Higher Ed GPS: How Will We Get Where We Are Going?

A year ago or so, I agreed to be interviewed by a group of graduate students in a distance education leadership course.   They submitted a set of questions and then followed up with a teleconference.   The recent situation at Western Governor’s University concerning how distance education should be evaluated and regulated reminded me of some of this discussion.   Here are some of my thoughts at the time.   I think I would say the same things today. Q:   What do you believe are the current challenges facing distance education and which of these challenges do you believe needs to be addressed first? A: The major challenge for distance education is that it must lead higher education (and thus all of education) into the 21 st century.    Distance education institutions must make education as accessible and user-friendly as the rest of our virtual (online) experience, such things as banking and shopping, for instance. However, there are signi...

So where do we look to deal with the conundrum that is the liberal arts?   Clearly, the liberal arts lie at the heart of what makes education valuable.   But as higher education has moved from the realm of public good to one of a commodity, this value has been put at odds with the expediency of meeting expectations of the job market. This reality is distasteful to much of higher education, and the higher ed community has largely been in denial that there is an issue to be addressed. Once again, the monolithic nature of our education system has become an obstacle to serving our student population. In a September 2016 article in Inside Higher Ed, Peter Stokes and Chris Slatter provide a thoughtful discussion concerning the current state of the liberal arts in American higher education.   They begin (actually they end with this) from the position that the liberal arts matter, for all the reasons that I have discussed in previous posts:   they ground students in cri...

During the Obama administration, a major component of higher the proposed education budget called for free tuition for two years at community college for students who kept up a grade-point average of 2.5 or better, and who graduated within three years.   Although the proposal was met with mixed reviews, the concept of helping students succeed by providing an academic pathway is undeniably a solid one. Subsequently, similar proposals were discussed during the 2016 presidential campaign and now have been brought forth by various individual states.   Qualifications to participate in such programs vary, but generally involve income levels and performance expectations. However, as is often the case, the devil is in the details. In fact, an idea that sounds so simple and straightforward as two free years of college is in fact incredibly complex. The reason for the complexity lies in the multitude of pieces that need to be put into place before any such proposal can be realized...

We now return to the Liberal Arts and General Education. So the challenge for General Education is to dismantle a monolithic legacy system and restructure the pieces. The new structure must take into account that today’s students do not come to higher education as blank slates.   Students now, as we know, are older, and they intuitively understand many general theoretical constructs by virtue of their experience in the real world.   They have already had to deal with ethical issues, and have had to think critically in making life decisions that have significant impact on themselves and others.   Accordingly, General Education must not assume that coursework should flow from theory to practice, or that students need to be lectured to about theory and how to apply it.   Quite to the contrary, coursework must be able to demonstrate how students’ experience is part of a larger framework, and provide grounding that affirms their experience and enriches it. Studen...