As we get closer to the release of the new e-Literate TV series on personalized learning, Phil and I will be posting previews highlighting some of the more interesting segments from the series. Both our preview posts and the series itself start with Middlebury College. When we first talked about the series with its sponsors, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, they agreed to give us the editorial independence to report what we find, whether it is good, bad, or indifferent. And as part of our effort to establish a more objective frame, we started the series by going not to a school that was a Gates Foundation grantee but to the kind of place that Americans probably think of first when they think of a high-quality personalized education outside the context of technology marketing. We decided to go to an elite New England liberal arts college. We wanted to use that ideal as the context for talking about personalizing learning through technology. At the same time, we were curious to find out how technology is changing these schools and their notion of what a personal education is.
We picked Middlebury because it fit the profile and because we had a good connection through our colleagues at IN THE TELLING.1 We really weren’t sure what we would find once we arrived on campus with the cameras. Some of what we found there was not surprising. In a school with a student/teacher ratio of 8.6 to 1, we found strong student/teacher relationships and empowered, creative students. Understandably, we heard concerns that introducing technology into this environment would depersonalize education. But we also heard great dialogues between students and teachers about what “personalized” really means to students who have grown up with the internet. And, somewhat unexpectedly, we saw some signs that the future of educational technology at places like Middlebury College may not be as different from what we’re seeing at public colleges and universities as you might think, as you’ll see in the interview excerpt below.
Jeff Howarth is an Assistant Professor of Geography at Middlebury. He teaches a very popular survey-level course in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). But it’s really primarily a course about thinking about spaces. As Jeff pointed out to me, we typically provide little to no formal education on spacial reasoning in primary and secondary schooling. So the students walking into his class have a wide range of skills, based primarily on their natural ability to pick them up on their own. This broad heterogeneity is not so different from the wide spread of skills that we saw in the developmental math program at Essex County College in Newark, NJ. Furthermore, the difference between a novice and an expert within a knowledge domain is not just about how many competencies they have racked up. It’s also about how they acquire those competencies. Jeff did his own study of how students learn in his class which confirmed broader educational research showing that novices in a domain tend to start with specific problems and generalize outward, while experts (like professors, but also like more advanced students) tend to start with general principles and apply them to the specific problem at hand. As Jeff pointed out to me, the very structure of the class schedule conspires against serving novice learners in the way that works best for them. Typically, students go to a lecture in which they are given general principles and then are sent to a lab to apply those principles. That order works for students who have enough domain experience to frame specific situations in terms of the general principles but not for the novices who are just beginning to learn what those general principles might even look like.
When Jeff thought about how to serve the needs of his students, the solution he came up with—partly still a proposal at this point—bears a striking resemblance to the basic design of commercial “personalized learning” courseware. I emphasize that he arrived at this conclusion through his own thought process rather than by imitating commercial offerings. Here’s an excerpt in which he describes deciding to flip his classroom before he had ever even heard of the term:
In the full ten-minute episode, we hear Jeff talk about his ideas for personalized courseware (although he never uses that term). And in the thirty-minute series, we have a great dialogue between students and faculty as well as some important context setting from the college leadership. The end result is that the Middlebury case study shows us that personalized learning software tools do not just have to be inferior substitutes for the real thing that are only for “other people’s children” while simultaneously reminding us of what a real personal education looks like and what we must be careful not to lose as we bring more technology into the classroom.
- Full disclosure: Since filming the case study, Middlebury has become a client of MindWires Consulting, the company that Phil and I run together. [↩]