Five Favourite Finds for the Week of 01 22 12

Free college courses . . .

The Saylor Foundation offers a set of free and open college level courses in General Education, Biology, Business Administration and other subjects. At a time when people are beginning to think a bit more deeply about the concept of accreditation, I find the following quote from their web site interesting:  Because we are not accredited, you will not earn a college degree or diploma; however, our team of experienced college professors has designed each course so you will be able to achieve the same learning objectives as students enrolled in traditional colleges.

This is different . . .

Publicly sponsored branding and positioning assistance for universities. Distinct is a non-profit initiative funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). The aim is to help England’s colleges develop “distinctive and compelling institutional identity”.

Lawrence Summers on College Education  . . .

An interesting summary of the challenges facing US colleges. What You (Really) Need to Know by former Harvard University President, Lawrence Summers.

Another alliance . . .

Another set of colleges has formed an alliance to improve the purchasing power to drive down the costs of textbooks: The End of the Textbook as we Know it and Five Universities to Test Bulk-Purchasing of E-Textbooks in Bid to Rein In Costs

One of the many reasons I worry about my children’s future . . .

Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher

A great primer  on the education of education publishing . . .

From Wired Magazine: Why Education Publishing is Big Business by Tim Carmody

New Contexts for Educational Content

As “they” say, context is everything.

We attribute value and meaning to people, objects and other things on the basis of the circumstances in which we experience them. Art is the classic example. If we take a work of art out from behind the red ropes, away from the quiet guards, and out of the art gallery, the meaning and value of the art typically changes a great deal. In fact it may no longer be interpreted as art at all by some people – particularly in the case of some modern art. (Figure A)

Figure A

Context is crucial in commercial markets, too. Vendors go to great lengths to control the context in which their products and services are positioned. Television advertisers, for example, avoid placing ads in the middle of programs that address unsettling topics; that evoke emotions and sensibilities that are not supportive of the product being promoted. “The Day After” was a fictional “made for TV movie” about the aftermath of a nuclear attack on US soil (Figure B).

Figure B

The film’s producers found it so difficult to attract advertisers that they choose to run all ads prior to the point in the film when the nuclear attack occurs.  Apparently, convincing people that having fresher breath will make them one of the “beautiful people” is more difficult after witnessing death and destruction.

What, if anything, does this have to do with higher education? Until now, not much. Historically, higher education has been able to control the context in which student’s experience the institution and what it has to offer. Compared to other types of organizations, colleges and universities are like islands, “all-in-one” organizations, in which the student – if they chose – could spend their entire educational career without ever leaving the campus.

But the walls around higher education are becoming less substantial, primarily because of student behaviour. Whether creating work groups on Facebook, or adding their opinion to RateMyProfessor, students are taking elements of their experience outside of their schools to the broader public, piece by piece.

Institutions are cautiously joining in the dismantling of the walls by, for example, creating institutional Facebook pages. But the most interesting effort to reach beyond the walls is the placement of the institution’s instructional materials (course notes, lectures) on public platforms, like  Connexions and Merlot and Academic Earth.

The fact that these materials are publicly available is significant, of course. Traditionally, these instructional materials were carefully hidden behind secure university course management systems, available only to students registered in the course.

But it’s also significant that the materials are now subject to evaluation and comparison with materials from other institutions. This exposes the institution to an entirely new type of evaluation with its own criteria.

Figure C

The Net is doing to higher ed what it did for so many other sectors – exposing competitors to brutal side-by-side comparisons; creating a far more informed buyer. As these shared platforms for educational content become more user-friendly visitors may soon be able to compare lectures like they compare fridges.

What the users experience is not always pretty. Philip Greenspun did a minute by minute evaluation of a well known finance professor’s lecture performance on Academic Earth, suggesting that the professor’s lecture was wasteful, self-indulgent and incoherent (Figure C). On the other hand, some of the instructional materials on the sites are celebrated for their quality. (Platforms like Academic Earth highlight the higher rated materials.)

This move to greater transparency is a positive development. But I’m not sure that the majority of academic managers are yet fully conscious of the implications. Indeed, the decision to put educational content online is, at most institutions, left to the individual academic. As these platforms become more popular and the ability to compare educational content/institutions becomes that much easier, we may see leaders paying closer attention to what is published publicly.

Author: Keith Hampson

Related articles

• The Search for Sustainable OER (highereducationmanagement.wordpress.com)
• M.I.T. Game-Changer: Free Online Education For All (hollymccracken.wordpress.com)

Five Favourite Finds for the Week of 01 15 12

New (Disrupted) Faculty Roles « Kerb Musings in Academia and Teamsports
Kevin Bell’s notes on the role of faculty in technology-mediated higher education.

Not Necessarily a Smooth Ride – WorldWise – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Nigel Thrift questions the assumption that growth of international student enrolment will continued unfettered. 

Understanding the Economics of Online Learning : Education Next
Bill Tucker’s response to Fordham University’s report on the cost of online learning. Although the report focusses on K12, the findings are useful for higher ed, as well. 

The ‘Personalization’ of Higher Education
From the Center for American Progress: “Today, we treat higher education as a “black-box” experience managed by the intuition of faculty and administrators. Consequently, students, families, and taxpayers pay a lot of money for an offering we know very little about.” 

Twelve Education Activists for 2012
An inspiring list of people that, according to Time magazine, are driving change in education 

Author: Keith Hampson

Credentials, Good Will Hunting & MITx

It’s no secret that the authority to bestow credentials is a core source of value for higher education institutions; it’s also a key means by which the institution protects itself from unwanted competition from non-sanctioned education providers.

The importance of credentials to traditional higher education is what makes the recent announcement regarding MITx particularly interesting.

MIT has received a great deal of positive attention in response to the MITx announcement – a “game changer“, argued Forbes. It may well turn out to be just that, but I think it’s useful to see this initiative as part of a broader trend that began in earnest six or seven years ago: the creation and (slow) legitimization of new types of learning providers, ways of learning, and credentials.

As soon as access to the Net became commonplace, innovators saw the potential to offer learners educational opportunities outside of established educational institutions. (You might recall oft-repeated quote from John Chambers, CEO of Cisco: “the next killer app is education over the internet” (New York Times, Nov 17, 1999).

These innovations took a number of forms, but for those of us in higher education, possibly the most interesting of the bunch were those that were presented as direct challenges to higher education. Here are a few of the more interesting examples:

• “UnCollege” was started by college dropout, Dale Stephens, who declared there are better ways to learn than what is being offered by US colleges and universities.
• The “Personal MBA” argued that spending 80k (plus lost wages) on an MBA was for suckers, and set up a community to work collectively to learn outside of institutions.
• Peter Thiel offered 100,000 per year to 20 students that would drop out of college to launch a business.
• And possibly most significant was the launch of “badges” that allows people to demonstrate mastery of subjects in a variety of ways.

These initiatives have a fascinating anti-institutional quality. They tap into our attraction to the “outsider”; those resourceful pioneers who have no need for help from established institutions. I’m reminded of the scene in the film “Goodwill Hunting” in which the lead character, Will Hunting, tells a pretentious Harvard grad student: “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library.”

The MITx initiative is different in one very important way: it involves a reconfiguration of credentials within an officially sanctioned and highly prestigious institution of higher education.

The impact of the MITx initiative on credentials? Hard to know for sure, but I suspect that the MIT initiative (as well as the more narrowly defined effort at Stanford U, AI course) will serve to spur on creation of new types of credentials from new types of education providers. Then again, the move by MIT may be a case of the “centre” incorporating elements of the “margins”. Conventional medicine, for example, fought hard to discredit alternative medical treatments, before eventually incorporating it into the mainstream. Maybe this is part of the dynamic in higher ed, as well.

In either case, an expansion of the types of credentials and education providers will create a more competitive, market-like environment for education. I anticipate that this scenario, to the degree it occurs, will be initially limited to continuing education divisions and other segments of higher education that focus on adult students who already have a college degree and are less concerned with the source of their credentials. We shall see.

Author: Keith Hampson

KnowU & MyEdu: Two Approaches to Social Media in Higher Ed

Higher education is working hard to find the best ways to integrate social media into its practices. We’ve approached it from a number of angles: marketing, community building, student support, and instruction. The players behind these efforts include software vendors looking to build the next edu social platform, colleges, individual educators, and on a less formal basis, the students themselves.

As of late 2011, there are very few scalable, institution-wide initiatives – but a great deal of isolated experimentation by innovators. The opportunities seem endless, but higher education management professionals are on the lookout for the right approach to make social media work for them today.

Not all areas of higher ed will be equally well-suited to the opportunities that social media presents. Of all of the possibilities, integrating social media and instruction may be the most difficult, for example – due to the conflicting properties of social media and higher ed. While social media is particularly well-suited to facilitating open-ended exchanges between people – with no clear or prescribed beginning and end – higher education has clear boundaries (e.g. course duration) and largely predetermined objectives (e.g. syllabi). Social media is user-generated and leaderless. Higher education is top-down and instructor-directed. Social media thrives when there are thousands, if not millions, of users. High volume provides online communities with enough activity and content to ensure that each user finds what and who they want with sufficient frequency. (Although Twitter and Linked In have over 100 million users, only a fraction of the users are of significance to any one user.) On the other hand, higher education instruction typically restricts participation to a single class (e.g. 100 students).

This is not to say that higher education won’t find ways to use social media for instructional purposes. Innovative educators are experimenting with new approaches and some of these strategies will stick, be shared, and ultimately picked up by other educators in time. But at this relatively early stage in its development, the low-hanging fruit of social media for higher education will likely be found in the areas of marketing, building communities and student support.

MyEdu

Two initiatives – MyEdu and KnowU from Harrison College – offer a glimpse of the possibilities.

MyEdu is a Texas-based company that has built a student-facing platform that combines a number of applications designed to help students manage their education careers. The platform includes course scheduling, textbook ordering, facebook-style interaction with other students, reviews of instructors and courses by other students. Soon to be added is information about graduate and professional schools, tools to manage transfer credits, and mobile applications.

Frank Lyman, SVP at MyEdu suggests that the core value of the platform is that it helps students make more informed decisions about their educational careers. In this respect, MyEdu is part of a larger drive to improve the volume and quality of information available to higher education’s stakeholders. Students, parents, government (e.g. Spellings Commission), and policy professionals (e.g. Education Sector) argue that we need better information about higher education in order to track student success, reward better schools, minimize student debt, and increase the speed with which students complete their programs.

Most of the information available to students within MyEdu is user-generated or “scraped” from public sites. Presumably, MyEdu will eventually need to gain access to college-based applications, such as student information systems, to further improve the currency and value of the information that the platform provides. But this will require the participation of the institutions, not all of which will want to make this kind of information available. MyEdu’s alliance with the University of Texas, announced in the Fall, will prove an interesting test case.

Harrison College and KnowU

Harrison College of Indiana takes a different approach. Their new social platform, KnowU, is designed by Harrison College specifically for Harrison students. This allows the institution to integrate as much of the student and institutional information into the platform as they wish. But, of course, by limiting the application to one institution, unlike MyEdu, they limit the potential benefits that can be found in capturing data across multiple institutions.

KnowU is an ambitious project. Though still in its early stage of development, the platform will ultimately serve a range of purposes – marketing, community-building, instructional support. Of particular concern to Harrison is their growing number of online students (73% increase in the past two years). Harrison wants to provide these students with all of the tools necessary to succeed. And it is rolling out the initiative on a university-wide basis, the way only proprietary colleges with strong management seem capable of doing. (Official launch: January 2012.)

It’s interesting to remember that the original value proposition of online education within proprietary colleges was to provide adult, working students with only those parts of the college experience that they needed (or for which they had time). Proprietary schools recognized that many students didn’t need residential life, sports facilities, and the like. Traditional colleges essentially over-served them (see Clayton Christensen).

To a significant degree, these “extras” of the traditional college experience were social in nature. But over the past five or so years social media has become a key means by which people execute their social lives. Consequently, these colleges can now revisit their value proposition; they can now offer a more social experience to online students. In effect, they are putting back the social part of the college experience that their original business model removed. It will be worth watching to see how this grand effort unfolds.

Author: Keith Hampson

London Business School: Tips for 2012

This is a thoughtful way for a business school to promote its relevance, quality and currency: have their academics offer tips and forecasts for the upcoming year in a high-production value video.

More information about the London Business School

In severe contrast to the above effort, I present to you – my dear friends – Hot, Hot, Hot by Appalachian State University. Enjoy.

The Search for Sustainable OER

OER or open educational resources is one of the good news stories of 2011. OER takes many forms, but what binds initiatives like The Khan Academy, MIT OCW (Open Course Ware) and Stanford’s AI course is that they are all freely available to learners and other educators. It’s this “free” characteristic that has caught the attention of the press. In the context of higher education news stories about rising costs, tuition and student debt, this must be our “man bites dog” news story.

Despite the importance of “free” to OER, there’s been little written about the economics of OER. How, specifically, can we make it sustainable? Even Taylor Walsh’s book on OER, Unlocking the Gates: How and Why Universities are Opening Up Access to their Courses, resisted challenging the logic of multimillion-dollar OER projects without revenue streams.

My interest in this aspect of the OER model was peaked last week while reading a report about The Open Education Initiative at UMass-Amherst. The initiative provides UMass instructors with stipends in exchange for producing instructional materials that are free to UMass students. (Print copies can be ordered for $13, which, I assume, covers printing costs).  According to the news story  “ . . . universities are finally getting serious about student complaints over the cost of course materials. UMass estimates that its $10,000 investment will save students $72,000 over the next school year. Provost James V. Staros says the savings “directly benefit [students'] very real and very tight budgets.”

The UMass instructors, then, are producing instructional materials that replace commercial textbooks. This initiative fits neatly into the broader narrative about textbook prices over the last few years.  According to one U.S. study, the price of textbooks rose 186% between 1986 and 2004.

Questioning the price of textbooks make perfect sense. In all sorts of industries, new business models – enabled by technology – are making the production and distribution of high quality information material possible at lower and lower prices. CD Baby did it for music. WordPress is doing it for bloggers. The new economics of reference materials has all but killed the encyclopedia business. And innovative business models are emerging that suggest that lower prices are indeed possible in the realm of textbooks, as well (See, for example, the very thoughtful approach taken by Flat World Knowledge).

The professionals behind the initiative at UMass-Amherst should be congratulated for their efforts. This is clearly an effort to make education more affordable. However, the initiative raises two important questions about the sustainability of OER that, to my knowledge, have yet to be adequately answered. And while I recognize that questioning OER is not an especially popular position to take, I need to pose these questions in order understand how we can make it work.

Equal value?

Can OER initiatives produce instructional materials of EQUAL value?

The investments made in the materials at UMass are far lower than is made in the investment of the commercial materials that the OER materials are designed to replace. Traditional textbooks cost anywhere from 150,00 to 1 million (USD) to produce. UMass is offering its Instructors 1000-dollar stipends. Even if the Instructors at UMass are only producing part of the required materials, the investment is a mere fraction of the total invested in the commercial model.

The costs of producing commercial textbooks goes toward designers, programmers, artists, copy editors, marketing, and to third-party content (e.g. illustrations). And of course, there’s the author.

Will these very low budget initiatives such as the one at UMass-Amherst be able to match the quality of what is produced under the commercial model? I’m not sure how they could.

Is it the case, then, that what textbook publishers have been creating for higher education is more than what the market actually requires? This may be true for certain kinds of instructional content, and it may be that a more varied set of content solutions emerges over time. However, the more common response from academia to commercial textbooks is not that they are too good, but that they are not good enough.

Is it the case, then, that commercial publishers are not as efficient as higher education institutions at producing instructional content; that publishers are increasing costs unnecessarily? It’s true that there are a few costs that institutions producing instructional materials won’t need to incur – marketing and profit, notably. But I think the more relevant issue in terms of cost efficiency is that higher education institutions are not publishers. They do not have the systems, incentives, processes, and skill sets and so forth of publishers. Simply put, it’s not what they do. Consequently, it’s unlikely that will be able to produce instructional material of equal value at costs lower than organizations that are designed specifically for this purpose.

Is it sustainable? Or, “where’s the money?”

The bulk of resources for OER initiatives appear to be coming from three sources: philanthropists, the colleges themselves and the efforts of faculty.

Faculty, for its part, is owed our appreciation for participating in these events. However, I’m not confident that we can expect faculty to do extra work for little to no pay on an on-going basis. And as the financial pressure on higher education continues to develop, more pressure will be placed on faculty to take on greater workloads.

If the college itself assumes financial responsibility for these ventures, the funds used to support the OER initiative will presumably be drawn, at least in part, from the bucket that is filled by tuition. Therefore, more tuition (or fees) will be needed to compensate for the cost of the OER initiative. (I’m also curious how individual institutions that are funded in part by taxpayers in jurisdiction will respond to requests to fund initiatives that help students in other tax jurisdictions. Let’s leave that for another time.)

If we rely on philanthropists (e.g. Gates Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation), we are subject to the ups and downs that characterize all university advancement initiatives. The institution’s ability to produce curriculum becomes dependent on the ability of the institution to solicit donors. In addition to placing academic work under the umbrella of “advancement”, we might also want to consider how this might affect schools that are less able to solicit donor funds. It’s true, as James Uhlenkamp points out, the differences in access to open educational resources are technically eliminated by the fact that the materials are “open”. However, in the short-term, the bulk of the use and benefit of OER will likely be derived by those that produced it. Yes, these materials are available to the broader public, but the content will be produced first and foremost in accordance with the needs of the institution that created it and it is not yet simple and easy to find and integrate OER content into courses. Until such time that the content can be easily customized to local needs and easily found and integrated in new contexts, the host institution will benefit most. And as there are considerable differences amongst institutions in terms of securing donor funds, there may be differences in benefits from OER, as well.

The US government has also flirted with the idea of directly funding the development of instructional material. In 2009, the Obama administration announced plans to provide 500 million dollars for the creation of freely available instructional materials aimed at the community college sector (later dropped in a funding cut). I’m curious as to how academics feel about having instructional content directly funded by a government.

OER is a very complicated issue. But it is one worth trying to solve. Lowering costs for students is fundamental to providing fair access to higher education for those who seek it. We need smart, sustainable business models for OER that don’t simply shift costs from one place to another, or reduce the overall quality of the materials we offer students. We need the highest quality instructional material at the lowest possible price.

Let me finish by sharing the response of one faculty member to an article in the Chronicle about an open textbook initiative. Although the views expressed below are not particularly subtle, they do provide a glimpse into how some segments of higher education have responded to the logic of OER thus far:

“I don’t understand … tell me again how the people who work on open source materials are feeding themselves and their families? Tell me how they take the money they’ve earned through hard work and reinvested it in coffee, automobiles, riding the bus, buying medical care, consuming food, etc … People who support open source need to provide all of their services for free too, so the people earning nothing making free materials can meet their own needs. And then we can all go to heaven and have lollipops and pet goats. Utopia. Yay. Economic children of the world…please grow the hell up.” (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Author: Keith Hampson

There’s a light at the End of the Tunnel #2 (Peter Smith)

In early November, I attended a meeting in Orlando called Learning2011. I learned of the meeting from my friend and colleague Cathy Casserly, CEO of the Creative Commons who was scheduled to present there. And so, as a last minute schedule-adjustment, I attended the meeting.

What I encountered there, and what Cathy had predicted, was an ethic that differed significantly from those at meetings I am more used to attending.

There are several groups addressing the need for change and the dynamics driving them today in the higher education policy and professional development arena. Educause,SloanC, New Media Consortium (NMC), the Presidents’ Forum, the WICHECenter for Educational Technology (WCET), and the Global OpenCourseWare Consortium come immediately to mind. And there are many others. These are good and valuable organizations. And their meetings contribute to the emerging body of knowledge. They are, however, tethered to the higher education hitching post. By this I mean that, almost universally, they look at learning through the lens of established or re-interpreted higher education. How is it different, how does it extend or change the rationale and/or the logic of the enterprise we know as higher education? In fact, a lot of my writing and thinking has been attached to the same hitching post.

At Learning2011 the frame was different. First, although there were a few of us educators there, the meeting was predominantly IT and corporate-populated with the CLOs of companies large and small composing the majority of the more than 2000 attendees. There was an air of independence about the conversations; a sense that “if higher education won’t do it for us, we’ll do it for ourselves”, if you will. People talked openly and fervently about the higher order intellectual, behavioral, and skill characteristics they needed and were not getting from the workforce candidates walking through their doors from colleges and universities. And I got the sense that the days were numbered, if not over, when employers (and potential employees) would settle for the time and cost of a traditional college approach as adequate preparation for work. For more on this, reference my three immediate past blogs on “What Employers Want from Higher Education”, written before I attended Learning 2011.

Second, the vast majority of presentations in sessions large and small focused on the meeting’s title, learning, regardless of where it happened, and its attendant value to the learners themselves and the people who employ them, businesses and non-profit organizations large and small.  Different people were presenting on their company’s or organization’s approaches to workforce development, the use of social networking to support learning at work, the use of work itself to drive learning, the role of IT in supporting all of this, and the emerging ability of assessment to actually link what the learner knows with what a given job requires for good performance on day one.

No single blog can adequately capture or represent what was going on at Learning 2011. But if you are intrigued, I suggest you go to www.Learning2011and see what the agenda and the presentations looked like for yourself.

What I sensed, and what I am trying to describe here, was an accelerating transition in workforce education from a higher education-centric model to a learner-workplace-centric model. In a world where higher education institutions have dominated, controlled, and driven the conversation about quality, content, access, and results; the balance of power is shifting away from that more monolithic tendency to a far more disaggregated power structure where good information, metrics, and results that can be validated against third party standards are the “coin of the realm”.

The commitment to all three pillars of higher education – knowledge, skills, and behaviors – was especially invigorating to me. Productive and happy work force members, wherever they work and whatever they do, need all three and an appreciation of all three throughout their lives. When we can show that the historic line drawn between the liberal arts and vocational training describes a dichotomy that does not have to exist, that in fact both can happen in multiple learning environments through multiple modalities, the world will be re-ordered in fundamental ways.

Employers who embrace this approach to workforce development will have a distinct competitive advantage over those who do not. And, if I am correct, this “disaggregated” approach will also include many more players while serving many more learner/workers. And it will require new thinking from government regulators and accreditors alike.

Once again, this “light at the end of the tunnel” is accelerating change in the higher education space. Depending on who you are and where you sit, it is either the dawn of a new age or an oncoming train. As the conductor used to call,” All Aboard that’s coming aboard!

Next week, in my last of this blog threesome, I will discuss the drivers and consequences of this oncoming train.

Michael Horn (TEDxSF) and Disrupting Class

Posted by Group Founder, Keith Hampson

Where Do Entrepreneurs Get Their Money?

A Kauffman Sketchbook. Visit Kauffman 

Posted by Group Founder, Keith Hampson

Simplifying Change in Higher Ed

In the not so distant past, I was responsible for online education within a traditional brick-and-mortar university. I would often joke with my staff that we weren’t really doing our jobs if the rest of the university – the brick and mortar – didn’t find us irritating from time to time. If you are truly meeting the unique needs of online students, you’re going to have to occasionally make the rest of the university bend in new and uncomfortable ways. The organizational structures and processes of colleges were long ago set up to serve the needs of classroom education; changing this embedded model is no small feat.

Of course, change is difficult in all kinds of organizations. This explains why a substantial industry of consultants, authors and assorted gurus exist to help organizations make changes more quickly and less painfully. Humans can be remarkably resistant to change. As Alan Deutschman pointed out in Change or Die, even recently recovered heart patients return to diets of cigarettes and Big Macs. Nevertheless, the current economic, technological and social conditions make the ability to change more important than ever.

From the vast literature on organizational change, one book stands out for me: Switch by brothers Chip and Dan Heath. It relies heavily on research conducted in multiple disciplines, yet it presents the findings in ways that are easy for us to pick up and make our own.

More importantly, the strategies presented in Switch seem especially well-suited to the unique conditions of higher education. Many books on change rely on charismatic leadership; others stress the importance of creating a sense of urgency – “burning the bridge” once you’ve decide to cross it and so forth. But in higher education the role of leaders in stimulating change is severely limited by the highly decentralized structure of the institutions. And it is very hard to create a sense of urgency in a sector that has seen growth decade after decade, and in which job security is relatively high.

Switch offers a different approach; one that is grounded in a deep understanding of how people actually change their behaviours. It’s a practical, methodical approach. The Heath brothers break it down into three overlapping concepts:

“Direct the rider”. Be crystal clear of what you are asking people to do differently. If you are trying to change people’s eating habits, don’t tell them to “make better food choices”. Tell them exactly which product to buy.

“Motivate the elephant.” Change takes a great deal of energy and focus, and these are limited resources. Therefore, we need to (a) stimulate the desire to change by appealing to the person’s emotions (“the elephant”) and limit the amount of change we are asking for. Divide big changes into small, incremental steps so as  to not exhaust their capacity for change.

“Shape the path.” There is a tendency in Western cultures to think of change solely as the result of “thinking differently”.That is, we change because we think we should change. And, of course, this is part of the story. But change often stems from changed circumstances. We tend to eat less cookies when there are less cookies in the house, not simply because we think we should eat less cookies. The task, then, is to structure the environment to meet our change objectives. If, for example, we want our team to share information with each other more liberally, then we may want to reorganize the office space so that they bump into one another more often.

You can download the first chapter from Switch for free by visiting the Heath brothers site.

Post by Group Founder, Keith Hampson

A National Vision for Higher Education?

The Canadian Council on Learning released its final report in October of 2011. The demise of the research organization was brought on by the current federal government’s decision to pull CCL’s funding. Less well known is the fact that CCL also received little support from educational institutions who occastionally interpreted CCL’s objectives as counter to their own.

Image via Wikipedia

In Canada, higher education is organized province-by-province. From its inception, CCL argued that Canada needs a nation-wide strategy for ensuring quality and accessibility in education, everything from Junior Kindergarten to workforce training.

CCL used its last report – its last kick at the can – to reiterate this core message. The table below the report makes the case that Canada is one of the few OECD countries without some sort of national dimension for higher education.

Unfortunately, the report, like much of what CCL produced, is short on details and tries to cover too much territory in too little space. Nevertheless, I’m highly sympathetic to the argument that Canada needs a national plan for higher education. Gossip suggests that CCL was faced with indifference and near-hostility from individual colleges and universities who saw the desire to create coordination in Canadian higher education as a threat to their autonomy. And it may in fact, they may be right: greater coordination between provinces and institutions will likely reduce the ability of institutions to define their own position in the higher ed landscape. But as some have argued (see Ian Clark’s new book), Canada has a preponderance of institutions that are seeking to establish themselves as comprehensive research-intensive entities. In a country with such a high rate of participation in post-secondary education, it seems probable that greater differentiation between institutions is in our interest.

Select the image for a larger view

Related articles

• Report gives failing grades to Canada’s education system (vancouversun.com)
• Report calls for national education leadership in Canada (ctv.ca)