On Tuesday I gave a plenary presentation at QUT’s annual Higher Education Research Network symposium, to kick off my OLT Fellowship. Here it is summarised in pictorial form!! Completely delightful.
higher education
The university of the future part 1: just say no (most of the time) to pre-digested content
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?)
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?
How do you teach for lifelong creative employability? 3 models of WIL*
*for a definition of WIL and some initial discussions around why I think we need to reinvent it, see my blog post from last week
I have argued elsewhere that in the real value in learning that the future university will provide students is not so much in the manifest curriculum content, apart from what we can offer through bespoke knowledge creation (research). Instead, what differentiates institutions will be the quality of the learning experiences we provide, and the industry/community networks we can offer. Creative faculties therefore need to start investing strongly in building relationships with industry and community, and fostering teacher capacity to teach creative enterprise as well as the capabilities associated with disciplinary practice. All three of the WIL models I propose below are predicated upon these investments, and also upon offering far more significant WIL provision than a single capstone 14-week experience. Actually, what I think I’m suggesting here is that these models could form the central learning experiences in a course.
(1) Offer internships with big, non-creative sector industry partners.
Here I borrow a little from successful Business School models of WIL, where the Faculty partners with big players (e.g., Deloitte or Ernst & Young) to offer a significant number of WIL opportunities each semester. The industry partner knows that by offering these internships that they have a direct recruitment pipeline to the best talent the university has to offer; in turn, the students get a high profile industry-based learning experience.
Where the creative internship model I propose differs from the Business School approach is that the creative students are embedded in non-cognate organisations. The Business School model involves, for instance, accountancy students heading over to Ernst and Young to work with other accountants on auditing, tax, and risk assessment. The creative faculty could, by contrast, partner with a very large firm (such as Westfield Group, Woolworths or Telstra in Australia), and send arts/graphic design, interactive and visual design, media and communications, interior design, and media production students to different areas of the firm for internships. As well as offering a pipeline for recruitment, the embedding of creative students into the organisation has the potential to increase the innovation capacity of the partner firm if it’s done right (Hearn & Bridgstock, 2014), as well as offering a relevant and enriching work integrated learning experience for creative students, who are quite likely to end up working in embedded roles in the future. The students experiencing this type of internship learn intrapreneurship, and how to work effectively with, and for, people who don’t come from their home creative discipline.
(2) Micro business and enterprise development.
We know that creative people are more likely than not to be self-employed to some extent. Most often, it’s als
o in these small ‘micro enterprise’ / start up situations where really innovative work goes on, rather than big (risk averse) firms. Micro-enterprise is becoming a much more common business model generally, through the growth of the sharing economy and ‘uberisation’ of professional services. However, many creative students do not regard themselves as entrepreneurial, and the majority of creative schools don’t teach for micro-enterprise development at all.
There is significant precedent for micro-creative enterprise learning in higher education, though (see, for instance, Rae 2012, or for diverse disciplines Culkin 2013), most often via coaching and mentoring, ideation, incubation and accelareration services, networking and resourcing support. In my own university, and co-located with the Faculty, we have a well-established creative incubator/accelerator, the only of its kind in the country, Creative Enterprise Australia. They offer a full range of startup support services, but there is actually very little overlap between their commercial activities and the faculty’s teaching.
Not all creative students will start their own businesses after graduation, but these learning opportunities are possibly the most effective way of developing true enterprise and entrepreneurship capabilities, disciplinary agility and students’ professional networks.
(3) Adopt a ‘teaching hospital’ model.
Neither of the previous two models represents a radical departure from what various universities have attempted previously, although they aren’t part of mainsteam teaching practice. Unfortunately, WIL tends to be highly time and resource intensive, and this means that creative faculties have trouble sustaining these kinds of experiments beyond special funded projects. This is where the third model comes in.
The third model involves embedding a creative enterprise into the heart of the creative faculty. This enterprise would provide commercial bundled creative products and services across art and design, digital, marketing, media/communications, performative and professional writing fields. In line with the key areas of growth in the creative economy, these products and services would target the Business-to-Business (B2B) market, but also would be able to support student micro-business development (model 2) and placements directly into non-creative firms (model 1) within it. The creative ‘teaching hospital’ should also encompass a non-profit arm, to support community engagement and social enterprise endeavours. It could support interdiscipinary collaborations with students and staff from other faculties.
In model 3 students learn through increasingly complex enterprise practice, supported and facilitated by academic and industry staff, and through legitimate peripheral participation models. This model has some resemblence to Vocational Education and Training models where, for instance, hospitality students learn through working at the institution’s cafe/restaurant. However, the key difference is in the capability types and complexity, the degree of criticality, theory and other contexualisation, and the emphasis on reflective professional practice. Students also end the program able to cite high level practice, real project outcomes and real clients. I’ve talked more about how learning in this model would work in my paper Educating for digital futures (Bridgstock, 2014).
Model 3 is the most risky of the three, but also has the most potential to yield big results. It requires redesigning the creative faculty around creative enterprise, including hiring industry practitioners and resourcing industry-ready practice. It also involves a radical change in curriculum and pedagogic practice for academic staff. There are also numerous ways that the teaching hospital model doesn’t fit within existing university structures (physical, procedural and policy). Some of these challenges may be surmounted by placing the enterprise to one side of the faculty rather than within it, with the university accrediting and providing qualifications on the basis of the learning experiences offered by the enterprise.
Yes, this is all a bit ‘out there’. I think it’s also the best way to build enriching, relevant learning experiences for creative students who are seeking employment outcomes (and to make a contribution to society and the economy). These models are also very different from mainstream practice in universities, and they have the potential to be highly marketable. In the case of models 2 and 3, there are revenue generation possibilities for the faculty in these models as well.
References
Bridgstock, R. (2014). Educating for digital futures: what the learning strategies of digital media professionals can teach higher education. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, (ahead-of-print), 1-10.
Culkin, N. (2013). Beyond being a student: An exploration of student and graduate start-ups (SGSUs) operating from university incubators. Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, 20(3), 634-649.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Rae, D. (2012). Action learning in new creative ventures. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 18(5), 603-623.
Teaching philosophy
A couple of weeks ago I was tasked with writing a one-page philosophy statement as part of my Higher Education Academy Senior Fellowship* application. Oddly, given that I’ve been researching and teaching in HE for quite a while now, I’ve never had to create one of these before, and I didnt actually know what it should contain. I used my Google-fu and found some instructions (e.g., this), some templates, lists of things to avoid, and some exemplars (this one was a lovely visual representation, I thought). Me being me, I even looked at the academic literature for instructions. I found some variation in requirements by country and discipline, and of course there was also a huge degree of variation by individual (compare the visual one up above to these ones).
In the end I just started writing, hoping to work it all out as I was going. After a couple of drafts I now have a one-page learning and teaching philosophy that I am reasonably happy with (I say ‘reasonably’, because it doesn’t quite get there for me around my core beliefs relating to learning for self actualisation and the humanistic side of things – human potential and so forth). Through the writing process, I realised that I do know exactly what my teaching philosphy is, and it’s actually reflected very consistently in my work.
Phew.
Anyhow, here it is: my learning and teaching philosophy.
I believe that in the 21st century knowledge society, higher education is vitally important to both social and economic well-being and growth. Universities are responsible for teaching high level capabilities that are needed for leadership, innovation and problem solving, all of which are integral to navigating a successful global future. Given this mandate, 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 includes the development of ‘21st century’ skills, including disciplinary agility, enterprise and entrepreneneurship, 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; 2014).
It is also incumbent upon us as educators to engage in pedagogic practices that (i) make the most of what we know about ways to maximise student learning; and (ii) to employ the best tools possible (digital or otherwise) to support this learning process. It is not sufficient to excuse poorly thought out transmissive ‘sage on the stage’ (King, 1993) teaching approaches by saying that this is the way we were taught at university, or to cite time and resourcing constraints. Many studies have shown that the best educators are committed to their own ongoing professional learning, and they manage to work within institutional constraints to produce creative and highly effective learning experiences (e.g., Philip, 2015). As a teacher, I aim to embody these characteristics and also to facilitate their development in other teachers.
I believe that the most fundamental task of any teacher in any classroom is to foster the ability and propensity in learners to keep learning for themselves. As such, I am a vocal skeptic of lectures, textbooks and exams, and a staunch advocate for authentic and situated learning, peer learning, problem-based learning, mentoring, enquiry-based learning, and informal learning. These are the ways that people prefer to learn at work and in other places out in the world beyond the university. These strategies enhance productivity, stimulate curiosity and increase depth of engagement (Bridgstock, 2014; Billett, 2009). Employing these strategies in a considered way at university not only fuels joy in learning – it hones students’ abilities to use and keep using these preferred strategies.
Finally, I believe in personalisation of the learning experience, which encompasses recognition of the existing knowledge and capabilities of learners (including knowledge and capabilities acquired through informal learning); accommodating their preferences and needs relating to curriculum, pedagogy and delivery; respecting the diversity in their backgrounds; and providing individualised learning support where needed. Further, education should never be something that is ‘done to’ a learner. Higher education should be an empowering experience for students; they can and should expect to be co-architects and co-constructors of their learning journeys.
Billett, S. (2009). Realising the educational worth of integrating work experiences in higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 34(7), 827-843.
Bridgstock, R. (2009). The graduate attributes we’ve overlooked: Enhancing graduate employability through career management skills. Higher Education Research and Development, 28(1), 27-39.
Bridgstock, R. (2014, in press). Educating for digital futures: What the learning strategies of digital media professionals can teach higher education. Innovations in Education and Teaching International.
King, A. (1993). From sage on the stage to guide on the side. College Teaching, 41(1), 30-35.
Philip, R. L. (2015). Caught in the headlights: Designing for creative learning and teaching in higher education. PhD Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane.
*the HEA fellowships scheme is a professional development and recognition scheme for higher ed teachers in the UK, but is starting to be used in Australian HE as well. It’s quite a lot of work to put an application together, but I think it’s really worth it, both for recognition of teaching capability and as a developmental process. If you’re interested in the scheme, more information can be found on their website.
