University teaching approaches

The university of the future part 3: Hub of a learning network

September 12, 2017 by Ruth Bridgstock

In an age where learners can download all of the content they want for free, there is limited value in continuing to feed them a pre-digested, pre-prepared curriculum. The institutions that will thrive in our age of digital hyper-connectivity will do so because of the quality and depth of the learning experiences they offer, the relationships that they foster, the networks that they broker, and their bespoke content generation (research).

This is the long-awaited third installment of my ‘university of the future’ series, all of which commence with a highly self-indugent and fairly provocative quote from yours truly 🙂

In the first two installments last year, I talked about the importance of interdisciplinary experiential learning, and of building a strong community of learners, teachers and industry/community. In this third installment, I’m going to make some remarks about the future university as hub of a global learning and practice network.

Generally speaking, universities are extremely ineffective at social networking. They focus on short-term, transactional and contractual relationships with students and research / commercial partners. They lock down their infrastructure and put their learning resources behind firewalls (cf MOOCS, but these have other problems I’ll get into in another post). They don’t understand that the most productive relationships, even in the online realm and involving payment, are long term, based on trust, and involve sharing and reciprocity.

In the conventional university the pedagogy is closed and walled, with a curriculum that is more or less one-size-fits-all-learners, and based on a distributive (transmissive) system. By contrast, people like George Siemens and Stephen Downes talk about connectivism and networked pedagogy — the idea that learning can be open and connected, characterised by self-regulation, co-creation and investigation. In networked pedagogy, the network is diverse. The learning is adaptive, and adapted, to individual and network needs.

I think that universities are changing.They are employing industry engagement personnel, albeit still mostly for research development, and purchasing CRM systems. They are trying to improve their responsiveness to industry skill needs. However, they still aren’t as responsive as they need to be, in part because they are still addicted to curriculum content (as are the professional accrediting bodies). Our curriculum is quite static. It takes a long time and usually many committees to renew.

I have a vision of the future university as hub of a learning network, encompassing industry, professionals, users and researchers. The university becomes a conduit and knowledge integrator for the latest university and industry generated research and practice trends that students and professionals alike can access as needed. Learners can forage within the network for task-relevant knowledge and information, and apply it to their practice, with the support and facilitation of teachers. They can make new contacts and find new collaborators.

I think I’m actually talking about a ‘meta’university’ model here — overarching, accessible, global, and community-constructed frameworks of materials and platforms. The universities with the best pipelines to industry and academic research, practice and people, that can supply these to learners in useful ways, will be the most successful.

Teaching philosophy update

June 22, 2017April 5, 2017 by Ruth Bridgstock

Edit: I was succesful in my application, and as of June 2017 am now a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy!

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I just finished writing a new application to the Higher Education Academy. I became a Senior HEA Fellow in mid-2015, and posted about my teaching philosophy then. This time, I’m going for the big one: Principal Fellow. There are about 700 Principal Fellows worldwide, and these people tend to be highly experienced senior staff with strategic institutional and sectoral leadership roles in learning and teaching.

I’m applying for my Principal HEA Fellowship through QUT’s scheme QALT (QUT Academy of Learning and Teaching). My application involved about 8,000 words, all-told : a reflective account of practice demonstrating that I meet all Dimensions of the PSF at Descriptor 4 level, a record of educational impact (list of roles and activities), three advocates reports, and my learning and teaching philosophy statement.

This application drove me nuts. It was much harder to do than my previous one, and not just because it was four times the length. I had trouble pulling apart my integrated experiences to address the different criteria. I dithered over my reflections and wondered exactly which examples of practice should go where. It took me a total of two months at 1-2 hours each work day to draft and then edit the thing.

I reached the teaching philosophy part and thought I’d be fine. ‘Excellent’, I thought. ‘I can cut corners here by using my philosophy from my SFHEA application!’

Except no.

I copied-and-pasted my teaching philosophy statement, read it over, and realised it didn’t fit. Not because my philosophy of teaching has changed; but because the focus and scale of Principal Fellow is completely different. In my SF application, I spoke largely about the learner, and the role of the teacher and the learning environment. In my PF application, I started my philosophy the same way, but got far more into what I believe higher education is for, and which pedagogic principles and practices should infuse everything we do. It got quite grandiose, really.

Anyway, here it is. Upon reflection, most of my work has this kind of focus rather than at the SF level, so while the PF application was harder to write, the PF aligns better with my thinking and practice. Cross fingers that I am approved — my application now goes to three reviewers, and I will hear back in about 8 weeks.

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I believe that higher education is vitally important to personal, social and economic well-being and growth in the 21st century knowledge society. Universities are responsible for teaching high level capabilities that are needed for leadership, social responsibility, innovation and problem solving, all of which are integral to navigating a successful global future. Given this mandate, I feel that contemporary university programs must be orientated towards real world relevance and application – that is, they must be of use – as well as continuing to support learners to develop disciplinary depth and high level critical capabilities grounded in history, theory and context. Education for relevance and application should include the development of ‘future capabilities’, including disciplinary agility, enterprise and entrepreneurship, digital literacies, social network capability, and career/learning self-management, all of which are often sorely lacking in university graduate capability lists and curricula (Bridgstock, 2009; 2015). I often argue that in a world where more and more information is available online for free, provision of pre-digested curriculum content is much less important than previously. Universities will soon be differentiated by the provision of quality learning experiences that develop future capabilities, and the extent to which they foster the growth of learners’ professional relationships and networks.

Thus, in order to meet the future capability needs of learners, teachers and educational institutions need to be future capable as well. My perspective on the dominant pedagogic approaches taken by the future capable is exemplified in my distributed knowledge network model of the university depicted in the figure below (Bridgstock, 2016). The model is based on research I conducted into the actual and preferred learning strategies of digital industry professionals (Bridgstock, 2016, published online), and is designed to create a responsive, continually updating curriculum. It has grounding in, and integrates ideas from, experiential, active learning theories and authentic learning (Dewey, 1938; Herrington & Herrington, 2005), social constructivism (Berger & Luckmann, 1966), communities of practice and enquiry (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and connectivism (Siemens, 2005).

Screen Shot 2017-04-05 at 5.06.58 PM

At the centre of the model is the learner who is engaged individually or in a group in task- or enquiry- based experiential learning. The green ring depicts their learning community, which may include other learners at different levels of capability, teachers, and industry/community members. The community is embedded into a much larger distributed knowledge network comprising global digital and face-to-face connections – such as learners, teachers, practitioners, industry, users, and other interested individuals. The acquisition of capability occurs in cyclical manner between authentic activity and the ‘classroom’ (whether physical or virtual), with teachers scaffolding learners’ processes of reflective metacognitive learning how to learn and emergent meaning making (Nonaka & Toyama, 2003). In strong contrast to the traditional ‘sage on the stage’ transmissive model of education on the 20^th century (King, 1993), 21^st century academic teachers must guide, coach, and mentor. They support learners to plan their learning, and then to filter, compare, contrast, and re-contextualise learning strategies and experiences, and identify new sources for relevant knowledge and skill acquisition, which is what learners will then do for themselves continually throughout the rest of their professional and personal lives. The learner is co-designer and co-constructor of their learning, which may traverse formal, informal, curricular and co-curricular realms as needed.

In the future capable university, teachers are vital to ‘bottom up’ educational innovation and growth, and to the ongoing facilitation of high quality learning experiences (Salmon & Wright, 2014). For teachers to be effective, they must be supported by organisational structures and processes that are germane to new ways of working and teaching. Teachers’ bottom up actions must also be met by complementary ‘top-down’ policies and strategies. Thus, I work with teachers and institutional leaders to build future teaching capability. I believe in the power of transformational leadership in stimulating organisational change (Avolio, Zhu, Koh, & Bhatia, 2004) that inspires and stimulates new ways of thinking, and affirms and capitalises on existing practice.

Avolio, B. J., Zhu, W., Koh, W., & Bhatia, P. (2004). Transformational leadership and organizational commitment: Mediating role of psychological empowerment and moderating role of structural distance. Journal of organizational behavior, 25(8), 951-968.

Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. London: Penguin UK.

Bridgstock, R. (2016). The university and the knowledge network: A new educational model for 21st century learning and employability. In M. Tomlinson (Ed.), Graduate Employability in Context: Research, Theory and Debate. London: Palgrave-MacMillan.

Bridgstock, R. (2016, published online). Educating for digital futures: What the learning strategies of digital media professionals can teach higher education. Innovations in Education and Teaching International.

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education: Simon and Schuster.

Herrington, A., & Herrington, J. (2006). What is an authentic learning environment? In A. Herrington & J. Herrington (Eds.), Authentic learning environments in higher education (pp. 1-13). Hershey: Information Science Publishing.

King, A. (1993). From sage on the stage to guide on the side. College Teaching, 41(1), 30-35.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 2(1).

The ‘most amazing course ever’: The university of the future part 2

November 8, 2015September 29, 2015 by Ruth Bridgstock

A few days ago I published part 1 of a post about the above quote. In the post I discussed higher education’s addiction to content. I talked about how teacher preparation and pre-digestion of course content is not only highly inefficient, it also runs counter to what we know about good pedagogic practice and the development of graduate capabilities such as information literacy and lifelong learning. I also implied that in the near future, as global market competition between universities heats up, continuing to focus on packaging content will not be a productive strategy (particularly if much of that content is available online at zero cost to the student anyway).

Imagine asking a student to describe the most exciting and interesting feature of their course. They are never going to say ‘the content’, and they’re never going to say, ‘the prescribed readings’. They are certainly never going to say, ‘the lecturer’s powerpoint slides’!

I’m not saying that we should do away with content, readings or powerpoint entirely. What I am saying is that in designing university courses for the future, we need to think carefully about what is going to attract and engage students, and what is going to yield the most valuable (and marketable, let’s be pragmatic here) learning.

Recently, I conducted a market research survey with more than 700 intending and existing students in my faculty. Inthe final section of the survey, I asked them to describe “the most amazing course ever”. The students could write whatever they wanted – and they did, with many giving me extended descriptions, learning approaches, and even fully thought out course titles.

I boiled down the 25,000 words I received from the students. The key elements of an amazing course turned out to be about:

(1) pedagogic approaches (‘hands on, minds on’ and a course that is personally meaningful / tailored to individual interests and needs),

(2) relationships (being part of a supportive, exciting community of learners, teachers and industry representatives), and

(3) being able to make tangible and positive contributions to the world.

This is the stuff I’m getting at when I say ‘the quality and depth of learning experiences’ and ‘the relationships that they foster’ in the quote at the beginning of this post. Incidentally, these are also some of the key features of optimal informal learning for professional development (Bridgstock, 2014). People tend to learn naturally by experiencing something that piques interest or poses a challenge. Often this experience is ‘hands on’ — the person is trying to do something, and through this process they discover that they need more information, or a strategy, or a specific skill. They then undertake research (broadly defined) to meet this need — they read, check online discussion groups, Google the topic, or wander into the next cubicle to ask their colleague. Thus, there is immediate, just-in-time relevance to the further learning that they are undertaking. Other ways that interest can be piqued is through informal discussion, reading magazines, surfing the web, or encountering new places. You get the idea.

A big point to make here is that no one is asking these people to memorise facts on faith that they might need them at some point in the future, or to acquire decontextualised skills that aren’t applied immediately. Human beings are actually really, really bad at learning using these approaches. However, this is exactly what we in universities ask students to do most of the time.

Right, so here are some questions for thought and discussion. I’m keen to know what you think.

– how do you approach learning when you are able to do it naturally?

– how do your approaches to informal / natural learning differ from your approaches to learning in formal contexts / courses that you have attended? How are they similar?

– what would happen if we designed courses where students were able to learn more naturally?

Re the last question, I wonder: is anyone (a) feeling a bit anxious that we wouldn’t cover the required content if we did this, or (b) worrying about how Timetabling might cope?? 😀 Ah the realities of teaching…

In my next post (part 3) in a few days I’m going to talk more about the ‘community’ and ‘network’ aspects of learning in the future university, picking up on the students’ responses about relationships being the second element of the most amazing course ever.

The university of the future part 1: just say no (most of the time) to pre-digested content

November 8, 2015September 25, 2015 by Ruth Bridgstock

In an age where learners can download all of the content they want for free, there is limited value in continuing to feed them a pre-digested, pre-prepared curriculum. The institutions that will thrive in our age of digital hyperconnectivity will do so because of the quality and depth of the learning experiences they offer, the relationships that they foster, the networks that they broker, and their bespoke content generation (research).

I’ve been waiting to put the above two sentences into an academic article for a few months now. I haven’t finished writing the article yet (still!), so here it is in all its opinionated glory.

This is part 1 of a 3-part (I think) discussion.

In just about all of the university courses I know of, we continue to teach students using an ‘industrial model’ – that is, we pre-package content that we think is relevant, and then transmit it to learners. Often this is via lectures (or, in the modern teaching world, online recorded lectures for maximum efficiency (although its questionable whether online recorded lectures are actually very effective. But I digress). However, in an era of MOOCs, Youtube, Slideshare and Lynda.com, to mention a few, the digital world is awash in content. We teachers like to think that the lecture content we’re preparing is unique and better than anyone else’s, but in reality this nearly always isn’t the case. So the first point is that we’re spending a lot of time making and packaging learning materials, when there is a lot of existing content out there already that most of us don’t access or use (cue discussion for another day: how do teachers become effective curators of learning?)

"The lecture bored me to death" by Graham Stanley is licensed under CC 2.0 — “The lecture bored me to death” by Graham Stanley is licensed under CC 2.0

What good teachers can say in our defence is that we tweak and optimise the content we make for the particular cohorts we’re teaching. We create learning experiences around the content that are designed carefully to engender deep learning in the cohorts we’re engaging with. This is pretty cool – one of the best reasons that teachers exist. However, this argument doesn’t address why we are spending too much time making redundant powerpoints in the first place. I guess some teachers might say that in the time it would take them to identify suitable open content online and tailor it for the cohort that they may as well have built the materials from scratch… in response though, I’d humbly suggest that sometimes this is because university teachers aren’t as well networked as they could be, and don’t know where or how to look.

I also wonder why we would WANT to spend a lot of time searching for and retrieving learning materials, filtering them and then making them relevant and useful to students, when information literacy and lifelong learning are key graduate capabilities. Students are going to need to do all of this themselves in an ongoing way for the rest of their lives. Why not start them off while they’re at uni? Yes, I’m talking about research and enquiry-based learning. Why don’t we as teachers spend less time focussing on content delivery, and more time and energy doing what we add the most value doing – creating learning experiences and facilitating learning? Don’t get me wrong — I’m not saying that ALL learning experiences at uni need to involve students doing their own research. Some types of content do lend themselves to a direct transmission approach (e.g., TED talks, which are specific genre of direct transmission teaching).

As I finish part 1 of this post, I wonder whether our collective addiction to content delivery comes from an (erroneous) belief held by both learners and teachers around what ‘quality’ and ‘effort’ is in teaching. Do we assume that because the teacher has spent hours on lecture slides and preparing readings that the learning experience is a high quality one? Would students ask whether they were getting value for money if the teacher provided less pre-digested content and instead focussed their efforts on supporting and facilitating the learners to find both questions and answers themselves? How scary might it be for a teacher to go in without the ‘safety blanket’ of their slide pack and talking points?