. None of the trends were surprising to any attendee of SXSWedu, or indeed anyone who pays attention to higher ed. Among the trends identified: (lack of) shared governance, trigger warnings, public-private partnerships, and the rise of instructional designers. Nothing about micro-credentials or personalized learning? Hmm.

Breaking the University from the Inside Out

This was another session with a mixed panel of academics and industry reps. The topic here was how to get higher ed to innovate and change more quickly. Their answer seemed to be that universities need to develop a culture of innovation where failure is not punished but encouraged and even rewarded. As the Chief Faculty innovator at my institution, I agree. One panelist said that leadership was important in these efforts. Agree again. Another said that less government funding means that innovation is more important. Sounds right. Maintaining the same thing will not work going forward. Probably true. One of the industry reps said that there are too many edtech companies, and that leads to less innovation because universities have a hard time with all the choices. That sounds right to me. I've had conversations at my institution about the need to establish a committee of faculty (and instructional designers, perhaps) that would look through and vet edtech options, and then pilot the use of the ones that look effective and appropriate. That would be a big task.

What Higher Ed Can Learn from Uber and Airbnb

 
This was a tough call because there were three sessions at this time that I wanted to see. I am happy with my eventual choice because the issues raised in this one are significant and looming. The topic really was the future of credentialing in higher ed. The critique of the current system is that a diploma from a university doesn't (accurately) indicate the competencies of the graduate. This recalled conversations we've had in my department about the skills and abilities employers really want, and how our graduates actually have those skills, like communication, team work, and critical thinking. Of course employers would have no way of knowing that just by looking at a transcript or resume. A psychology degree implies a mastery of psychology content, but of course we know that those other skills and abilities come with that knowledge. So it might behoove us to start documenting those skills and abilities in addition to psychology knowledge. Many people at SXSWedu talked about microcredentials, or badges, or edublocks. Some worry that these new ways of documenting competencies will lead to the demise of the college degree. I disagree; it just means we need to do a better job documenting the value of what we do. One of the panelists created Portfolium, which is a new kind of digital portfolio. It's free for life, and can be used by students right now. Worth checking out.

Final keynotes

The first speaker was Todd Rose from Harvard Graduate School of Education. He's written a book called The End of Average,

and his point was that in every field he's looked at that measures humans in any way, there really is no single person that matches the average scores/measure. Pretty interesting examples from the military, health care, and neuroscience. This means that when we design courses for the average student, we are actually designing the course for no student in the course! People are not average, they are jagged in his terms. This means that people may be high or low on one dimension but low or high on another. Together that person may look average, but they are not actually average on any dimension. I put his book on my Amazon wish list.
The next speaker was Russlynn Ali, who is involved in the XQ Institute which seeks to dramatically rethink high

school. She was pretty inspiring and showed several video clips of high schools excitedly working on their applications for the QX program.
The final speaker of the conference was Connie Yowell. She basically talked about microcredentialing or badging for high school. Another passionate speaker.

Major Themes at SXSWedu

I'd say there were three consistent and significant themes:

1. Microcredentials or badges
2. Personalized learning
3. The relationship between higher education and edtech companies

We'll see how those themes play out over the next year.

SXSWedu (or south by, as the insiders call it) was a mad rush of new, exciting and sometimes scary ideas, and passionate speakers, all at a rapid pace. A very rewarding experience.

SXSWedu day 3

It was another full day at SXSWedu. The focus of the sessions I attended today was different than the days before, not purposely on my part or the conference organizers'. Just worked out that way. No general comments today; on to the sessions.

How to Think (and Learn) Like a Futurist

Today's keynote was one of the most thought-provoking of the conference so far. Jane McGonigal is best known as the author of Reality is

Broken, an influential book about using games for good. She now works for something called Institute for the Future,

and she described her as a futurist. She clarified the meaning of that term as not someone who predicts the future, but rather someone who imagines the future and then tries to make that future more likely (if that imagining is desirable), or less likely (if undesirable). Her main insight was to imagine the future of education as analogous to Bitcoin.

Bitcoins are traded between individuals with a complete record of each transaction available to everyone. So her imagining is that education could be traded between individuals about any topic, and that each transaction would be recorded in the Ledger. It's an interesting idea in that it would make everyone a teacher and a learner, and that these transactions could be monetized. But even if not worth real currency, there could be badging, and the barter system would thrive. You can learn more about the idea here. 

From Analytics to Action

This session focused on the topic of the day for me: data analytics. There was a panel discussion about how to best to use data about student progress to change what universities do to improve outcomes like retention and graduation. I liked the proscription from one of the panelists: 1. Give faculty data that is really useful, 2. Convince faculty that they have an ethical responsibility to act on this data, 3. Tell faculty what specific things they can do to help, and 4. Show faculty that their actions are having positive effects. One of the panelists, Phillip Long, has a telling title: Associate Vice Provost for Learning Science at UT Austin. They clearly believe in the value of using data analytics. This session made me believe that I need to have a progress check in my online courses early on in the 8-week term, perhaps as early as the end of the second week. I need to look at the grades from previous semesters to see if I can identify predictive events that early in the term.

InnovationU: Unlocking the University-as-Incubator

The panel for this session included Bridget Burns from The University Innovation Alliance (they were everywhere at SXSWedu). The other three panelists were either academics with experience spinning off innovations into private enterprises or setting up incubators (or accelerators). Much was said about the barriers in the academy to these efforts, even at the R1 institutions where these people worked. They pointed out that edtech (as opposed to biotech, for example) is often not thought of as intellectual property because it is most often used to further the educational mission of the university. But it is IP as much as some new drug or device and deserves both support and protection from universities.

Personalized Learning: Campus Leadership Insights

Personalized learning is one of the major themes of this conference. There were numerous sessions about it, some sponsored by publishing companies, some sponsored by non-profits doing it the open-access way, and some organized by academics. This session was a hybrid as it had three academics talking about their experiences instituting personalized learning systems on their campus, and a provider of such service, OpenStax.

Personalized learning means that students interact online with assessments that provide both for mastery of the content, and guidance about what they need to study more. This session was not about the what of personalized learning, but the how of adopting personalized learning. So the panelists talked about how to get faculty to buy in to this new approach (hint: pay them to do so), and the barriers to adoption from an institutional and individual perspective. This made me think that we are asking the wrong questions when we choose to adopt a new book for classes like Introduction to Psychology. Instead of asking the reps about resources, price to students, and quality of the content, we should be asking them for evidence of the effectiveness of their book in terms of learning and persistence. I hope that changes.

Social Media: Legal Pitfalls and best Practices

This was the odd session out for me today. I do have an interest in using social media in education so I thought I'd see what these two people had to say. They were a former teacher who now consults with school districts about edtech, and a lawyer who focuses on social media in education. They focused mostly on K12 so it was less relevant to me. Suffice to say that this is very sticky wicket, and there are few clear, hard lines to be found. Students can get into trouble discussion education-related issues both on an off campus, and the same goes for instructors. Be careful on social media, be very careful.

Coda

Something I forgot to mention from Day 2 was my visit to the Canvas lounge. We are in the process of evaluating several learning management systems at my institution, including Canvas, so I was curious about what they would offer at SXSWedu. Of course they had loads of Canvas employees there to answer questions and plenty of swag. But I saw on their daily schedule that they were going to have a session about professional development. That caught my eye because I'm on a committee designing a professional development on-demand system that we intend to put on our LMS. So, I find out that there are already people doing that on Canvas. Interesting.

Tomorrow is the final day of the conference. I'll be sorry to see it end.

SXSWedu day 2

Day 2 has come and gone, and I have to say that I'm exhausted. Today was another very full day, with more

walking than day 1. Plus I visited the hotel gym this morning -- perhaps not a good idea. Oh well.

I'll follow the same format as Day 1's blog: general comments followed by notes from individual sessions.

General comments

I'm starting to see the excellent organization of this conference. There are SXSWedu volunteers all over, all eager to answer questions about locations of venues and anything else. The sessions start and finish on time, the tech is nearly invisible (a good thing), and the app is very functional. The wifi coverage is excellent across all venues.

Designing and Sustaining Transformative PD

 

I was really excited for this session. The description made it sound like it would align with the efforts of a committee I'm on at my institution to create a system for professional development on-demand. We certainly want the PD to be transformative. The room was beyond standing room only; I was nearly pushed out by the SXSWedu staff. I had to sit on the floor (not good for the post-gym aches). The description did not clearly state that the intended audience was K12 teachers, but in retrospect I should have surmised that by the offer of CPE credits. The presenters and most of the audience were indeed K12 teachers and administrators. Somewhat worse, and I have mixed feelings about saying this, the presenters set up the session as a 'workshop', meaning that they wanted the audience to interact and do much of the work. As I was not at a table that was difficult, even had I been inclined to participate. Which I wasn't. Plus, it was a 2-hour session. I left after 1 hour for a session I didn't think I would get to, but looked good... The presenters did talk about iTunes U, and I was able to find some interesting resources on that platform during the session. So, not a total loss.

How Universities are Crowdsourcing Innovations

This was a panel discussion between a reporter and three university Presidents (UKansas, Georgia State, Arizona State), all of which are members of the University Innovation Alliance, which I mentioned in my Day 1 blog. They do have some impressive outcomes in terms of raising the retention and graduation rates of poor and minority students. Given the student body and service region of my university (some of the poorest counties in the U.S.) this effort should be made known to the relevant administrators. I did tweet at my university president about UIA; he was not aware but wanted more info. I would love to follow up with him. If Georgia State and UAz can improve, we can too.

ImagineCon: The Future of Student Success

This was less a session than a fair for organizations that won a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation last year.

Readers of this blog (shout out to my mother and a few others) will recall that I've been working with publishing companies to inform my Dept. colleagues about their online resources, especially their adaptive and personalized learning platforms. And I've been impressed by most of them. But I learned at this session that there are lots of non-profit organizations that are trying to do the same thing but with open-access content, reducing the cost to the student all the way down to $10 - $25, much less than the ~$100 cost from the publishing companies. Some of these

organizations include lumen, Open Learning Initiative, and more. Most of these companies have materials for Introduction to Psychology, or it's in their pipeline. I hope my Dept. will consider these resources when we next adopt a text for that class.

From South L.A. to the Ivy League

I hadn't planned on attending this session, but I had a few minutes between other sessions so I dropped in. As you might deduce from the title, this was a panel of two students and one of their teachers from L.A. The students are now attending Harvard and Yale, but came from an impoverished area of L.A., although they somehow attended a charter school. To be clear, these two young men were about as impressive as could be, still grounded and focused. Inspiring. Both mentioned individual teachers in the charter school as keys to their current Ivy League status. A nice boost for every teacher that aims to make a difference.

Evolve or Die: Why Education Has to Change

I was attracted to this session because I believe its title is true. The presenter, Jim Deters, started by making the (now) commonly understood points that the jobs of the future do not exist now, that future workers will change jobs (and careers) more than in the past, and that higher education has to change to respond to this new landscape. His focus is on coding and data skills; he made the point that many large companies that we do not associate with software (Goldman Sachs, G.E.) are now employing large numbers of coders. He's an entrepreneur, and the session quickly took on the feel of a sales pitch. Eventually one of the questions from the audience was about the cost of their training (~$21,000 for a 6-month course); he did try to make the point that some help with tuition was possible. His model may become more frequent but I'm not sure I buy that it will supplant traditional higher ed. What is the role of the liberal arts in his model? Not mentioned, even in passing.

That's a wrap for day 2. Another full day tomorrow. Whew.

SXSWedu day 1

Well, it's finally here. I've been thinking about coming to SXSWedu for more than a year, and with the support of several key people (shout outs to Dean Zeigler, TLC honchos Sweet and Blythe, and Noel boss Carpenter) I'm soaking up the energy of this conference and the host city of Austin, TX. I'll start with some general comments about the conference, and then some highlights of the sessions I attended today.

General Comments

This is a huge conference. Not as big as some of the major disciplinary conferences I've been to like APA and APS, but still sizable. The audience is more varied than I'm used to seeing at psychology conferences. There are lots of K12 teachers, passionate advocates all, and many quite young. But there aren't the horde of graduate students here I'm used to seeing. Doesn't make me feel quite so old. There are also the more familiar faculty types. The other less-familiar bunch are the people representing start-ups of all kinds. The panelists at one of the sessions I attended walked out into the crowd to 'interview' audience members, roving-reporter style. Many of the interviewees introduced themselves, and their affiliations took almost as much 'airtime' as their comments. This industry is new to me, or at least the extent of it. That's something I'll keep an eye on for the next three days.

Sessions

Temple Grandin. 

I've seen Grandin speak before, but it was still entertaining to see her today. She really seemed

to have a good time in front of a large capacity crowd -- unusual for someone with Autism. Someone even asked in the Q&A if she enjoyed giving talks like this, and she said it took some getting used to. There was a momentary technical glitch (embarrassing for such a technology-enfused event) involving her slides, and she was clearly disturbed by the prospect of presenting without them. Her main points were familiar to anyone who has heard her or watched her online: people think in different ways, we need to design our pedagogies to accommodate these various ways of thinking, and that there are many highly successful people 'on the spectrum'. She added 'keep Austin weird' several times, to the enjoyment of the crowd.

Wisdom of Higher Ed Pioneers in 7 Minutes or Less

They really packed a lot of info into this session. I'm not sure how these 8 presenters were affiliated, other than they were all interested in innovation, broadly speaking. Here are some of the important ideas: innovation and scalability are important, but diffusion of innovation is key; higher ed needs to credential smaller bits of education to prepare future students for the future job market; the 5th wave of evolution of higher ed will need to work on all scales (individual learners and large groups), and teachers need to get off the stage and work to create personalizable learning environments; we can't let the publishing companies keep the data about learning behind a proprietary wall, we have to open that data up to the light of science; and Dr. Pennebaker from UT-Austin talked about changing the way students think (I believe he was getting at metacognition), not just change their knowledge. Check out this organization.

Several speakers were talking around the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) without actually using the term. That was an interesting omission during day 1: no one I saw said SoTL explicitly, but lots of presenters talked about collecting data and assessment. Is SoTL a dirty word here, or passe?

The Subtle Psychology of Motivation and Learning

This was a real research team doing SoTL (although they didn't call it that). They reported on their efforts to improve the outcomes of both junior-high and community-college students. Their approach was impressively broad, including individual (growth mindset, persistence) and social factors (peer ties, faculty support). They have published their research in leading journals (Journal of Educational Psychology) and worked with edtech start-ups like Analytics for Learning.

I was pleased to hear that retrieval practice and interleaving were part of their intervention. 

There was more, much more. But this is tl;dr already, and I plan to blog at the close of every day of the conference. So if you want more from SXSWedu, stay tuned.

A new way to get students to read the text

Ask any instructor and she'll tell you that one of the biggest challenges is making sure that students read the textbook. I've tried several approaches to this problem, from begging and pleading (no effect) to requiring students to outline the text (seemingly effective, but very time-consuming). In my flipped class (described elsewhere in this blog) I rely on the in-class activities to force students to engage with the material in the text, and I think this approach works pretty well. However, the jigsaw activities we do in class really only require students to engage with the material their learning groups are responsible for (just a small portion of any chapter), and they get the rest of the material from their peers in the teaching groups. So when my Pearson book rep told me about a new offering for my textbook that would require more student engagement with the text, I was ready to listen.

She told me about a new service called REVEL. REVEL really is a number of related things. First, the REVEL service provides students with an electronic version of the entire text, from pictures, to bold key words, to chapter summaries, everything that appears in the paper version appears in the e-version, plus there are interactive elements like brief activities and videos. The etext is in the cloud and is accessible on most platforms, from PCs to tablets to smartphones. So students can access the etext anywhere they have internet access including over wifi and cell service. Students also get an unbound 3-hole-punch version of the text identical to the traditional bound version. So, in sum, they get the same text they used to get, but now they get it electronically and in paper form, with added electronic features (including narration of the text). This alone might have tempted me to adopt this version, just for the increased access and portability. But there's much more to REVEL.

The most useful aspect of REVEL are the assignments that Pearson has built into the etext. As an instructor I get an account on REVEL that allows me to select from a list of assignments for each chapter in the etext. I can set up a due date for each assignment and REVEL will track each student's performance and progress on the assignments. The assignments themselves range from short quizzes covering small sections of the chapters to shared reflections on the material. The short quizzes can be taken multiple times, although correct answers diminish in value with each attempt. I really like this mastery approach. There are also quizzes that cover the entire chapter. I can select whatever type of assignment to use, covering any part of a chapter or all of it. The semester hasn't started yet so I don't know how well the analytics work, but it looks very helpful from the instructional videos. 

Setting up the assignment on Pearson's REVEL website does take some time and effort, and at this point REVEL doesn't interface with our LMS (Blackboard) so I'll have to manually import the results into the LMS and my gradebook, but that looks relatively painless. But I really like the ability to control when the assignments are available so they track my course schedule.

So the idea is that students are forced to attempt the assignments I selected (I chose the section quizzes, but not the chapter-length quizzes). They can relatively easily jump to the quizzes without reading the associated material, but their performance on those quizzes will likely suffer for it. My hope is that the REVEL assignments will lead to more student engagement with the text (obviously).

Pearson suggests that you make the REVEL assignments worth 15-35% of their final grade, but I decided that they would be worth 40% of the final grade for my class (and 40% from the in-class quizzes, and 20% from a paper assignment).

So, again, if REVEL only provided a more accessible etext, and the online assignments, I would have been very likely to adopt it. But on top of that, the cost of the REVEL package is substantially lower than the traditional bound text. I'm talking $105 for the REVEL package compared to about $240 for the bound text. With the spiraling cost of textbook (and higher education in general), I felt nearly compelled to adopt the REVEL version.

I'm pretty excited about using REVEL in my class. I promise to blog about how well it works during the semester. Stay tuned.