The 21st century opened amidst an information revolution which promises to transform higher education as dramatically in this century as industrialization did in the last. Many things have already changed, but the real revolution will come when we harness information technology to personalize education: optimizing our education of an increasingly diverse student body, creating much greater student motivation and engagement, and accomplishing more with less.
This talk describes how research using data about the processes and products of education led the University of Michigan to discover patterns of inequity in STEM education, develop an array of new student support technologies, and launch a major new Foundational Course Initiative.
9. • >98% of these are:
• Small & changeable
• Taught in idiosyncratic,
engaged, and creative ways
• <2% of them are:
• Large & relatively stable
• Taught in industrial, remote,
and tradition bound ways
One reason?
There are two ways to teach a
large number of students…
We have 9200 courses at UM
15. Six Asilomar principles
1. Respect for the rights and dignity of learners: transparency,
consent, protection of privacy
2. Beneficence: maximize benefits, minimize harm
3. Justice: benefit all, reduce inequalities
4. Openness: learning and research are public goods
5. The humanity of learning: insight, judgment, & discretion are
essential, we should keep learning humane
6. Continuous consideration: ongoing, inclusive discussion of
changing ethical circumstances
http://asilomar-highered.info/
Where to have this
conversation?
21. What do we measure?
• What we measure now:
– Admissions information
– Course taking & grades
– Degrees & honors
• What we’re starting to
record (explosive growth)
– Process of learning:
clickstreams, discussions,
video, course structures
– Products of learning: forum
posts, essays, papers,
presentations, theses
• What we want to have:
Detailed, relevant, evolving
portraits of every
student's background,
interests, goals, and
accomplishments
• These portraits should be
used to help students,
faculty, administrators,
staff better understand
higher education
52. Expert tailored communication
• Built on 20+ yrs of digital health coaching
• Aggregates rich student info from many sources
to tailor feedback, encouragement, & advice
• Tailoring on both what to say, how to say it, who
speaks: w/testimonials from peers, etc.
• All content written & tested by behavior change
experts, faculty from disciplines, students
• A tool for humane personalization w/student
agency: allowing us to speak, share data, connect
57. Focus on Foundational Courses
• Large, relatively stable,
mostly introductory courses
• Serve students with
especially various
backgrounds
• Serve students with
especially various interests
and goals
• Foundational courses
where we educate at scale
are ideal environments for
the application of analytics
• Best large courses taught in
multigenerational teams
with role specialization
• Roles include:
– Course management
– Delivery of instruction on
large and small scales
– Instructional design
– Technology
– Assessment & analytics
– Student support
• Courses should be broadly
‘instrumented’ for study
These ‘foundational’ courses exist across many disciplines, most of which are outside
the natural sciences, so this initiative is campus-wide.
60. Educating @ scale in 21st century
• Teaching at scale in the
information age affords
unprecedented
opportunities for
personalization
• Realizing these is a major
sociotechnical challenge
• We are addressing both the
social and technical
challenges associated with
this task at Michigan
• Our campus is creating a
laboratory for learning at
scale, connecting education
research & practice
• This will become a “learning
higher education”
community in which we
learn continuously from
experience in context
• It can all be done in a
student-centered way while
protecting privacy