Canadian HR Reporter

CANADIAN HR REPORTER MARCH 2018 20 FEATURES PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT Education 2.0: The destructive re-construction of higher learning By Mihnea Moldoveanu A n unprecedented — and massively overdue — wave of innovation in the higher education industry is about to be unleashed. It will bring unprecedented disruption to a field whose prac- tices and routines have remained unchanged for more than 1,000 years. The technology, know- how and rationale for a learner- centric platform for higher learn- ing are here and we need to make this happen. is is not a typo: Early Renais- sance paintings depicting class- rooms and historical accounts of learning practices indicate that the basic choreography of con- tent, context, learner-teacher in- teractions, and structured drilling and quizzing as a pre-requisite to certification have not changed. The lecture-problems-reci- tation-exam format — canon- ized by repeated practice in early modern Europe and in North America — formed the basis on which learners are sorted, filtered, measured, incentivized, evaluated and taught. Remarkably, these practices have persisted in spite of a cen- tury's worth of empirical evi- dence — in cognitive and applied psychology, educational practice, and artificial intelligence (AI) — that there are faster, better, cheaper ways of helping learners acquire net new skills than those that populate current college and university classrooms and labs. Spaced learning, variable- del ay reinforcement-b a s e d learning, socialized learning, hyper-resolution feedback, fast/ frequent/personalized/adaptive feedback-based learning, social- ized learning and contextualized learning present modern-day educators with building blocks for the redesign of the learning experiences in ways that increase the efficacy and efficiency of both skill acquisition and skill transfer — meaning the application of a skill outside of the context in which it is acquired. But innovation in the billion- dollar higher education field has been slow, sporadic, spotty and segregated into fields, subfields, departments and "areas." e behavioural blueprints of learning experiences — courses, classes, recitations, tutorials, quizzes, problem sets, essays, exams — have yet to change in ways that even closely resemble the restructuration of everyday experiences in the music, retail, publishing, travel, communica- tions or financial industries. The explanations usually of- fered for this painful factoid draw on the macro- and micro-incen- tives of research-active academics and departments that use teach- ing-driven revenue to subsidize research activities whose out- comes are the ones that "count," and the institutional forces of research-centric universities that align in the direction of minimiz- ing the logistical unpredictability that innovation waves trigger. ey point to the sociology and social, cognitive and developmen- tal psychology of homo academic- us — a creature better suited and predisposed to speaking about a phenomenon (say, innovation in a different field) than to practising it, to analysis of innovative op- tions rather than the prerequisite action, and to representing rather than intervening. Or, they take the "tough-mind- edly realist" position that higher education is a filtering and evalu- ation process of students for em- ployers, wherein learning and de- velopment are desirable but rare and accidental byproducts. Of course, this is precisely the sort of (quasi)-causal explana- tion whose proliferation causally contributes to the perpetuation of the status quo: In the face of such massive synergistic forces, how could it not be that the practice of teaching and learning lags behind insights and empirical findings by a good century? But, like most explanations, it is incomplete in factual base and erroneous in inference. The last 10 years have seen massive innovation in the field. MIT's 20-year-old Open Course- Ware initiative and Stanford's 30-year-old commitment to con- tinuous, remote learning have morphed and proliferated into a massive, open-learning "exoskel- eton" which, under the guises of EDX, Coursera and Udacity, bring state-of-the-art content to millions of users, while making it possible for dedicated instructors to learn how to teach from one another. Curricular innovation in pro- fessional programs — notably business and medicine — has been on the rise since the early 2000s, responding to new de- mands for quintessentially hu- man and executive skills from ev- er-more-savvy recruiters, whose own in-house training programs have also grown in sophistica- tion and size (witness a tenfold increase, from 200 to 3,000, of "corporate universities" between 2004 and 2015.) Responding to the need for contextualized learning that combines conceptualization and technical skills with the practi- cal know-how provided by con- text, leading-edge engineering programs — such as the Olin College of Engineering — have redesigned their learning ve- hicles "from scratch," and from first principles, to maximize on the still-elusive objective of skill transfer from classroom to "life" — and the life-world of organiza- tions, in particular. Alongside positive evidence for curricular and institutional inno- > pg. 21

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