e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Gallup

  • Recommended Reading: What Do Faculty Really Think of Online Learning?

    …As it turns out, it depends.

    Inside Higher Ed recently published its fifth annual  Survey of Faculty Attitudes Toward Technology, conducted in collaboration with researchers from Gallup. These reports cover a range of attitudinal questions on ed tech, online education, and new models of delivering course content. One of the key findings of this year’s report, as described in a Gallup blog,  is that there is still a high level of disagreement among faculty of the relative merits of online courses versus traditional face to face courses, but there are some important nuances to the results. The survey finds that a majority of faculty (55%) “disagree or strongly disagree” with the idea that online courses can deliver the same student outcomes that in-person courses produce. Among faculty who have actually taught online, however, there is a much more positive view of the ability for online education to match in-person courses. (more…)

  • Student-Centered Educational Software

    Last year I wrote a long rant about how the Gallup-Purdue survey studying the impact of higher education on wellbeing shows that our well-intentioned desire to ensure schools are providing a “quality education” is causing us to measure the wrong things in ways that deform the whole system. Well, the latest Gallup-Purdue survey results are out. Here are a couple of summary findings that Gallup has highlighted:

    Graduates who were “emotionally supported” — who strongly agreed they received support from professors who cared about them as a person and made them excited about learning, and from a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams — were twice as likely to be engaged in their work and almost twice as likely to be thriving in their well-being later in life.

    What’s more, graduates who had “experiential learning” — who strongly agreed they worked on long-term projects that took a semester or longer to complete; who had a job or internship where they applied what they were learning in the classroom; and who were extremely active in extracurricular activities — also doubled their odds of being engaged in their work later in life.

    These are impressive outcomes. Yet a quarter of all graduates strongly disagreed that they had any of these crucial experiences while they were at college. When it comes to providing students with the key experiences that will lead to success later in life, the U.S. higher education report card is poor.

    (more…)

  • Harmonizing Learning and Education

    I’m the Whether Man, not the Weather Man, for after all it’s more important to know whether there will be weather than what the weather will be.

    – The Phantom Tollbooth

    Dave Cormier has written a couple of great posts on our failure to take learner motivation seriously and the difference between improving learning and improving education. In the latter post—a response to Stephen Downes’ comment on the former post—Dave writes about the tension between improving an individual’s learning and improving our system of education, essentially positing that the reason why we as a society often fail to take learner engagement sufficiently seriously is because we become preoccupied with making the educational system accountable, a goal that we would be irresponsible not to take on but that we are also essentially doomed to fail at. (I may be putting words in his mouth on that last bit.) Dave writes,

    There’s definitely something wrong if people are leaving their first degree and are not engaged in learning. We certainly need to address it. We totally want to be in the business of helping people do what they want to do. Try it. No really. Just try it. Sit down with a child and help them do what they want to do. And i don’t mean “hey this child has shown up with a random project they are totally passionate about and are asking me a question” I mean “stop them at a random time, say 8:25am, and just start helping them.” You will get blank stares. You’ll get resistance. You’ll get students who will say anything you want if it means you will go away/give them a grade. You will not enjoy this process. They will also not enjoy it.

    There is something wrong. The problem is that we have built an education system with checks and balances, trying to make it accountable and progressive (in some cases), but we are building it without knowing why. We have not built an education system that encourages people to be engaged. The system is not designed to do it. It’s designed to get people to a ‘standard of knowing.’ Knowing a thing, in the sense of being able to repeat it back or demonstrate it, has no direct relationship to ‘engagement’. There are certainly some teachers that create spaces where engagement occurs, but they are swimming upstream, constantly battling the dreaded assessment and the need to cover the curriculum. The need to guarantee knowing.

    He suggests that we need to redesign our education system around the goal of getting students to start caring and keep caring about learning. And his argument is interesting:

    Give me a kid who’s forgotten 95% of the content they were measured in during K-12 and I will match that with almost every adult i know. Give me a kid who cares about learning… well… then i can help them do just about anything.

    This is partly a workplace argument. It’s an economic value argument. It’s a public good argument. If Dave is right, then people who care about learning are going to be better at just about any job you throw at them than people who don’t. This is a critical argument in favor of public funding of a liberal arts education, personalized in the old-fashioned sense of having-to-do-with-individual-persons, that much of academia has ceded for no good reason I can think of. The sticky wicket, though, is accountability which, as Dave points out, is the main reason we have a schism between learning and education in the first place. Too bad we can’t demonstrate, statistically, that people who are passionate about learning are better workers. It’s a shame that we don’t have good data linking being excited about learning, being a high-performer in your job, and being a happy, fulfilled and economically well-off person. If we had that, we could largely resolve the tension between improving learning and improving education. We could give a compelling argument that it is in the taxpayers’ interest to build an education system whose purpose, as Dave suggests, is to increase the chances that students will start to care and continue to care about learning. It’s a tragedy that we don’t have proof of that link.

    Oh, wait.

    (more…)