Encourage faculty to build on MOOCs

Background

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and their ilk are capturing attention across the higher education landscape this year.  While it may be unwise for Mills to jump on the bandwagon, we should explore the ways in which this and related new technologies could be exploited here.

Proposal

Consider giving partial teaching credit to a professor who takes a MOOC along with her students, providing supplemental material and discussions as needed.  In computer science, for example, we are not able to offer many electives, both due to a shortage of FTE and due to the specialization of current faculty.   One can imagine that it might be more advantageous for students if a faculty member offered two or more MOOC-based electives in place of a single traditionally delivered elective.  The students would get more choices and faculty would broaden their teaching repertoire and expand their knowledge of new subfields.

"Coop" Programs

What if we took the idea of community involvement and experiential learning to the next level and developed the equivalent of a "coop" program outside the realm of the engineering sciences where it is most typical?  It could be a way to grapple head on with the controversies around internships and free labor, over commitment to volunteer work during semester at a cost to academic studies, paying for school, etc.  There could be a degree built around something like a semester on semester off with, say, half credit for the semester off (it would be in an internship/coop placement) so that the total time to degree remained attractive.  Partner organizations might find it attractive enough to be willing to go beyond the unpaid "afterschool" intern approach since they'd be getting a full time worker.  If there were a critical mass of participants we could field a guidance/reflection/etc. seminar or some such that would allow the interns the benefit of an academic coach/advisor, etc.  There could be networking opportunities among the organizations that accepted our coop interns -- Mills as bridging social capital.

The general framework could be developed in a manner that permitted it to be adapted for use in technical fields as well as non-technical fields.  Our switching to semester hours could loosen up the structure in a manner that yielded some of the scheduling flexibility that might be needed to make this work.

Restructure the General Education Requirements

Mills College has historically been a place of innovation, and while it continues to foster it, the college could emphasize this aspect by eliminating the separation between departments and divisions, a separation that hampers creativity and innovation.

The undergraduate general requirements would be a good place to begin. One suggestion is to revamp all of them using the idea of "cross-pollination" (in other words, taking an interdisciplinary approach). Our students would fully taste the benefits of the liberal arts college if their Gen Ed requirement courses were co-taught through a whole semester.

There could be a possibility of special funding for courses co- taught by faculty from more than one division or department; a pilot program might involve only a small number of courses, with proposals judged on the basis of curricular innovation and "cross-pollination" among divisions. There might be outside funding sources for these courses.

While such a program would require a small financial investment, it could be done with relatively little expense, and if it is successful it could become a marketing tool for Mills. We would continue to make our mark as innovators by creating new bridges through various departments. These new courses, to truly reflect the "cross-pollination" concept, would have to be fully integrated into the curriculum of each collaborator.

Don't Let a Strategic Plan Stop Our Strategic Planning

The Problem

Most strategic plans result in the production of some glossy brochures and periodic reports about progress on plan implementation.  But they often amount to little as the really interesting stuff got lost in the process of producing something that was not too dangerous, not too specific.

And often enough the process proceeds backwards: we commit to big ideas about things we would like to do before we have done our homework finding out what we should do and what we could do.

A Solution

Those things my be unavoidable, but they inspire a remedy: ongoing strategic planning.  Let's make sure one element of this strategic plan is a commitment to permanent exploration and experimentation with innovative pilot projects and self study.  Let's build in a recognition that we don't have enough current information to plan the perfect new program and that building an infrastructure that supports innovation and experimentation is the surest route to long term sustainability.

How It Could Work

1. Be sure provost and divisional deans have sufficient "opportunity" funds that they can support good ideas when they happen.
2. Create policy infrastructure that streamlines fielding experimental courses and majors.
3. Have a ready to use optional sunsetting provision for programs that might not be approved if they were necessarily going to be forever.
4. We would have an Educational Innovations Committee with say $10-15K per year to encourage the formulation of ideas to test in small versions — something like this is being tried out in social sciences in connection with designing an interdisciplinary component in PLEA. This would be a voluntary committee of interested faculty members. Budget could fund travel for proposers to see other, better practices, it could fund some targeted research, etc.

New Courses Earn Simultaneous Course Release

Proposal

Any faculty member teaching a new course should receive a course release that year.

Rationale

Teaching a new course is difficult and time-consuming.  It involves actual new work on faculty member's part : organization, planning, research, etc. and the actual teaching tends to be much more labor intensive the first time through.  There is an inevitable effect on one's other courses.  It is especially important to have the time and energy to do the first run of a course particularly well so as to determine if it generates student interest and fits well in the curriculum and because the first run lays the ground work for subsequent offerings.   This will encourage curricular innovation and more excellent new courses.  It would also resonate with our commitment to taking seriously the quality what we put on the course schedule.

Impact and Cost

Examine recent faculty meeting minutes to estimate number of new courses approved each year.  Likely only those taught by multiple course faculty would come under this.  Suppose 2 new courses per faculty meeting at 6 meetings per year nets 12 new courses each year.  Net budget impact $50-100k.  Consider distribution of new courses: are there programs that have over-abundance?  under-abundance?  What explains disparity?

Implementation Ideas

• Perhaps require that the release be taken in the same semester (since the whole point is the time and effort it takes to field the course) with possible option of the semester before (the consideration being prepping the course).
• Perhaps 180s are not included?
• Can put a limit on frequency with which faculty member can take advantage of this.  Or limit on departments/programs?  Or a global limit and have either EPS or Provost allocate?

Faculty Driven Trans-Disciplinary Major Pilots

Idea

What if small groups of faculty design, and get approval for "college" majors to be offered for a few years on a pilot basis.  The menu on offer would vary from year to year as lessons were learned and interests evolved.  For something similar, see the programs at Evergreen College.

Introduction 

Like many liberal arts colleges, Mills allows students to “design their own majors.” These institutions also, from time to time, consider curriculum changes including the creation of new majors and (much less frequently) the elimination of existing majors. When the two processes are contrasted, interesting differences emerge. The former leaves the inventiveness in the hands of sophomores, the latter in the hands of distracted committees, status quo bias, and turf battles. The products of the former, even if an excellent idea, are rarely repeated. The latter, even if a bad idea, are rarely repealed. The list of contrasts could go on, but the bottom line does not require it: our processes for curricular innovation leave a lot to be desired.

The future of women’s education depends on changing this. The pace of change in world of higher education is such that offering an education that is just as good as and just the same as except for women only is not likely a sustainable. If we continue to be guided by our 19th and 20th century educational legacy, we stand to produce graduates less and less well prepared for 21st century lives. This will reduce the attractiveness to new students and reduce the success of graduates and, in turn, reduce the level at which they can support the college.

Women’s colleges like Mills, if they are to serve women who will lead change in the coming decades must themselves be able to lead change in what it means to be an institution of higher education. One piece of this is to re-think what it means to “major” in something.

Majoring in the 21st Century 

What should students at women's colleges major in? For a long time we have tried to change women’s position in the social division of labor by getting more women to major in subjects that had tended to be dominated by men. In some fields, like medicine, this project has been quite successful (The Lancet 2009); in others, like computer science, quite disappointing (Stross 2008).

These efforts, while laudable, are, ironically, not very future oriented. The academic paths we encourage our students to follow in pursuit of breaking barriers and ceilings are on maps designed to solve the problems of a previous century. The time has come to think about training leaders not in terms of the legacy of disciplinary boundaries and social problems of the 20th century, but rather for the problems and opportunities that lie ahead.

In other words, what they should major in in the 21st century is the 21st century.

What would this mean? Even without crystal balls, we can guess that the leaders of tomorrow, in technology, arts, and politics, are going to be boundary spanners, most likely not the "interdisciplinarians" that we have talked ineffectively about for the last few decades, but rather "transdisciplinarians" whose tool kits ignore boundaries and who possess the ability to collaborate with colleagues with alien skill sets.

It won't do to reprise previous efforts at top down, monolithic, a priori curriculum reform. We need to eschew the old approach of appointing committees and voting up or down wishy-washy consensus plans based on what we wish we had studied in college. In its place we need an infrastructure that will facilitate faculty experimentation and curricular reconfiguration in ways that do not depend on university committees, decanal decrees or foundation grants. In effect, we need to import some of the virtues of “startup culture” into the academy.

We should explore how women's colleges can reinvent themselves not to prepare women for traditionally male occupations but for a world that is not yet here and to do this in ways that other institutions will want to emulate. It will focus on ways to build an innovation infrastructure that encourages, facilitates and rewards faculty for engaging actively in this process.

A Preliminary Vision 

What if small groups of faculty design, and get approval for "college" majors in consideration of

1. existing intellectual and pedagogical resources, 
2. an analysis of future problems and challenges in American and world society, 
3. an assessment of the opportunity structure in the graduate school and employment markets (to optimally match “novel” majors with career paths likely to be open to them). 

Faculty would commit to a given sequence of courses and advising students for a set number of years. Faculty would then be in the position of “selling” the program to entering students; if there were no student interest, there’d be no program. Similarly, faculty and students would evaluate such programs on an ongoing basis, making changes or even eliminating the programs as indicated. Programs that are particularly successful could be institutionalized in majors “on the books” if desired.

We expect that novel programs like this will prove attractive to excellent students and to outside funders currently desperate to find student oriented new ideas. The institutionalization, not of particular "majors," but of this process, can lead to a general institutional nimbleness that is rarely seen in organizations like liberal arts colleges.

Opportunity

Amid the litany of problems facing women’s liberal arts colleges like Mills lies opportunity. Contrary to the position some have taken, the project of educating women can be called a success without saying that it is over. According to the National Center for Education Statistics women will continue to earn about 60% of the bachelor's degrees awarded in the U.S. each year – over one million per year – during the next decade (National Center for Education Statistics 2010). This is not a small market. But to enroll these students women's colleges need to take the lead transitioning from "just as good as but different" to “different and better.”

Colleges like Mills tend to be small, under-resourced, and have relatively low rates of staff turnover, all factors that make innovation challenging. These same factors can make it possible to create an environment in which small experiments can flourish. We should attempt to take advantage of these characteristics and this demographic trend to expand our impact on society.

Works Cited 

1. National Center for Education Statistics. 2010. “Degrees Conferred by Degree-granting Institutions, by Level of Degree and Sex of Student: Selected Years, 1869-70 Through 2019-20.” http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_279.asp. 
2. ———. “Digest of Education Statistics, 2007.” 
3. Institute of Education Sciences. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_258.asp. 
4. Ryan, Dan. 2012. “Majoring in the 21st Century.” http://majoring21.blogspot.com/. 
5. Stross, Randall. 2008. “What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?” The New York Times, November 16, sec. Business. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/business/16digi.html. 
6. The Lancet. 2009. “Women in Medicine—a Future Assured.” The Lancet 373 (9680) (June): 1997. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(09)61088-6..