How Can We Fundamentally Change Higher Ed?
Looking back on your college years, what would you change about your experience? Would you head to college straight out of high school? Choose a sensible major? Power through and get your degree in four years?
Sarah Stein Greenberg, executive director of the Stanford Design School, offers a provocative alternative to our existing higher education system. In her compelling talk at Wired by Design, Stein Greenberg asks: how can we go beyond redesigning higher education -- how can we fundamentally change it?
To foster creative thinkers and problem solvers – people who will have to tackle complex challenges like the ebola epidemic, data security breaches, climate change – Stein Greenberg and her colleagues set out to learn what students want and need from their college experiences. They asked students to interview each other, and used insights from their research to propose radically different models for higher education. These are just some of their ideas:
- What if students could loop in and out of university and work in the real world over the course of six years? Or what if they could move through college at their own pace, with the ability at different points to explore lots of topics broadly, then focus and gain expertise, as well as practice in the field?
- What if students could build college transcripts that emphasize skills rather than a record of classes?
- What if students could declare missions, not majors, such as the School of Hunger or School of Renewable Energy?
How do you think your career – or even your life – would have changed, if any of these defined your college experience?
Bending the arc of people potential
7 年What a fascinating read ... thank you for posing such a challenge!
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8 年Great post Tim. You mention "sensible major". I think the education system both high school and universities could work better to communicate the career opportunities aligned to any given major, prior to commencing a course. It's simply not good enough to skim over the "potential job opportunities". We continue to read that there is a skills shortage in "STEM" related jobs, given the vast majority of university students undergoing related studies, universities and workplaces need to be more connected, communicate career opportunity, and if their is a lack of such opportunities assist students with alternatives that utilise the skills they have invested in prior to graduation.
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8 年i have finished bachelor in industrial design and decided to take two years off to do some work so i can be secure in choosing the right masters. i think it has been the best decision of my life. i took some extra classes in graphic field just so i can learn more and get that insight as well. but working has connected me to people and brought me better insights into design than i have gained from school and books. for me design is constantly changing and eventhough books do give you the fundamentals it is constant changing field because it depends on problem solving, and everywhere you go you will find different problems and different ways to solve it. furthermore, being outside of school has given me a bigger appreciation of the time spent there because getting out of school shows you how much time you had to do a project, not just time but also the conditions which in real life doesnt happen. so when i come back i will definitely take care of that part and work more carefully and meticulously on the work.
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9 年I agree, Terri; Oh Lord, where to start! The answer is available to us, but many don't want to see it. They don't want to make the kind of changes that would truly put our High School and College/University graduates in a position to be employable upon graduation. It is a long and tedious task that has to start with teaching our teachers how to convey and help students learn the subject matter that they will need to be employable upon graduation So here's a YouTube post that I've been dropping in blogs all over the place. You may not agree with the points being made by the panel, but since (at least in my opinion) Jeremy Howard is like one of the smartest individuals on earth, I do believe that he deserves to be listened to, and for us to then think about the situation and how it can be solved. I've followed his logic on this for a while now and I can't see where he is missing anything major. Same for Ray Kurzweil - me thinks that we'd better start listening to these guys. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3jUtZvWLCM Article about Ray Kurzweil https://singularityhub.com/2015/01/26/ray-kurzweils-mind-boggling-predictions-for-the-next-25-years/ Ray Kurzweil: Has been awarded 20 Honorary Doctorates! Has been awarded Honors from 3 different U.S. Presidents. Jeremy Howard: making $200,000 while he was still a teenager he developed a new global practice now known as Big Data. He became the globally top ranked participant in Kaggle data science competitions in 2010 and 2011, so Kaggle offered him the position of CEO and Chief Scientist where he led a community and competition platform of over 200,000 data scientists. As a point of reference, 200,000 individuals is right about the bottom end of the number of individuals in the top third largest cities in the United States. Now, while doing such trivial items such as developing a new system that allowed him to learn basic Chinese language skills in just one year, he is the youngest faculty member at Singularity University. I think that we'd better listen more closely to these guys.
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9 年Competency based and apprenticeship model based on true personalization powered by adaptive learning opening up the right options