Liberal Arts Education Is the Most Valuable Type of Postsecondary Education
I believe that a liberal arts education is the most important education! Interesting enough, a 2011 study found that the children of college professors were twice as likely to attend a liberal arts school than children of parents earning over $100,000 a year.
People who work in higher education understand that the most important aspect of the undergraduate experience is learning how to learn. Yesterday’s jobs are different from today’s jobs, and tomorrow’s jobs will be different from today’s. Those able to succeed will have a strong foundation of analytical, communication, problems solving, and social skills. The ability to gather and synthesize information to make persuasive arguments using evidence, and to build strong relationships across cultural and perspective differences, as well as overcome organizational and geographical barriers will determine success in the labor market.
So why aren’t we all seeking liberal arts education? Part of the problem is that we have been too slow to connect the demands of a globalized and technologically driven economy with the classic education that one receives at a strong liberal arts institution. Thought leadership in educational technology (with some exceptions) has not traditionally come out of the liberal arts world. In 2016, we are pushing for a liberal arts orientation to educational technology.
Learning Is a Journey and a Relationship
Edtech is all about scale, efficiency and productivity. Unfortunately, our edtech profession has done far too little to build strong relationships with educators. We have too easily adopted the language and affectations of the tech culture and usually done too little to listen to the needs and goals of the educators and learners that we should be serving. We’ve been changing that over the last two years, but in 2016, it should be clear that edtech should be about learning and the relationships we build across the technology.
Our institutions operate and educate under conditions of scarcity. Not every class can be a seminar; not every student can work and live full-time on our campuses. The promise and our delivery of learning technologies, included blended learning and online learning, is to try to make learning feel like or support a small seminar atmosphere. We need to do everything we can so that faculty in larger and distant classes can build individual relationships with their students. We need to find ways to best use class time for interaction, collaboration, and coaching – while spending less time on content delivery.
Increased Competition Demands Greater Investment and Experimentation in Learning
The most important higher ed story is the one that centers on how learning is improving across our postsecondary system. The education that my future kids will experience should be, and I am hopeful, will be far superior to the one that I received. A fixation on costs and student debt, however real, may be blinding us to the parallel story of improvements in learning.
Why has learning improved so much across a wide-range of colleges and universities? Two big trends have combined to push the quality of student learning. The first is competition. If you spend time visiting campuses with an 11th or 12th grader on college tours, as I did for a couple months last fall, you will hear a great deal about the quality of teaching and learning. Schools are proud of the investments that they have made in recruiting high quality educators, in the improvements in their classrooms, and in the expansion of learning support services. In a competitive market for qualified students, learning is emerging as an important differentiator.
The second trend that is driving improvements in residential learning is the expansion of online learning. Traditional online programs brought with it new methods, thinking, and skills to our residential campuses. Prior to the rise of online learning, we had few instructional designers and not much talk about Bloom’s Taxonomy on our campuses. The methods necessary to create a quality online program work just as well for quality residential programs. Backwards course design, an identification of learning objectives, and a focus on active learning techniques are as essential for a blended residential class as they are for a fully online program. Applying research on how people learn best is of equal value in residential as it is in online courses. Open online education (MOOCs) have accelerated the push to invest in residential teaching and learning, as free online classes have raised the bar for expensive residential offerings.
The improvements in learning are great for students, but they pose real challenges for institutions. We must find ways to increase research, development, and investments in teaching and learning. As learning becomes better understood as an opportunity for institutional differentiation, the pressure to improve learning will only increase. Improvements in learning almost always add costs, as learning is an activity that is very difficult to scale. We will need to find opportunities to redirect resources towards investments in learning. Improving student learning is what has is guiding us and our edtech work in 2016.
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