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EdSurge
A ’Golden Age’ of Teaching and Learning at Colleges?
By Jeffrey R. Young
Oct 15, 2019
Somewhere in a university lab, a research subject is being slid into a
brain-scanning devices to try to better understand how humans learn and
retain information. It may seem a bit like science fiction, but
research like this is taking off around the world. And in recent years
more of the findings are making their way onto campus, in the form of
new teaching practices.
That has Matthew Rascoff, associate vice provost for digital education
and innovation at Duke University, excited about the possibility to
make wide-scale improvements in how colleges teach.
“From a teaching and learning perspective, this is a golden age,” he
says. “We know more about how people learn than we ever have in the
past.”
EdSurge sat down with Rascoff last month at a meeting of a group called
Harvesting Academic Innovation for Learners, or HAIL, held at Southern
New Hampshire University. He painted a picture of where he sees campus
innovation going, and talked about how his new digital tools can
navigate issues around protecting student privacy and avoiding
algorithmic bias.
Q: EdSurge: Is the idea of academic innovation catching on at
universities? After all, colleges and universities are not known for
changing quickly.
Matthew Rascoff: I think we have turned a corner to some extent. We’re
getting a lot more inbound interest from faculty and administrators who
want to do projects that they’re motivated to do, and they’re looking
for help, support, inspiration, partnership and experience that comes
from our team.
I also see it in the broader discussions of higher ed. There’s an
exciting set of changes and movement that’s going on around us, and it
is very stressful on leaders and institutions as we’re clearly
experiencing this moment of change. But it also means there’s a lot of
opportunity. You see that in the private sector, in all of the startups
that are being funded to build new models. You see that in the public
sector in institutions that are just launching programs like Louisiana
State University. And you see it in nonprofit universities like Duke
and our peer institutions where there’s just this new motivation,
support, collegiality and collaboration that doesn’t require any teeth
pulling.
Q: So what’s an example of one of those requests from professors to do something innovative?
One thing that we’re seeing is a move from what I call the
“early-adopter faculty” who were our mainstream for years. Those who
were inherently, intrinsically interested in the use of technology in
the classroom. And we might provide iPods, or later iPads to classes to
support some experiment that an individual might want to do.
The new pattern is we now have associate deans and deans—leaders of
schools who are in positions of power—coming to us and saying, “Can you
help us launch a new hybrid or online program? Can you help us figure
out an alumni engagement strategy that uses learning as a means of
keeping our alumni engaged wherever they are throughout their lives?”
And that’s a shift, I think, from the early adopter into the mainstream.
Q: What you’re saying goes against the popular perception of higher ed as this place that’s not changing.
There is an incredible mismatch in the rhetoric about higher education
that you read about in the newspapers and the actual change that I see
happening everyday inside institutions. And it’s actually one of the
most frustrating things for me to read in an editorial or a newspaper,
and it’s also both from the left and the right right now. I see what’s
happening on the ground, and see the pipeline of programs that are
going to be launched in a few years, and that’s very motivating and
very exciting. And then you pick up the newspaper and it’s such a doom
and gloom story about higher education.
I think we’re doing such a bad job of telling our story right now.
There are definitely some necessary reforms, and don’t get me wrong, I
think some big changes are necessary, especially in the education
finance system. But from a teaching and learning perspective, this is a
golden age. We know more about how people learn than we ever have in
the past.
There are more opportunities and products and services to translate
that knowledge about how people learn into new learning opportunities
that are flexible, that are global, and that serve different kinds of
learners than we ever have in the past with different kinds of
credentials and different learning experiences. There’s just a
flowering of innovation that I see happening as an insider in this
field, and I love it. I wish the broader public and the broader
community could see a little bit of that world, that insider
perspective.
Q: What are some of these programs that you’re alluding to? What does
it look like this new kind of exciting innovation world that you see
blooming?
One perspective that we bring comes from what we call educational
research and development. The idea there is that we learn in labs
valuable information about how our brains work, and how learners work
in communities and in social contexts. And we can translate that
knowledge into new kinds of learning experiences, new designs that
benefit from what we know about who we are at the fundamental level.
And there’s just so much new knowledge that is being created on a
weekly basis from, for example, FMRI, brain neuroscience, and the
science of how people learn from the biological perspective that can be
applied readily into the classroom.
So it’s a whole body of research that is kind of making progress on a
weekly basis that we can translate with the right system in place, to
take those discoveries and turn them into applicable, usable
strategies. And that’s the kind of translational challenge that we face
in education, where we need to take those discoveries that are being
published in the journals and turn them into products that build on
them … and then see, how does that play out in the classroom? And I see
this more data-driven, more evidence-based approach taking off that
translates that basic science into classroom interventions and
educational reforms. And we’re just beginning to scratch the surface of
that.
Q: Just to ground it a little bit, can you give an example?
We have an R&D project at Duke called Nudge, which uses one of the
earliest findings in learning science called the Ebbinghaus Forgetting
Curve, and applies it to a text-based system to help students improve
retention of their knowledge. The Ebbinghause Forgetting Curve
basically showed that people forget things on a predictable basis, and
if you can remind them of things that they learned at specific points
in that forgetting curve, you can help lock in their knowledge for the
longer term.
What we built was basically a system for [sending a text message] that
just asks a quick question about something you learned in class at a
specific amount of time after the class. And we now have research that
shows that students improve their performance in a class by several
percentage points just using this intervention. That’s open-source
technology that we built at Duke.
Q: What do students think of that? It almost sounds like quizzes that can happen anytime, anywhere.
It’s not a quiz. There’s no grade, and you don’t even have to get the
answer right or wrong. It doesn’t actually matter if you get the answer
correct from the perspective of the learning benefits. It’s just the
jogging of your memory that helps lock in that knowledge and code it
into your brain. And in fact there’s no point in grading something like
that. So it’s more about applying the learning science to help our
students retain more of their knowledge and get more learning benefits.
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