It's About Learning

Creating Significant Learning Environments

The Cost of a Missing “Why”

Dwayne Harapnuik — February 20, 2014 — Leave a comment

When a clear vision, what I will refer to as the “Why”, is missing people easily lose sight of their primary responsibility and get caught up in pushing priorities that may be important but when placed in context of the bigger picture result in a completely different focus. Let me explain…

My priority as an Instructional Development Consultant is to help faculty create the most effective learning environment. Therefore, I look for ways to use technology as a tool to enhance learning and create a more engaging environment. When I run into challenges, obstacles and the day to day bureaucracy of higher education I deal with those challenges or obstacles in such a way that they don’t hinder the faculty from creating significant learning environments and look for ways to ensure that we are still effectively serving our learner.

In contrast, if a person doesn’t have a clear understanding of Why we do what we do then they are left to focus on their own priorities and that usually means getting caught up in the details and minutia of their job. Institutions like BCIT have a FOIPOP policy and generally the purpose of these types of policies are to:

– Ensure compliance with the Freedom of Information and Protection and Privacy Act
– Define the roles of employees and contractors in complying with the Act
– Reduce the institutions liability and risk of litigation due to inappropriate handling of information
– Protect the institutions reputation

These are all admirably and necessary purposes and it is good that we have a policy and office which is concerned with these issues. Depending on your Why, something like a Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIPOP) can be dealt with in two different ways.

First way
Without a bigger Why the people tasked with ensuring that these purposes are upheld make these purposes the top priority and all activities are weighed against these priorities. The best example of this in higher education is the debate of using the cloud, social media and other collaborative and distributed resources which the institution does not control. If a person’s Why is to enforce the policy then free software that is based in the cloud, social media tools and other resources cannot be used because these tools contravene the policy. If people are adamant about using these tools then explicit hoops must be jumped through or the institution will create its own cloud based tools that they can control. The first and most common response is to abstain or restrict for fear of the consequences. Fear becomes the driving force. Fear is the factor that is preventing all of higher education from moving to Google Docs or Office 365 and providing their students access to the most widely used collaborative tool, not to mention saving millions of dollars each year.

Second way
In contrast, if an institution and all members hold that their Why is much bigger than a policy and the top priority is to create the most effective learning environment for its students, when they come up against a policy like FOIPOP the response will not be reactive and based on fear. It will be proactive and creativity will be used to explore how can we use these engaging collaborative tools and still adhere responsibility to FOIPOP. With the right Why, people are automatically looking for ways to use these tools and still satisfy the FOIPOP requirements. More importantly the right Why can motivate people to explore creative solutions like revisiting the legislation to see if the interpretation that is being made is really the best interpretation that will help us to insure that we are creating significant learning environments.

IF everyone in an organization from the housekeeping staff on up to the President all hold the same Why—something like:

We are committed to creating significant learning environments that will help prepare our learners to face an uncertain future and enable them to learn how to learn and ultimately solve problems that don’t even exist.

then FOIPOP and other bureaucratic obstacles are not dealt with reactively in fear but are proactively managed in such a way that they do not hinder the bigger Why.

The change of perspective that a clearly defined and well communicated Why can move an organization from being fearful and reactive to being creative and proactive, assuming an organization has the leadership wisdom to value proactive workers (see my post The Paradox of Being Proactive.

Does your institutions have a clear and well communicated Why? If it doesn’t what can you do about it?

In Innovation learner centered, proactive, reactive, service, vision, why

MOOAs, Not MOOCs – Fundamental Problems in Higher Education

Dwayne Harapnuik — March 26, 2013 — Leave a comment

http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2013/03/25/its-mooas-not-moocs-that-will-transform-higher-education/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

It’s MOOAs, Not MOOCs, That Will Transform Higher Education – The Conversation – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout

While professor Laurie Essig’s post calling for Massive Online Open Administrations or MOOAs instead of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as the salvation for higher education must be recognized as a good work of satire, the post does reveal that we have a fundamental problem in Higher Education.

Whenever an industry is being radically disrupted the constituents within that industry will start to entrench their positions and defend the status quo that they know so well by taking pot shots at the people or groups who they believe are disrupting their world. This post reveals that many faculty are being threatened by MOOCs and technology in general and are opposed to being forced to change the way that they have been teaching. Similarly, many administrators are turning to the technology flavour of the day to improve the bottom line for the University and are often asking faculty to change simply for the sake of change. Yes, it is much more complicated and involved but the reality is that higher education cannot sustain it current practices and must change. The proverbial writing has been on the wall for a very long time. Change is happening.

Unfortunately, for Alberta instiutions the opportunity to be proactive and to control how to deal with the forces of change have passed. The Edmonton Journal article Mandate Letters Sent to Schools reveals:

On Friday night, Advanced Education and Enterprise Minister Thomas Lukaszuk sent out the first drafts of so-called mandate letters to top university officials outlining expectations under the new guise of Campus Alberta.

The notion of the “new guise of Campus Alberta” is not accurate. Various iterations of Advanced Education over the past decade have been warning higher education leaders and faculty that a voluntary move toward a collaborative Campus Alberta was necessary to sustain and improve education options for all Albertans. Unfortunately, time and dollars have run out and the once voluntary option has now turned into a mandate. Despite these strong words there still is an opportunity for Alberta Universities and Colleges to be proactive. Even though Advanced Education and Enterprise is requiring a move toward Campus Alberta the details on what the Campus Alberta will look like, how resources are shared, how institutions will collaborate is open for discussion.

Perhaps there is still time for the administration and faculty in higher education in Alberta to be proactive. Unfortunately, when you look at past performance as indicator of future potential is doubtful that there will be little more than a reactive response to the cutbacks. We only have to go back a few years to the late 90’s to see how well higher education reacted to forced change.

How can so many highly educated people continually miss the opportunity to proactively improve education. Pointing fingers isn’t going to help. When the faculty blame administrators (who were once faculty), when the administrators blame the faculty and when unions and everyone else blame the government we all loose sight of the fact that it will be our learners, our children, who will loose out.

How do we fix it? We focus on the learning. By building a learning culture that prepares our children how to learn how to learn we can prepare our children for an ever changing future. The solution is really that simple–unfortunately, changing or re-shaping our culture is the challenging part. We out it to our children to move beyond our personal needs and ambitions and take on this challenge.

In Change culture, Learning, proactive, reactive

http://watch.bnn.ca/bnn-fall-series/investing-by-demographics/#clip543161

BNN Fall Series : Investing by Demographics : Demographics Special: Investing in Demographics [10-03-11 2:50 PM] via kwout

In the above Business Network News interview David Foot reviews his predictions from his book Boom Bust & Echo 2000 published back in 1999. Particular salient are his predictions about enrollments in education.

Foot asserts that:

Demographics explain about two-thirds of everything. They tell us a great deal about which products will be in demand in five years, and they accurately predict school enrollments many years in advance.

Foots predictions about a significant drop in higher education enrollments by 2012 are disturbingly accurate. The disturbing part is that we were warned but we just didn’t head the warning.

Foot further states that:

…if decision-makers really understood demographics, Canada would be a better place to live because it would run more smoothly and more efficiently.

Well if we are to heed Mr. Foot’s advice on education we need to look to demographics to help us understand who our future students will be and where they will come from. According to Foot, Canada has the most expensive Education system in the world (and unfortunately not the best) because we have repeatedly ignored the hard facts of demographics and have not moved education dollars from primary, to secondary to post secondary education to match the demographic trends. He says that if we had a flexible and responsive education system and good planning based on demographics:

…we would have taken the money out of the high schools in the 1980s and transferred it to the universities and elementary schools. In the mid-1990s, when the university enrollment was slipping and high school enrollment was rising we could have transferred some of it back from the post secondary system to the increasingly crowded elementary and high schools.

Foot challenges us to not repeat the mistakes of the past and manage the education system more effectively. His book was published in 1999, so he was only able to offer predictions (based on demographic information) on what the future of post secondary enrollment would look like. According to demographics at the turn of the century the echo generation (boomers children) will be on the verge of entering colleges and universities and the because the children of the busters (children of Gen-X) will be a much smaller cohort so elementary and high schools will need much less resources than post secondary institutions. We are now 12 years past the turn of the century so it would seem logical based solely on demographic information that post secondary enrollments will once again drop and they have.

When you factor in the booming economy of Alberta, and the reality that a high paying job may be more attractive then the cost of post secondary education we shouldn’t be surprised to see enrollments drop. Foot also pointed a huge opportunity for higher education in distance/online, adult and alternative education.

So what does this mean for Concordia University? If we want to shore up our declining enrollments we not only need to focus on online, adult and international education, but we also have be very purposeful on promoting our unique learning proposition and use analytics to assess the effectiveness of our marketing and recruitment strategies. We are a high quality Learner centered Liberal Arts University that prepares leaders for a better world. We equip our graduates with the skills, abilities and insights to be able to deal with problems that we don’t even know exist.

We have a choice…we can be reactive or proactive. We can either promote the fact that we offer a remarkable education or we can be like every other institution and offer a course for this or a course for that. In the article on “How to be Remarkable” Seth Godin stated: “If it’s in a manual, if it’s the accepted wisdom, if you can find it in a Dummies book, then guess what? It’s boring, not remarkable.” I also added that we could add or even interchange the word remarkable with innovative.

Dummies books and Idiot’s Guides are wonderful examples of being reactive. These books are written to convey information on very generic or standardized systems or processes. They help people to react to technology around them. I would argue that there is nothing proactive or innovative in the Dummies or Idiots Guides approach to dealing with technology or learning in general.

Before someone equates the notion of being proactive or innovative with being on the bleeding edge I want to emphatically state that this doesn’t have to be the case. One can still be proactive and innovative with technology and not be on the bleeding edge. Being proactive or innovative can be as simple as recognizing that social networking tools like instant messaging, blogging, Facebook, Twitter, podcasting etc. are also tools that education can use to communicate with learners and share information. Being proactive or innovative can be as simple as recognizing that online learning is not just hype and there are a plethora of web-based tools (Content Management System, RSS readers, gmail, Google Docs, Youtube, online forms of all kinds etc.) available that make communication, collaboration and learning much more effective.

I have been teaching my 14 & 16 year old sons the difference between being proactive and reactive. More specifically I have been try to help them understand the importance and advantages of being proactive and I believe they are starting to understand. My boys are also starting to understand that you really have to be innovative to be proactive. It takes hard work, planning, and a commitment to really being and doing the best to be proactive and innovative–it’s not easy but it is worth the effort. To help my boys understand the significance of this issue I ask them the following questions:

Do you want to be proactive or reactive? Do you want to be perceived as being innovative or idiots?

Perhaps these are the questions that we all need to consider.

Like people, Universities don’t plan to fail; they can just fail to plan. Good leadership and good planning can insure that Concordia not only remains the high quality institution that it is but that it will continue to grow and prosper.