Education – Communication – Transformation
Education is one of the last cultural bastions of one-size-fits-all in delivery and assessment as we seek out students who are “average”, just as we seek those “above average” and “below average.” Our entire infrastructure is based on grading students up and down, based on how they “compare” to other students.
I’ve blogged before about what makes a person, team, or organization innovative. The experts seem to agree that a significant, if not the top condition or attribute of an innovative experience is associative thinking. It is largely the reason I gave people the book, “Steal Like An Artist” for birthdays (etc) while I was the Chief Innovation Officer at Saint Leo. It helped remind people to carry a mindset of paying attention to solutions from other places. The key is looking around to see how something is being done effectively in another context and bringing it to your context – that is innovation. To that end, let’s have an associative thinking session. Are you up for it? I was reading an editorial recently in IHE entitled, “What’s Wrong With English Department Websites?” The writer was lamenting a litany of weaknesses presented by most College / University English Department websites. That said, the article could have just as easily appear in Wired, INC., or as a tutorial for WordPress. The writer, James Van Wyck (PhD) expresses the same problems found on most bad websites: a lack of relevance to the actual audience, poor storytelling, a lack of meaningful information, and more. (Note – the article was content focused and not SEO focused.) The only real difference between the arguments found in this article and an Inbound Marketing firm’s blog is the percentages of “badness” being addressed. It’s probably not far reaching to say that 85% of all higher education department websites are bad…really, really bad. In fact, you could likely argue the same thing for most college or university websites in general. They do not seem to consider their audience effectively, they do not tell the right stories, they are hard to navigate, and it is often hard to get the information you are after. But as I read the article, chuckling and shaking my head at the same time, another conversation came to mind. I’ve blogged before that my dad works in the church world. He is an extremely good communicator (aka preacher), fantastic with organizational consulting, a sharp auditor, and he helps churches grow by leaps and bounds. In other words, what I try to do for higher education, my dad has been doing for evangelicals twice as long. My dad invited me to a webinar he was putting on for a group of head pastors and senior leaders a few weeks back. The speaker was an author of a book that would not likely come across my radar: “Not Your Parents’ Offering Plate (Dr. J. Clif Christopher , 2008 ).” Interestingly, the talk was as much about generational proclivities, values, and charities, as it was about church giving. But this researcher and author, who had some fascinating statistical analytics to share, made some extremely poignant and salient arguments for the religious sector which could easily be transferred to higher education. (Remember, this is an associative thinking exercise.) So, Dr. Christopher discussed the very real dilemma many churches face… Read More
A crucial “systems thinking” component of a learning ecosystem is this: Integration trumps functionality. In other words, if 85% of your desired functionality can be achieved with a fully integrated tool, or 97% of your desired functionality can be achieved with no connection to other parts of the ecosystem, use the former and avoid the latter. (Of note, this is why the RFI / RFP process can be so detrimental to an organization’s longitudinal well-being from a systems perspective.)
Most companies never ask for a transcript, and for the few who do, it is only for those seeking their first job out of college. (Working inside education may be an exception.) After that, grades mean almost nothing. What companies instead seek are the things that grades, which become so easily gamed by both students and teachers, can diminish. After all, if the grade is all that matters, then trying new things and failing (actually promoting learning) will be negated. Teaching to a test, jamming information into short-term memory only to be lost a few weeks later will be the norm. Critical thinking will be lost. Problem solving based on context will be supplanted with algorithm practice absent of context.
A course based mostly on lecture has negative consequences. A campus where student affairs and academic affairs don’t legitimately work together has negative consequences. Schools that resist online learning have unseen negative consequences for students, just as schools who bound into eLearning without strategic considerations for quality and scale also see negative consequences. Faculty Development being left solely to the discretion of the faculty can have negative consequences. Athletics integration on campus can have negative consequences. Hiding school email addresses from the public can have negative consequences. Creating a school website for marketing purposes and ignoring current students, faculty, and staff can have negative consequences. Recruiting volunteer faculty as adjuncts can have negative consequences. And on and on and on…