Six days before the public launch of The Harvard
Campaign, in which the University will “foreground”
pedagogy and learning, according to President Drew Faust, two news
announcements underscored the scope of that initiative:
Provost Alan M. Garber announced the
creation of a new senior post, vice provost for advances in learning, as a way
to focus faculty and institutional engagement with efforts to enhance education
across Harvard. Carswell professor of East Asian languages and civilizations Peter
K. Bol will assume the role immediately.
Harvard School of Public Health
(HSPH) announced receipt of $12.5 million to support revising the pedagogy for
its master’s degree programs and creating a new doctorate in public health leadership.
That support, plus newly disclosed prior gifts and grants totaling $5.8
million, will enable the school, according to a news release, to deploy “more
case-based and field-based ‘real world’ learning opportunities.” HSPH will also “accelerate efforts…to develop ‘flipped classroom’ experiences, in which
lecture-style material is delivered increasingly online before class, while classroom
time is spent by students and faculty actively engaging together to develop
strategies for solving the types of problems students will encounter in their
careers.” (For one faculty member’s first-person account of creating and
teaching a “flipped” course, read
“Reinventing the Classroom,” from the Harvard
Magazine archives.)
Together, the announcements suggest accelerating efforts to
apply technology to teaching and to rethink pedagogy on a school-wide scale
across Harvard.
Context
In recent years, several efforts to apply cognitive science and discoveries
about learning to the classroom (to improve teaching practice) and to explore
educational technologies have gathered strength across Harvard:
Science
faculty members have redesigned introductory classes, made hands-on
laboratory experiences widely accessible, and used
interactive devices to assess learning in real time—all out of concern
about losing students who might otherwise fail to pursue their passion for
science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (part of a larger national
discussion about this phenomenon).
The
Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT), catalyzed by a
$40-million gift during the University’s 375th-anniversary celebration, has
created a forum for discussing the issues across campus, and backed
experimentation and innovation with seed grants—including, it turns out, to
HSPH (see below).
The edX
online-education partnership with MIT, launched in the spring of 2012, has
jump-started experimentation with the use of technology in virtual and campus
teaching contexts. HarvardX
now has its own production staff and studio to accelerate online course
development, and HILT and HarvardX are collaborating to train faculty members
and graduate students to incorporate the new technologies in their courses and
teaching.
Individual schools are also investing
in their own teaching-support infrastructure, as in the appointment of the first
faculty director for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ Bok Center for Teaching
and Learning: Robert A. Lue, who is also faculty director of HarvardX.
The Vice Provost for Advances in Learning
It is within this context that Provost Garber announced the appointment of Peter
Bol as the new vice provost. In a conversation, Garber noted that there had
been “an explosion of interest in how we approach teaching and learning at
Harvard”—dating especially from the gift that launched HILT in 2011. That does
not mean that every faculty member is suddenly eager to offer online courses,
he emphasized; but “more and more faculty are interested in being involved in
some way” in rethinking their teaching. That has created the need for a
dedicated position responsible for stimulating further work on improving pedagogy across the University, serving as a source of information and guidance for interested
professors—and making clear that “faculty should be leading these efforts.”
The new vice provost, Garber said, should be someone “who is actively involved in
teaching and in innovation” (as Bol is and will continue to be), in order to maintain contact with students and direct experience in the evolving
Harvard classroom.
According to the announcement, Bol will report to
the provost, while overseeing both HarvardX and HILT. In that capacity, he will
work with those units and faculty members and deans to “support Harvard’s broader efforts to improve education by leading
campus discussions about innovations in teaching and learning and their
implications; working with the schools to develop policies and best practices;
and fostering collaboration with the Harvard Library, the museums, the Division
of Continuing Education, and Harvard University Information Technology, as well
as related teaching and learning centers such as the Bok Center.”
Bol has long pioneered new approaches to technologically
enhanced research and teaching:
More than a decade ago, he and graduate
students reported from Zhejiang Province, south of Shanghai, where they were
digitally documenting local village and community life; electronic databases,
videos of lineage halls, and other tools were incorporated into a course on
“The Culture of Everyday Life in China” that he taught with professor of
Chinese history Michael Szonyi.
He has applied
database technology to the vast archives of Chinese leaders through the
millennia, creating new opportunities for digital scholarship while engaging
colleagues in the United States, China, and Taiwan. Those efforts have been
married productively to his academic
leadership of Harvard’s efforts to use geographic information systems and
geospatial technology in a host of scholarly disciplines—including
developing a new
course that was supported by a HILT innovation grant.
He was, as Garber’s note observes,
chair of the Harvard academic computing committee, and now is a member of the HarvardX faculty committee.
Now, with colleague William C. Kirby, Chang professor of China studies and Spangler
Family professor of business administration, he has adapted
Societies of the World 12, “China,” for online teaching through edX as SW12x,
debuting next month; it is simultaneously being taught in the College and
through the Extension School. (As previously reported, last
spring Bol taught Chinese History 185, “Creating ChinaX—Teaching China’s
History Online,” in which students and teaching fellows jointly learned the
content while preparing materials for use in the SWx course. The image below, courtesy of HarvardX, shows Bol during the production of the online course.)
The application of edX technology to campus
classrooms is particularly important. HarvardX aims at both disseminating
course content worldwide—the best known use is for “massive open online
courses” (MOOCs)—and, somehow,
deploying the videos, online exercises, student discussion forums, and other
relatively expensive tools in existing courses at the University. Faculty
members who have been skeptical about the feasibility of campus applications
are watching to see how such uses unfold in their colleagues’ teaching. In his
address at the University of St Andrews this past weekend, Harvard president
emeritus Derek
Bok focused on the role of such technologies in enhancing live, classroom
teaching—consistent with his long-term emphasis on pedagogy and learning. In
an interview with Stanford Magazine,
that institution’s president, John
Hennessy, a champion of applying technology to education, focused squarely on
campus classrooms, deflecting attention from MOOCs’ role in disseminating
courses around the world. Speaking about plans to expand the undergraduate
body, he was asked about the use of MOOCs (Coursera and Udacity, two MOOC
enterprises, were created by Stanford faculty members). He responded:
There’s a
bigger question about online education, of which MOOCs are a small piece. MOOCs
will be important for self-motivated learners and people who can’t get access
to a high quality education. We don’t view them as a substitute in any way for
what we can offer undergraduates. But, MOOCs are something that Stanford can
offer to improve the quality of education available worldwide.
A separate question is whether technology has a
role to play in improving the quality of the educational experience right here
on campus or at our overseas campuses. A lot of our current focus is on how we
make some of our classes, particularly large lecture classes, much better
learning environments. How do we use technology to improve our pedagogy? We are
very committed to that goal. And we would do that independent of whether we
kept class size the same or expanded it.
Garber stressed that edX and HarvardX have a three-part mission:
to make Harvard professors’ teaching available worldwide; to improve teaching
on campus; and to support research on teaching, learning, and the effectiveness
of education technologies in the classroom. Most discussion of MOOCs and edX
during the past year has focused on the first of these goals, he said; “Peter
Bol is committed to all three.” The most effective learning, the provost said,
continues to involve extensive face-to-face interaction among faculty members
and students, augmented by making the best use of new technologies.
By selecting Bol for the new learning post, the provost has chosen
a senior faculty member who has deep experience, across disciplines, in
applying new tools to his own teaching, while establishing relationships with a
large number of the leaders in pedagogical innovation across Harvard. (Disclosure: Bol is a past member of the board
of directors of Harvard Magazine Inc., a current member of its board of incorporators,
and a nominee for a new term of service as a director of the organization.)
“Transforming Public
Health Education”
HSPH, according to the announcement, plans a broad effort to “redesign its
educational strategy.” This
past May, at the HILT conference, Dean Julio Frenk outlined his
school’s centennial-year curricular plans. He talked about redesigning instruction to
focus on competency-based learning, with flexible, modular, experiential units
accommodating students at various points in their professional lives. He also
endorsed the “blended” online and class-based teaching techniques of the
flipped classroom. The mix of online and face-to-face instruction, he said, would
vary with the purposes, with more online teaching for “informative,”
expertise-oriented learning, and progressively more personal instruction for
“formative” (values and professional) and “transformative” (leadership)
courses. He then reviewed the institutional challenges: colleagues (investing
in faculty development); capacity (physical space, technology, finances, and so
on); and culture (changing from language that describes a professor’s teaching
“load” to give teaching a value equal to research; the rewards for teaching and
research; and the school’s self-identification as a preeminent research
institution). View the video recording of Frenk’s HILT
presentation
here.
According
to Ian Lapp, associate dean for strategic educational initiatives, Frenk began
planning to revisit HSPH’s curriculum and pedagogy some three years ago,
reflecting his awareness of both changing needs for public health and evolving
learning methods and technologies. On November 1, the
school is devoting a centennial symposium to the subject and its aspirations.
But it is one thing to envision an initiative for “Transforming Public Health
Education,” as the effort is now called. It is another to be able to afford to
effect it. HSPH is by a very large measure the Harvard unit most dependent on
sponsored-research grants (73 percent of
fiscal year 2012 operating revenue, according to the University’s annual
financial report), and least able to count on endowment funding (14 percent of
operating revenue)—precisely the circumstances that make it most difficult for
a dean to finance changes in curriculum and pedagogy.
Hence
the importance of today’s announcement. The Charina Endowment Fund and Richard
L. Menschel, M.B.A. ’59, and Ronay Menschel are making available $12.5 milllion
to underwrite the planned changes in master’s degree education, to be in place
in 2015, and the new doctoral program, beginning next year. (The new education
funding comes atop $2.5-million of
earlier support from the endowment fund and the Menschels in support of Ariadne
Labs, an HSPH-Brigham and Women’s Hospital initiative, lead by Atul Gawande, professor in the
department of health policy and management, and professor of surgery, to reduce surgical errors, increase childbirth
safety, and enhance planning for end-of-life care.) The new education-initiative
funding—combined with an anonymous 2012 gift of $5 million to HSPH for
curriculum development and scholarships for the doctoral program, plus a
$500,000 grant from the Medtronic Foundation—will also support the broad makeover
of curriculum and pedagogy, including plans to create facilities suitable for
“innovative and team-based” teaching, according to the news release, and to
enable HSPH faculty members to collaborate with peers in other Harvard schools.
A
$300,000 HILT grant for faculty training (formally, the Faculty TEAM Initiative
for Advancing Learning: Teaching Excellence, Assessment, and Mentoring) has
made it possible for HSPH professors to work on active-learning techniques,
technology-enhanced education, and team-teaching, Lapp noted. (Faculty members
have also received smaller HILT course-development grants, and HSPH professors were
among the first Harvard participants in creating courses for the edX platform,
beginning with PH207x, “Health in Numbers: Quantitative Methods in Clinical and
Public Health Research.”)
In
the announcement, Dean Frenk said:
This
combined funding, totaling $18.3 million, shows a remarkable level of
philanthropic interest in, and commitment to, public health education in the U.S.
and globally. It positions us well to continue to educate the public health
leaders of tomorrow. As soon as this fall, students at the School will begin to
benefit from the generosity of these gifts through the enhanced classroom
experiences they will encounter.
Public-health
students
preparing for leadership roles in government, non-governmental agencies, and
private firms need both in-depth knowledge in specialized areas of public
health and a wealth of competencies that enable them to work collaboratively
across the wide range of disciplines involved in improving the world’s health.
We are re-envisioning our approach to education in our professional programs to
enable our students to meet the rapidly changing needs of the field.
The reenvisioned
Doctor of Public Health degree (Dr.P.H., a revision of the little-used
D.P.H. program) will shift from a research focus to training in management,
leadership, communication, innovation, and translation of research into
high-impact public-health policy and practice, Lapp said. Accompanying its new
content will be the full panoply of pedagogical innovations, including
digital-interactive, case-based, and field learning, at HSPH proper, with other
Harvard faculties, and in the wider community. (In this sense, it parallels
some of the strategies brought to bear on Harvard Graduate School of
Education’s Ed.L.D. leadership degree, introduced in the fall of 2009.)
Pillars of Philanthropy
In HSPH’s release, Ronay Menschel said:
We support Harvard School of Public
Health with our philanthropy because we believe in the importance of public
health and the opportunity to expand the knowledge and skill sets of future
public-health leaders through the use of technology and case studies examining
evolving health challenges.
Richard Menschel said:
Improving learning leads to better
prepared students who can more successfully address the major public health
issues facing the world today. Better educated public-health leaders have the
capacity to improve the health of us all.
Behind those descriptions of the rationale for their current support
lies a record of deep engagement with Harvard, among other institutions.
Richard Menschel, a senior director at Goldman Sachs—and 2007
recipient of the Harvard Medal, recognizing his “broadminded
benevolence, thoughtfulness, and time” devoted to helping the University “move
toward our shared vision across schools”—and Ronay Menschel, a Cornell alumna
and past vice chair of its board of trustees, have been active supporters of
work across the institution, including:
endowing the Harvard Art Museums’
photography curatorship;
endowing a professorship at HSPH, now
held by Robert J. Blendon, an expert in public opinion and policy (who
holds a dual appointment in the Harvard Kennedy School; a professorship honoring past dean and
Harvard provost Harvey V. Fineberg, for use in HSPH’s division of
public health practice or department of biostatistics ; and a
fellowship program;
endowing the
Bok Center directorship (the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ focal
position for improving teaching practice), and, earlier, underwriting
other teaching improvements and pedagogical innovations such as the Graduate
Seminars in General Education (through which faculty members and
their graduate students jointly create new courses for the College’s
general-education curriculum);
supporting Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Program in Education,
Afterschool & Resiliency; and
supporting Harvard
Business School’s year-long leadership fellowships in public, social, and
nonprofit enterprises.
Richard Menschel has served on the business school’s visiting
committee, on the art museums’ director’s advisory council, and on the
Committee on University Resources (Harvard’s principal fundraising advisory
body). He was national co-chair of the University Campaign, which concluded in
1999. The Menschels are also parents of three Harvard daughters, according to
the HSPH release: Charis ’97;
Sabina ’99, M.B.A. ’05; and Celene ’04, M.B.A.’13.
At HSPH, Richard Menschel has served on the dean’s council and the
leadership council, and chaired the school’s fundraising committee during the
University Campaign. He will be honorary co-chair of the forthcoming capital
campaign, to be unveiled after The Harvard Campaign festivities on September 21.
For a relatively lightly endowed enterprise like the public-health
school (whose graduates almost by definition do not earn high incomes), the
long-term friendship of strategic philanthropists like the Menschels—in both
financial support and volunteered personal engagement—could not possibly matter
more, especially in a time of actual and threatened wholesale reductions in
federal research support.