Adult Education – Page 2 – Self-Directed Professional Development

Q&A with head of U. of Phoenix

The University of Phoenix is usually portrayed as the devil by most traditional higher education providers, but the new president seems like a pretty normal guy. With 300,000 and 250,000 graduates, Phoenix is largest accredited private university in the country.

I was surprised at how inexpensive the typical undergraduate degree was; I would have guessed that it was more in line with Syracuse–also a private, accredited university–with tuition and fees of $29,965 annually.

‘Students come to us at different parts in their career, plus our tuition varies by geographical region. But if you’re looking for a homogenized number, probably between $30,000 and $40,000.

With graduation rates of around 60%, Phoenix compares with many large open-enrollment state universities. Students leave for the reasons we would expect:

Pepicello: The two largest reasons they give us are, No. 1, financial and No. 2, life gets in the way. For adult students, obviously that makes sense.

Pepicello is quite candid about why the Unviversity of Phoenix was founded.

The mission of, say, Harvard is to serve a certain sector of the population and their mission is not to grow. And that’s true of higher education in general. The reason the University of Phoenix exists at all is that is that all of those various (universities) and their missions did not provide access to a large number of students who are capable and wanted access to higher education. And that’s our mission.

In general, I’m not a big believer in the “education should be more like business” mythology; in fact, I think that’s the worst thing institutions could be doing. However, I do think that those of us in traditional professional schools should pay attention to some of these new competitors and not just write them off as being part of some evil empire. There are some lessons to be learned there.

Malcolm Knowles Biography

Malcolm Knowles

This is a fascinating biography of Malcolm Knowles, full of personal details that add valuable context to understanding of andragogy as a theory and set of guidelines for practice. Several biographies alluded to his background in Scouting, but this was the first I remember reading about the specifics of his winning a trip to the International Jamboree:

His campaign for the scouting prize had not been hit or miss. He had developed a technique that would help him compete effectively. He drew a large chart with a separate square for each day of the nine month contest. In these squares he systematically planned out the activities he would perform during the year to win the badges. Finding a technique that worked for him, he was convinced it could work for others. “My mother trained me to be systematical,” the sixteen-year-old Malcolm told readers of Boys Life, the scouting magazine, as he shared with them the self-directing technology that won him the trip. “Make your chart this way, fellows, and you will see how easily you can get your ‘fifty.'” He laboriously and mechanistically delineated how to do it. “My original chart, “he told the scouts, “was made out of beaverboard, two by three feet. I had it nailed at the foot of my bed, where it was the first thing I saw upon waking.”

The article also contains some interesting background on Knowles’ experience at Boston University.

His graduate program prospered. Student numbers proliferated. The fact that Knowles, with the help of a tiny adult education faculty, was supervising an extraordinarily large number of dissertations and theses, however, did not set well with many Boston University academics who questioned the granting of degrees for self-directed, or as they might have termed it, undirected learning. Knowles was carving out a national image for Boston University in adult education. Soon, though, a new administration dedicated to a traditional view of graduate work and scholarship questioned whether the reputation Knowles was building was the one that the administration favored for the university.

In the midst of his triumph, his beachhead in academe came under withering fire in 1972 from higher ground, the top administration at Boston University. The new president, John Silber, was unimpressed with andragogy. It seemed to him that too few professors were supervising too many dissertations, that the graduate program in adult education was structured more for students to learn from each other than from the professors, and that democratic process was more valued than intellectual discipline.

The article is posted on the site of the Adult Education program at National-Louis University. The program is unusual, if not unique, among US doctoral programs because of its clearly articulated philosophy of practice:

The ACE Doctoral Program, offered within the College of Arts and Sciences, provides a forum for critical reflection on adult education practice. The future of our economy, and of democracy itself, rests on an informed and critical populace. Weekend and residential sessions, together with web-based support provide the resources for educators of adults–teachers, organizers, trainers and “grass-roots” activists who, through their work, seek to contribute to the emergence of a productive society grounded in equity and justice.

Will Richardson on Becoming a Life-Long Learner

The New Face of Learning

Will Richardson’s article in Edutopia, the publication of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, is an excellent summary of his experience with the evolution of the web from a read-only word of static pages to a web filled with blogs, wikis and podcasts. The read/write web was the major catalyst to his own fullfillment as a life-long learner.

In this new interactive Web world, I have become a nomadic learner; I graze on knowledge. I find what I need when I need it. There is no linear curriculum to my learning, no formal structure other than the tools I use to connect to the people and sources that point me to what I need to know and learn, the same tools I use to then give back what I have discovered. I have become, at long last, that lifelong learner my teachers always hoped I would become. Unfortunately, it’s about thirty years too late for them to see it.

My ability to easily consume other people’s ideas, share my own in return, and communicate with other educators around the world has led me to dozens of smart, passionate teachers from whom I learn every day. It’s also led me to technologies and techniques that leverage this newfound network in ways that look nothing like what’s happening in traditional classrooms.

This is the world of lifelong learning that adult educators have been longing for at least since the publication of Allen Tough’s 1971 book The Adult’s Learning Projects. (Available as a free download). In 2001, Tough wrote:

I see the Worldwide web as the most exciting development in adult education in the last 30 years. As educators we need to take the web very seriously….

An understatement perhaps?

A Guide for the Stubborn Intelligence

Ron Gross’s book The Independent Scholars Handbook is one of the my favorite adult education works of all time. The book, which was first published in 1982 and then re-released in 1993, contains the stories of individuals from every background whose lives contained a serious commitment to research, investigation, theory building and other intellectual enterprises. In addition, the book provides a resource guide with specific suggestions on how to move from “Messy Beginnings” to the finished product of research–whatever your field of endeavor.

One of my favorite stories in the book comes when the author, beginning his career as the “lowest of the low” in the world of New York publishing, comes face to face with editorial giant Max Schuster…

Continue reading “A Guide for the Stubborn Intelligence”

A Competency Model for Lifelong Learning

Half an Hour: Things You Really Need to Learn

One of the key objectives of our adult education course is to develop and refine our long-term competency models of what it means to be adult learners. (The best way to think of this particular class is through the principle of recursion: a group of adult learners, learning to think more creatively and critically about how adults learn to be more effective in managing their own learning .) The competency model is the long term vision; one student nailed the concept in this way:

but I am trying to think of this in terms of what you said last night – that we are trying to develop a large number of competencies, and they are not all going to happen at once, but that we can create learning experiences to take them on a few at a time, so that over the course of a lifetime, we can become exceptionally competent.

I clipped this list from Stephen Downes earlier in the semester, and I think it’s really worth going back to. Stephen was responding to a post by Guy Kawasaki which included suggestions like learning “how to write five sentence emails, create powerpoint slides, and survive boring meetings”. Stephen’s list was much more appropriate adult and lifelong learners:

This is, in my view, what you need to learn in order to be successful. Moreover, it is something you can start to learn this year, no matter what grade you’re in, no matter how old you are. I could obviously write much more on each of these topics. But take this as a starting point, follow the suggestions, and learn the rest for yourself. And to educators, I ask, if you are not teaching these things in your classes, why are you not?

Some of the items on the list are things that most courses don’t begin to address, but that are crucial to successful lifelong learning. (The comments to the post are worth a read as well.)

How to predict consequences
How to empathize
How to be creative
How to Learn

Not a bad long term competency model for the 21st Century.

A Noble Cause for Educators–Scratching the Itch

Abject Learning: Wikipedia and Higher Ed – Glib Answers to Tough Questions

Brian Lamb has posted a great set of answers to questions about the use of Wikipedia. As Gardner points out, this is a wonderful synthesis of idealism about the promise of a connected community and the realities of our academic clutures. My favorite phrase is “scratching the itch of our habitual curiosity.” What a great line!

Does Wikipedia really encourage understanding, or is it just us scratching the itch of our habitual curiosity?

Oh, a bit of both I suppose. When you see an incredibly detailed Wikipedia entry on the Klingon language it’s hard not to laugh and roll your eyes. But such cultural quirks should not obscure the genuine pragmatic value of the resource. Nor does it invalidate the super-cool nature of tens of thousands of volunteers working worldwide in good faith to create the best reference work possible. I fail to understand how any public-minded educator can’t be excited and encouraged by this phenomenon.

Incidentally, I think that fostering a sense of “habitual curiosity” and tapping its energy is a noble and worthwhile mission, especially for educators.

Attracting Students to Adult Education Programs

Inside Higher Ed :: Registration Rave

Interesting article about the “registration rave” hosted by Morton College outside of Chicago. The college runs a 29 hour event, staffed by volunteers from the various offices of the college, where prospective students can register even if they hold down jobs that keep them from more traditional registration events.

It’s Morton’s round-the-clock “registration rave.” Some people are there for the music or the Sno-Cones, some so their kids can play the carnival games, and others to take placement tests and meet with academic advisers.

The all night-event is an initiative of college president Brent Knight, who had formerly worked as VP for Meijer Inc., “a ‘big-box’ retailer in the Midwest; like a ‘super Target,’ as Knight puts it”.

The comments are worth a read, as well. Some are sceptical:

I completely agree with the previous commenter. Unless classes are offered in the middle of the night to serve the same students who were available in the middle of the night, how are the students going to succeed? Also, isn’t it a bit of trickery to create a party atmosphere when education, although it can be fun, is serious business.

Others are more supportive:

That people who work shifts would show up in the middle of the night to enroll or register for classes is not surprising: there is a whole world of such people and there are services and industries that schedule to accommodate them. I have thought and advocated that higher ed also accommodate them for the longest time. Unfortunately, many in higher ed either have never worked outside that rather small world and cannot conceive of offering not only services such as admissions, registration, financial aid, advising, etc., outside the usual hours, but also courses when there is good reason to do so. For example, nurses and police officers (and other shift workers) typically get off work at hours like 7a.m., 3 p.m., and 11 p.m. If you wanted to offer degrees, or simply coursework — whether for credit, non-credit professional development, or CEUs — for such people, why not offer it when they get off work? Even, in their workplace? Whether through face-to-face instruction or via technologically-assisted instruction, there is no reason why that is not feasible today.

Building Pedagogical Intelligence

Carnegie Perspectives: Building Pedagogical Intelligence

It’s been eight years since I taught an (explicity) adult education course, so I’m spending quite a bit of time reviewing the literature and trying to find an appropriate framework for the class I’m teaching this fall. In the past I’ve always taught as part of a specialized graduate program, and students either entered with some exposure to the field or were looking to my course to provide the basis future work. This class is the only one on the topic at William and Mary, so it will probably be the only exposure many get to adult education as a field of practice. Packaging a field that includes everything from adult basic education (ABE) to continuing professional education (CPE) into a single course is no small task.

One key goal of my classes has always been to help participants become more effective self-directed learners and more confident in their abilities in “learning how to learn”. Pat Hutchins, at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, calls the enhancement of this ability of students to become more aware of themselves as learners “building pedagogical intelligence.”

More important, having a voice in matters pedagogical would make students better learners. It’s easy for those of us in “the business” to forget that getting educated isn’t easy. Just jumping through the hoops is not enough. Students need to be able to make connections between what is learned in very different, and typically unconnected, settings. And to do this they need to be able to step back and see what their efforts add up to, to take stock both of what they have learned and what it will take to get to a next level of understanding. In a word, they need to be agents of their own learning.

Since this will be a graduate class in the school of education, we can probably justify a little more obsessing about the topic than the typical undergraduate course:

This is not to suggest that Econ 101 or 19th Century American Lit be turned into occasions to obsess about the learning process. But the disposition to be thoughtful about one’s own learning, to be an active agent of learning, to find and even to design experiences in which learning is advanced—these are goals that should be central to undergraduate education.

Even Higher Education

Back to College

I generally avoid reading the AARP magazine–which I guess is the successor to Modern Maturity. As Tom Paxton wrote:

So when you find it in your mailbox for the first time my friend
You can tell that you getting older, you’re turning grey….
Modern Maturity, means you’re getting old
When you get the magazine that you hide from your friends
Once it was Rolling Stone, it was thrill after thrill
Now Modern Maturity means over the hill.

This issue has a piece by Harvard professor and author Rosabeth Moss Kanter about the future of “even higher education”. She’s proposing a future in much which experienced, affluent 50 and 60 somethings will be returning to campus for “Advanced Leadership School” before heading off on the next phase of their careers in providing distinguished public service.

Someday soon, going to a university at 50 or 60 could become the norm. Someday, every major graduate school will have graduate schools designed specifically for accomplished professionals who want to make the transition from their primary income-earning careers to their years of flexible service.

Kanter stresses that this is different than the traditional retirement activity of taking a few courses for diversion. These new programs and the students who populate them are emulating a new model that has been set by the likes of Jimmy Carter, Lee Iacocca or Bill Gates who have the experience and the energy to “support new forms of philanthropy and public service that truly solve problems”. They don’t want to volunteer in the traditional sense; they want to change the world.

Colleges and universities can be a key role in helping adults make this transition.

But for all the talk about what older boomers want to contribute, there are practically no ways to help them do it. How do they gain the knowledge and refresh their skills so they can end childhood hunger or save Newark? How do they use their considerable experience if they never earned a degree the first time around? When and where do they make the right connections?

There will have to be some changes made to made…

Of course, the educational model should feel right to accomplished adults, tailored to their life stage and experience. It shouldn’t resemble the lecture halls, know-it-all professors, and musty textbooks of college memories.

The the resulting programs would look much different than the current activities on our campuses, according to Professor Kanter:

Sessions would be more like think tanks, in which faculty facilitate discussions about how to tackle major social needs. Participants could use the university as their sandbox, catching up on recent developments in their fields, and adding a language or a science skill. Their “dorms” would be two-bedroom apartments, with their spouses or partners as not just roommates but coparticipants in the program. Participants would be more like contributors than students, mentoring undergraduates or leading seminars for grad students. The presence of accomplished leaders could change universities in positive ways. And by focusing on the world’s most daunting human problems, leaders will find direction for their next productive decades.

I guess I still wonder why we have to retain that kind of school for the 50-somethings. Sounds like our current students could benefit from much of what is proposed in this new world of “even higher education.”

Stephen’s Back

Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~

One of my student bloggers from last semester’s course wrote recently and commented on the transitions that were happening with some of the eduboggers that he had been reading regularly. Stephen Downes’ hiatus and Will Richardson’s posts on some of the issues he was wrestling with were raising some questions about the long-term viability of a community dedicated to serious thinking about how to use new web tools to improve (and even transform) parts of higher education. I think the community has staying power because a growing number of teachers/learners have an this kind of internal drive:

What brings me back is a desire to make things better, to contribute my own unique voice to what I see as a rennaissance. Like this: “What edubloggers must do is to continue to engage in critical dialogue, reflect, and communicate with those around us. We must be the ones who stand up and take responsibility for the struggle (If not us, then Who?). We must reflect and act together in a way that offers a new story, a new vision of education can be. Start by looking in the mirror: Meet the new boss; you’re not the same as the old boss…”

Perhaps – but we do not need vision and will, we do not need great leaders. There will be no revolution, no rennaissance, until we change ourselves, until we ourselves become the embodiment of the caring and compassionate society we want to create. How hard that is! I return from my time away more aware than ever of how fallible, how ordinary, how human I am. Oh my yes, I have my apologies to give and my amends to make. Still, no matter how hard it is, we need to believe in ourselves, to believe we can make a difference, to believe we matter, to believe we can live freely. This, above all, must be our legacy.

Thanks, Stephen, for reminding us.