Planet+Change

On Planet Change the time capsule visits the shifts in learning.
Learning: The Currency in the Future Individual and Communal Learning Self-Conscious Institutions

Learning: The Currency in the Future
In the future, learning has long spilled outside the brick and mortar walls of higher education classrooms and drives the knowledge economy, every organization, and its workers. The demand for learning is so great as to exceed the capacity of facilities of higher learning to provide it. Hence many other corporate partnerships follow like that between the automaker BMW who funded chairs at Clemson Universityin Southern Georgia partially to further its own research and development needs and to exercise its social mission of good corporate citizenship.

The staid traditions of academia in granting grades and giving credit fail to meet the needs of the marketplace for standards. Standards or competencies better package and represent the skills, behaviour, performances and knowledge represented by grades. Entrepeneurs or communities of practise continue to develop assessment protocols that efficiently package the skill sets of higher learning for work in certain arenas. Certain universities, in the wake of the example set by Western Govenors University exclusvely trade in assessment and accreditation, largely because grades become increasingly more meaningless.

ePortfolios which showcase the performance and application of skills, talents, insights, attitudes, and personal development become indispensable. Certain institutions like Athabasca University, with its critical mass of scholars devoted to DE, lead the way in ascertaining accepted protocols for assessing an ePortfolio, adding to an international reputation for openness and leading-edge approaches to learning assessment, evaluation and recognition.

Individual and Communal Learning
With the advent of ePortfolios and the continuous tracking of achievement, skills, performances of understanding, talents and attitudes, indivudual education plans (Cleveland-Innes & Sangra, in press) created by a student in conjuction with a mentor begin to organize learning outcomes.

The social affordances of the web create learning communities and a new kind of learning wherein production of knowledge mashes into consumption of knowledge. The mass collaboration afforded by web 2.0 has resulted in a different learner and learning process. In higher education, a learner is changed into a prosumer. Web 2.0 social media allows for greater participation, greater collaboration, and greater engagement creating a prosumer: a learner who both consumes and produces knowledge, artifacts, learning experiences etc.

In learning facilitated by web 2.0 affordances, the learning managment system will be replaced by less formal open learning systems that are oriented from the learners' needs and curiosity. A more nurturing role and active role for the teacher will be inserted into instructional design. The role of teachers and teaching will be to bring learners into communities of practise and nudge them into prosumption. In these communities of practise the leadership is distributed and developed amongst all the members, with members sharing and exchanging expertise and skills on which a reputation may be built.

DE teachers will actively embrace a role aa mentor and coach empowering learners through bringing about learner awareness of the conditions needed to favour learning, especially the parameters for self-correction. Instead of focussing on obtaining a mark for an end product, the community/class will judge it and will make up the criteria by which it will be assessed. Learners will become aware of conditions that optimize their learning and how to right themselves if they go astray or how to optimize their learning and judge its success.

Increasingly accreditation for learning will be outsourced to specialists within communities of practice. Universities will need to hinge their programs to accreditation agencies from outside their traditional scope like Microsoft's credentials for example.

Web 3.0 and the semantic web follows on the affordances of web 2.0 allowing for much greater integration of the web into the personal preferences and patterns of each individual almost to the point of mind-reading ie., the semantic web will be able to provide choices based on computer aligorithms that interface knowledge of personal patterns with available resources. Again learners gain a greater understanding of their own learning and efficiency in learning through affordances of web 3.0 andthe semantic web to optimize and personalize the learning space.

Self-Conscious Institutions
Institutions of higher education will need to become much more responsive and agile. The shift will be from pedagogy to andragogy. Pedagogy structures obedience, dependence and servitude to 'the master' in the clear power differential between teacher and student. The word learner captures the nuance of difference between pedagogy and andragogy. A learner has agency, options, wherewithal and self-direction and is therefore more on equal footing with the teacher and worthy of respect. Andragogy accords more power and respect to the learner to make decisions about whether the learning is worthwhile and useful. Institutions are going to need to treat their students as customer-learners, who will go to the institution that best meets their needs.

In the knowledge economy, universities will need to become learning organizations, conducting focus groups, gathering data, copying and improving on the innovations of other institutions, and making their bureaucracies more customer-oriented and respectful. Institutions will need to provide more formative assessments, more competency based outcomes, better mentoring for students, better support for teaching, better data collection on learners. Leadership for these changes is present now in the communities of practise amongst DE practitioners/students. One outcropping of a new focus on the consumer is an idea that I have for a "mystery students' business. This business would exploit the learning needs of the university in the same way as mystery shoppers provide feedback for businesses. Leaders who hire a consumer -research firm designed around the need to know more about the consumer-learner and the consumer-learners satisfaction with their learning, feedback, and experience will develop a competitive advantage. Knowledge of the consumer-learner, the learner's experience with the institution will accord greater viability and vitality.

Academic freedom notwithstanding, the best institutions of HE will require credentials for teaching as well as subject matter expertise. The new professoriate will use simulations, virtual reality experiences, live polling, interactive groups, back chats, and lab/field work to move learning along. From the onset of higher education, students will be directly engaged in the practices of the discipline to which they aspire to belong or experience. Instead of lectures, professors will record their lectures as a podcast or video and students will be required in class to work with the material or professors will set the time aside for individual or small group mentoring (interview with New York University President John Sexton on Charlie RoseJuly 23, 2010). The new leadership in universities will need to promote a model of meaningful learner engagement within the practices of the academic discipline along with mentoring to promote greater personal development. The teacher will be the servant and the student will be the master in the new paradigm.