Phendrana Drifts

I could not imagine a more succinct challenge to what people think post-secondary is, what it actually is, and perhaps the reasons why we need to change how we provide it.

Many of the revelations will be news to many (and while few individual ones were a shock to me, taken as a whole really showed me how the college and university world needs to adapt and change). The video (and student feedback on post-secondary in general) should not paint a dreary and hopeless situation, but it does demonstrate some key and systemic flaws.

Relevancy - is it a student's fault they don't do 50% of the readings, don't go to class or bother to crack open a $100 textbook? Of course, at one level it certainly is. But it isn't because they are lazy and don't read - 2,300 web pages and 500 pages of e-mails (not to mention 1,200 plus Facebook profiles) show that when the material is relevant students who make it into university apply themselves with vigour. Post-secondary education is not a dinosaur but we need to do more to modernize the campus. The video itself was pretty good at pointing out technology alone cannot solve this - nor can funding (regardless of whether it comes from the student in the form of tuition or from public funding). Systemic change is required to make campus more relevant to students - students are not consumers and closing the sale is not a sign of success, engaging curious minds is the goal, or at least should be.

Curriculum - You can't teach directly to the modern day. It isn't that the university and college are teaching outdated information (although I think in many cases they are). If a student in class today is going to graduate two years from now and get a job that does not yet exist, how do train the student for that job? You can't, and that's the point. Bright, curious, inquisitive and reasoned minds are what are needed for the societal challenges two years, a decade from now and half a century from now. Training an open mind is what is needed - take Wikipedia for example. The core technology was available years ago to do it - it was not a new processor or a faster modem that made Wikipedia, blogging, file sharing and the ongoing revolution online. Technology is always a part, naturally, but being open to how technology interacts with knowledge is what made those advances possible and relevant. Closed minds need not apply in the economy of today, let alone tomorrow.

Creation vs. consumption - The classic undergraduate degree is not about consuming knowledge - reading it, retaining it and regurgitating it on demand. That was the first thing that was told to me when I stepping into my first undergraduate class in 1996, and it should be just as true today. It should be about teaching you to think. Despite being told that, it is the easiest way to give the appearance of an undergraduate degree, and I fear more and more professors, departments, faculties and institutions are encouraging that approach either overtly or subtly in favour of other priorities. The "real world" taught me that people valued thoughtful collaboration well-above individual competition. My university degrees did not prepare me for that. On a side note, the "real world" taught me that brevity was a good thing, my degrees certainly did not do that either. If training you to think is the key to a solid education, and if the best way to teach is to do, should our education institutions not be focusing on production rather than regurgitation? I think universities do a much better job at it than K-12 schools, but the production barrier is gone. Why didn't every university class demand a similar project to the anthropology one that this video was 30 years ago? Because the technology was unavailable to allow 30,000 students on a given campus to do so. More importantly, why did few university projects make it into the public consciousness like this one has, with 1.2 million people watching it in a month? Because technology has made it possible for me to share stuff like this with the world. Do rather than study, and share rather than protect information, new or old.

What did you find interesting in the video?

Labels: education

3 Comments:

At 12:07 AM, SD said…

Well it is certainly not "on message", the video does give rise to the question: "What should our message actually be?". We get so caught up with ratios and trends that often times we miss the fact that the system itself is totally flawed. The way we expand the system, the way that we fund the system, even the way that we learn within the system is flawed.
The moral of the story is that the system is broken. CAUS, the UASU, and others are worker with the only tools we have to try and fix it. Pragmatic solutions will provide the baby steps we need to make the system better. The interesting part about this video is that it shows how far we have to go.
At 8:56 PM, michele said…

As a sometimes post-secondary instructor, I understood what the video was getting at as far as demands on student time, but at the same time, I found myself objecting to some of the claims because I didn't think they were legitimate.

Re: relevancy. Yes, students need skills, particularly critical thinking skills, that will be relevant to their careers (and relevant to multiple careers thoughout their lifetime). But "relevant" is also often translated by students as directly applicable to their life, their relationships or their finances on that particular day or week. For example, students often dismiss learning to write well because they don't need to for IM-ing or Facebook-ing. They need it for the work world, but because that isn't right in front of them at the moment, many dismiss it as not "relevant".

Re: curriculum. Yes, there needs to be a real revamping of curriculum. I think Web 2.0 is a start, but teachers need to be more involved in embracing these technologies, not just for their sakes or their "coolness" but because they can complement (or replace) the chalk and talk experience. Blended learning has great potential to merge the best features of the classroom with the best features of technology.

Re: consumption. I know you're talking about consumption from the student's perspective of "consuming" knowledge - that regurgitation is indeed counterproductive in the kind of workplaces we now inhabit. But there is another form of consumption that is creeping into higher ed, and that's the consumer model of education. Universities have contributed to this problem by "closing the sale" as you note and selling the degree as a commodity needed to get a good job. This leads students to view the degree like any other consumer good - if you pay for it, you own it. But higher ed requires more than just paying your tuition and walking out with a degree. I have had students express to me the sentiment that because they have paid for the course (and "paid" my salary), they should pass it, regardless of their performance*.

This consumer model links back to the relevancy problem, with some students tuning out because it's a)not relevant, and b) they've paid for the degree already and assume that means they've got it.

These two things will not be solved by technology - it might help bridge some of the gaps, but there's a bigger institutional and social problem as well that the higher ed institutions will have to work at setting straight.

*in Canada, the last issue of buying a degree is less prevalent than in the U.S., but that's not to say we'll remain immune.
At 11:38 AM, Heather said…

While I agree that readings and course content need to be relevant, I have to say that I didn't see much in the way of students taking responsibility for their own work. When did reading Facebook entries replace reading textbooks? Do they not understand that they're sabotaging their education by surfing the web during class? Or don't they care?

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