Gearing Up for Learning Beyond K--12. Bryan Johnson Alexander
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digital skills, and a greater emphasis on teaching combine to place enormous pressures on campus leaders and staff (Johnson, Becker, Estrada, & Freeman, 2015).
It’s important to keep in mind that division between technological change and change from other domains. Each can be very attractive and also exceedingly complex, drawing our attention to the exclusion of others. I find the futures approach with the daunting acronym of STEEP to be helpful in balancing these perspectives. STEEP stands for social, technological, economic, environmental, and political forces. It’s a kaleidoscopic approach that helps us understand the interrelated, complex, multifaceted nature of shifts in education.
Imagining the Future of Higher Education
As befits a work drawing on the futurist tradition, this book does not guarantee certain futures or specific predictions. Instead it explores the full range of possible forms higher education might take, based on our best possible knowledge of the present. Let me expand on this point in the form of several caveats.
First, it is possible that a black swan event could disrupt higher education in ways this book does not anticipate. A black swan is Nicholas Taleb’s term for very low probability, very high-impact occurrences, such as the sudden appearance of a black swan from a huge number of white birds. They are extraordinary events, are extraordinarily difficult to anticipate ahead of time. Ironically, we tend to change our sense of our own understanding afterward, back-filling to imagine we knew the event was actually quite predictable after all (Taleb, 2007). For the subject of this book, the appearance of affordable artificial intelligence reaching the level of a decent college tutor would constitute such a major disruption. If created for learning, a virtual entity, like the one depicted in the movie Her (Barnard, Farrey, & Jonze, 2013), could challenge the very structure of formal education. Another black swan would be a major terrorist attack on the United States, which leads to drastic restrictions on the Internet, on information access, the movement of populations, and public financing. All of these would alter education in sudden and deep ways. We could consider these and other extraordinary events but are limited by their low probability and by restrictions of space.
Second, Gearing Up for Learning Beyond K–12 is focused on higher education in the United States. This is partly due to limitations of space in this volume, as addressing the sheer diversity and extent of global postsecondary education would require a great deal more text. The enormous research burden required to assess global higher education at a truly international level would require a different textual apparatus as well. I hope to address this global challenge in subsequent publications.
Third, although focusing on one country’s postsecondary education system can risk excessive narrowness, the United States’ higher education ecosystem is actually very rich and diverse. It includes institutions private and public, secular and of many religious affiliations, military and Quaker, community colleges and research universities. Some institutions enroll fewer than one hundred students, while others teach tens of thousands. As we explore the many different ways higher education can evolve in the next decades, bear in mind that these changes will play out across a various, even contradictory landscape.
Fourth, this book will gradually date itself as the years advance. Observations about current events become history soon enough, and technological notes risk obsolescence even more rapidly. Placing arguments in print, even in ebook form, is a risky venture. And yet I hope this will be useful during the period it describes, 2015–2025, especially in the first few years. Gearing Up for Learning Beyond K–12 is at least a snapshot in time, a glimpse into how some of us thought about higher education in the United States during the era of President Barack Obama, onrushing climate change, the Apple Watch, Miley Cyrus, and ISIS.
Given these caveats and intentions, who is this book for? I write for everyone interested in the future of higher education. High school students picking colleges to apply to, policymakers weighing budgetary and policy demand, adult learners considering a return to university, middle school principals preparing teachers and students for the next generation, workers looking to reskill, family members seeking to help relatives succeed in the rapidly changing world of education; I hope all of you can learn from these chapters about how these places of learning develop in the future. It’s vital to remember that no matter how large these issues appear, each of you will contribute to what higher education becomes.
I deliberately resisted using jargon in this book because I want it to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible. When chapters discuss technology, they do so in a nongeekish, low-acronym, gently explained way. Occasionally, Byzantine university structures and policies hit these pages under the assumption that readers are not campus administrators. Forays into economics occur without presuming readers are macro- or microeconomic gurus. The future of higher education is complex, drawing on several domains, each with its own arcana. I want to demystify that in this little book.
Gearing Up for Learning Beyond K–12 is organized chronologically. Each chapter explores colleges and universities at different points in time, starting with the present and advancing roughly into the next decade. This is a short- and medium-term future.
Chapter 1 outlines the present technological environment already at work in higher education. The details of this nearly completed revolution may surprise some readers, and show quite clearly how the 21st century classroom differs from that of the 20th. The chapter then identifies other technologies just starting to have an impact on education, analyzing their likely effects over the next few years.
Chapter 2 turns to nontechnological forces, the SEEP of STEEP after technology. These drivers will give rise to changes playing out on a longer timescale than their digital cousins, taking us across the next decade. Here we look to economics, demographics, policies, and campus strategy to see how these forces will reshape campuses.
Chapter 3 considers the possibility that higher education in the United States hit a peak in or around 2013, and has started to decline in important ways, shrinking in size and eventually cost. Alternatively, colleges and universities are around the top of a bubble cycle, with a collapse coming up fast. Either way, these arguments see decades of postsecondary education growth reversed before 2025, with enormous impact on campuses. I suggest one post-peak, post-bubble model for college, based on a university offering already existing.
Chapter 4 turns away from the storied campus of quads and residence halls to outline off-campus ways of learning at an advanced level. From hackerspaces to edupunk, informal learning to the cryptically named cMOOCs, new options are opening up for students who wish to learn without heading to a campus. Still nascent in many ways, these new academic venues will take time to build out, pushing their horizon further forward still.
Chapter 5 is a sort of coda, knitting together threads from the previous chapters then returning readers to the present. We revisit the STEEP approach to see how those forces interact and combine to influence individual decision making, then offer some additional possible futures for the contexts of higher education.
I owe a great deal to my network of friends, co-conspirators, and the occasional utter stranger who contributed insights, references, news items, and reality checks over the past few years. Much applause is due to them. In contrast, all errors of fact as well as prognostication are my own. Please contact me to crow about lapses, to offer additional information, or to share your experiences in thinking through the next decade of campus life in the United States.
Chapter 1
After the Technological Tsunami
What is technology doing to higher education?
To understand its impact, it is best to imagine a predigital university classroom in its full, nearly nostalgic glory. Let us choose the preweb date of 1985. Consider a seminar,