Gearing Up for Learning Beyond K--12. Bryan Johnson Alexander

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       Introduction

      Skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.

      —Wayne Gretsky

      Today is Wednesday, which means Lucy has two classes, history and biology. She gathers up her things—phone, snack, umbrella against the likelihood of rain—and drives to campus.

      Today, Modern European History isn’t very crowded, much like the rest of Lucy’s college courses, with eleven students scattered across a room built for thirty. She remembers high school classes as being more crowded, and picks out a seat. Lucy quickly reviews part of this week’s videos concerning the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) on her phone until the professor arrives.

      This is the third class and second campus of the day for Arthur to teach. He cobbles together a living by adjuncting part-time at as many colleges and universities as he can, as do most of his colleagues and friends. Entering the classroom, Arthur takes a moment to organize his thoughts, recalling which course this is, and where in the semester they are at this point, plus the name of one student who left an especially thoughtful comment on his lectures. He’s used to this kind of mental orientation practice, as he conducts it every time he shifts campus and class. It’s part of being a modern academic nomad, the typical 21st century professor.

      Class begins with discussion, as Lucy’s peers pick up arguments they made last week and online across multiple online venues, including messaging, discussion, and blogging services. Students and adjunct explore the events of 1815, all using various devices to reference the online discussion and resources: phones, phablets, laptops, crinkly forearm displays (flexible screens attached to their sleeves, light-based keyboards projected onto desks or arms). They identify resources that confirm their insights, or challenge their classmates.’ Students record or write their developing reflections, making them available for classmates to ponder and Arthur to assess. Most also throw digital content onto wall displays, using the classroom network to transfer documents from their own devices to the wall-mounted, floor-to-ceiling LCD screens. For her part, Lucy is a bit quiet, still thinking about the 1790s, as she’s been playing a French Revolution massively multiplayer online game for months. The Revolution fascinates her with its powerful ideas transforming the lives of leaders and everyday French people alike. Lucy plays a lawyer from Lyons, fighting hard to preserve her city from the Terror. Several of her in-game colleagues, and one adversary, have become good out-of-game friends. Lucy’s immersion in this engaging milieu has led her to a conundrum. She’s still trying to figure out how Napoleon emerged on top of the revolutionary scrum, when other leaders, like Danton, had at least as much potential to lead the French nation. Back in her class, Lucy likes combining screenshots and video clips of To the Bastille! with period music and her own reflections, sharing them with classmates, thousands of fellow players, and simply interested folks. Maybe what she decides about Bonaparte’s rapid rise to power can help her—and her classmates—understand the post-Waterloo political settlement.

      After Modern European History, Lucy heads off campus to the city arboretum, where her Plants and People class takes place. There are no other students physically present, nor an instructor. Lucy has not met any of them in person. Instead, classwork consists of Lucy examining plants and their immediate environment, using her phone to ask questions and research. The previous week’s homework (data sets, audio lectures, readings) prepared her for this arboretum class. At times, Lucy hovers her phone over a certain plant so that an app can overlay information based on Lucy’s location and what the camera displays. She doesn’t pay attention to other arboretum visitors, as she is focused on her work.

      Biology finishes during late afternoon, and Lucy chats with her younger brother as she drives home in the gathering dusk. Jonathan has never seen the appeal of a physical campus, preferring the openness and flexibility of wholly online learning. Lucy thinks it’s because he’s living on his own for the first time and cherishes that independence, not wanting to be constrained by someone else’s space. He disliked that about high school and resents it at work. For his part, Jonathan thinks his older sister is just showing her age, wallowing in nostalgia for the times of crowded campuses and offline school spirit.

      Before hanging up, Lucy and Jonathan each renew their vow to finish school before the other, grinning, because they know full well they’ll never really stop learning in this world.

      Never has there been a better time for learning. Yet, there has never been a stranger time to be teaching.

      More people than ever before have access to more information. Indeed, the sheer amount of available content has driven us to invent new terminology (yottabytes!) and new professions (data curation specialist) just to cope with the bounty. Anyone who wants to learn about a topic may face vast and growing informational riches. Learners can also connect with an ever-growing number of teachers and fellow students.

      Such teachers are not necessarily so fortunate. On the positive side, they too can partake of this grand banquet of learning, which allows them to more easily stay current in their fields while branching out to new ones. However, instructors face new challenges in many areas. In some countries, the traditional school-age population (roughly five to twenty-two) is dwindling, driving colleges and universities to increasing competition for fewer pupils (Taylor, 2014). New technologies present all kinds of problems for teachers, from added workload to greater complexity (and potential embarrassment) in the classroom to the possibility of online competition. In the United States, demographics, economics, and policy pressure combine to make the teaching life more difficult all too often.

      Taken together, these factors mean that higher education is changing. Colleges, universities, academies, and other postsecondary education institutions are transforming into different places from the ones we once expected. They are becoming stranger institutions than the ones teachers, scholars, administrators, and legislators experienced, planned for, or hoped to enter. Visions of higher education drawn from popular culture, adults’ memories, nostalgia, or pundits are increasingly likely to be out of date, politically biased, culturally partial, simply not very useful any longer, or a combination of these.

      The leap from high school to college has changed and will mutate into still more unfamiliar shapes over the next decade. High school students and their parents have more to research about college options as they examine new campus features and programs, such as learning commons, 3-D printing support and makerspaces, and mobile device policies. These students and their families will have new options for study after high school, too, including a variety of online options. Parents’ own high school experiences are gradually relegated to history, while their work and personal lives provide clues to the modern college: always-on Internet access, connections through social media, a rising amount of part-time work, collaboration with distant, unmet people. Some may feel as though the transition from secondary to postsecondary education resembles science fiction, as in Vernor Vinge’s classic 2006 novel about future high school, Rainbows End.

Revising Our Understanding of Higher Education

      To be able to think seriously about higher education, we need to revise our understanding of that educational sector. We can’t do otherwise if we want to realistically plan for jobs, for further education, local economies, or the continued growth of human knowledge. To paraphrase Wayne Gretzky’s advice in the epigraph, we must strategize based on where higher education is likely to be going, not where it once was.