I enjoyed reading the article about the future of education in America. Saba lays out a number of problems or trends in education today: access, cost, and the results of both of these, lack of transparency and accountability, lack of American-born students enrolling in courses for science, engineering, technology, and mathematics, lack of innovation because of traditional academic calendars or inter-institutional recognition of transfer credit, etc. Although, with the latter, I tend to agree with Fareed Zakaria. He argues that what differentiates American educ. institutions from India and China is that our universities try to make students into problem solvers, whereas in India and China, students have become accustomed to rote memorization of a textbook. I can vouch for this because I have students on visas from China telling me this all the time. Here's the link to Zakaria:
http://www.good.is/post/fareed-zakaria-state-of-american-ed-not-as-bad-a...
Saba lays out our nation's goals as set forth by the Dept of Education:
1) economic prosperity and global competiteness, and empowerment of citizens.
2) accessibility to all
3) transfers ever-changing workplace skills to Americans
4) ability of educ inst. to adapt to a world changed by technology.
Saba further argues that standardized tests have come under scrutiny and heavily criticized because it's a one-way, passive street and doesn't really predict success of students in the real world.
Saba argues that we need to pay attention to transactional distance or the relationship between the teacher and the learner, as measured by dialog and structure. With the advent of the computer and I would argue the evolution of the telecommunications industry (cellphones) along with technological convergence, the
tendency for different technological systems to evolve towards performing similar tasks, we are now at crossroads where it is possible to take education in a new direction by focusing on individualized instruction.
Saba presents a 'mass customized' scenario. I agreed with many of the ideas in this scenario, but I could picture problems with others. This reminds me of the constructivist theory of education that we've already learned so much about in our previous EDTEC courses.
In my opinion:
Positives:
1) The idea of a 'learning contract' promotes a sense of responsibility and accountability on the part of instructors, students, counselors, administrators, and even instructional designers who are necessary for desining the educational management system (EMS) which includes learning objects, etc. It represents "a map for the student and a blueprint for the institution to provide the necessary learning experience and monitor progress". When reflecting back to life as an undergrad, I remember how it was almost like high school with time and space based classes. I took general requirements that I didn't want or would probably never use. Instead under this scenario, I would have probably not wasted time/money taking courses that didn't help me learn skills that I could have used as a history teacher. Instead, early on, a counselor would have helped me identify specific skills or knowledge domains, lifelong and shorterm goals, and specific career/lifelong objectives. Now that I think about it, I never met with a counselor.
2) The fact that they would need instructional designers opens up job opportunities for all of us! :)
Negatives:
There really is no guarantee that students will encounter 'campus life'. This social interaction, I would argue, is a lifelong skill. When Americans enter the workplace, I would hope they actually have other things to talk about other than school. I always tell my students 'get a life.' Don't become so focused on school that you forget to be a kid--in the case of the university, I don't want students to become robots. Hopefully, videoconferencing, virtual reality-ala Second Life, can help overcome such a problem.
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