Higher Education Personified

Who do we serve? (What do they do? Why do they come to higher ed.?)
*This is an important question. How we answer it has great implications.

• Students (Preparing for a future life they've set for themselves; career success)
  
• Employees (Gain income)
  
• Society (Up to individuals who make it up)
  
• Ourselves/Board (For their own purposes)

What do we provide them that they can't get anywhere else?

• Higher Ed as a provider of bits --> We will die. We're really, really bad at this.
• Social Life of Education - to be knowledgeable in the world, you need the social context of the information.
  
• Credentials/Degree
• Mentoring/Apprenticeships

Clay Christiansen - IBM Program competing with Harvard's MBA. They hire you to get this "education."

New hires from MBA program have to "unlearn" everything they learned. Many employers say, "We don't care about the content you acquire; we just care if you're better than your peers."

Degrees filters the hiring pool. Even if they have to re-train you, the higher education institution can tell whether or not you could handle higher education.

• How do we do that better?

How can we tell we're doing a good job?

• In many instances, employers don't care what the student's degree is in.
• Do graduates get jobs?
• Do students achieve success on those jobs?
• Student evaluations
• What helps us the most is not always the most pleasant experience. (So we can't just use student satisfaction.)
• Work backwards from what we want to do. Talk to employers to find out what makes good graduates. What makes students the most useful.
  

Education and Ecstasy - There has to be desire to learn, and we have to feed that desire.

Washington University's Harvesting Gradebook. Peers, Teachers, Employers--increasing severity with each level of assessment.

Neumont University: Employers set the curriculum, and students come in and graduate as quickly as possible and go to really good jobs. They ONLY get Computer Science degrees there, though.

What is the best way to provide it?
What technique do you use?

What is the best way to organize?
What is our organizational structure?

Class Question: What do we want to say at the end of this semester?

• Is it important or futile to pursue the 2-Sigma problem?
• Why hasn't it happened yet?
• People have given up on using people in educational solutions.
  
• If you reduce knowledge to information to bits...
• Granularized education - efficiency of reading with technology
• People maybe focusing too much on the small pieces of education instead of the general whole.
• List of research questions somebody should solve

Twitter up to 50 million tweets a day.

*Create a research agenda for creating a tutor-like environment for education. Where should our attention be placed? What tools are emerging that we could use to give people access to something even better than an individual tutor?

Freshman Program

In my considerations of the ideal Freshman program, I decided that people don't go to big schools for a small school experience. In other words, I think BYU has a really great Freshman program, especially through Freshman academy, allowing students who want to be involved in a smaller group to have an outlet there. BYU should not try to make everyone stay here. It is not for everybody. But those who will stay will stay because of their positive Freshman experience.

This is my opinion.

Freshman Mentoring

When Freshman come to BYU, they will now each get a Peer Mentor.

• Low-tech.
• Einstein and chauffeur. "That's so easy, my chauffeur could answer it."
• Every single Freshman will be involved in this program
• A mentor will attend one class/week with the freshman

Some things to recommend to help Freshmen be successful:

• Be clear about goals: Enculturation to higher ed. and BYU, support system
  
• Frequency of Feedback
• Early warning/intervention
• Profiling
• Ability grouping
• Avoiding minimal compliance
• Matchmaking
• FAQs
• Synchronous Tools
• Experienced concierge
• Program/interest
• small world networks

Technology for Mentoring/Collaboration:

• Wimba Pronto- IM software that integrates with course rosters
• Purdue's Hotseat - back-channel conversation on Twitter, facebook, or web app.
  
• BYU 100-hour board
  

Measurement/Evaluation:

• drop-out rates
• academic performance data
  
• Past/Present
• Student interviews/surveys
• What does success look like?
• Trust Relationship - Elder Eyring
  
• Enhanced with crowd-sourced tutor
  

*Design my own Freshman experience. What would that look like? How would you set it up so you could tap into that learning/human potential of every one of your students?

Town Hall Meeting

http://blog.brainhoney.com/

There are some things you cannot completely replicate in a completely online environment. What impact would that have on learning? Do you have to be in a face-to-face environment?

There are some things you cannot completely replicate in a face-to-face environment.

What tools inside the current LMS would a tutor use to effectively guide students through a content?

• Automate corrective feedback

Is face-to-face interaction essential to tutoring element of education? Can we do the tutoring effectively with certain online tools? Spontaneity difficult to achieve online.

"If we don't kill them, they will be successful." It's so difficult to even make it into BYU, they're going to be successful no matter what they choose. How do we know if we've added value?

"Education is largely the process by which a teacher's lecture notes get into students' notebooks."

How do we navigate a world with so much information?

A more fundamental problem: In far too many instances, we don't put the time and effort into defining success. Instead, we create goofy multiple-choice tests that don't have any direct relationship with what we were doing.