Hi. I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, covering innovation in and around academe. Subscribe here. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week:
Shark Tank …
Let’s start with a disclaimer: Vetting the pitches for our Shark Tank: Edu Edition at SXSW EDU is an utterly unscientific process. The goal is to unearth some interesting ideas and have some fun exploring their pros and cons.
Having now done that for five years (coverage of past installments appears here, here, here, and here), I realize that it also provides a window into some of the things that bug folks about higher education.
For the 2019 version, three professors and one instructional designer came to Austin, Tex., last week and braved the friendly grilling by one newbie “shark,” Catharine Bond Hill of Ithaka S+R, and two veterans — Paul Freedman, co-founder and CEO of the Entangled Group, and me. My colleague Scott Carlson was the M.C.
For their effort, we offered the contestants no money — just plenty of free critiques and advice. Oddly, they actually seemed to appreciate it. Here’s how their pitches shaped up.
Kristen Slack: A social network dedicated to the craft of teaching
The pitch: Slack, a professor of social work at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, recognized that professors create “a lot of cool things” in the process of teaching their courses, but found “no go-to place for sharing” these unpublished lectures, podcasts, rubrics, and the like. So she took out a second mortgage on her house to finance the development of Prof2Prof, a social-networking site that lets faculty members share teaching materials with one another. The idea is not just to help professors reach beyond “our immediate networks” for teaching ideas, but also to create an new educational ecosystem. “Most faculty teach,” she told us. “I wanted to create a platform that elevated that contribution to higher education on par with research.”
The sharks’ take: We all loved the idea. We just wondered whether it would be used. Hill asked if the site would include features that let members rate the content. Slack said there is a way to give feedback, but she decided against public-facing ratings, fearing they would dissuade people from sharing their work. The site is free for professors, but Slack plans to generate revenue from advertisements from publishers and others. It has only about a thousand members now, but according to Slack, there’s “a big jump in activity in July.” Freedman, whose firm invests in educational companies, noted that Slack’s biggest challenge would be to get enough activity on the site to make others want to join it too, and to provide robust-enough tools to help professors find what they care about.
Edna O. Schack: A plan to flip the curriculum to delay general education
The pitch: Schack, a professor of mathematics education, has taught at Morehead State University for 32 years. She proposed rethinking the curricula so that students could take their more practical courses first, maybe even earning a certificate, before digging into general education. An approach like this, she said, could help regional public institutions like hers find their niche in an increasingly competitive market.
The sharks’ take: Mixed enthusiasm. Freedman, who has argued for this idea himself, said he thought it would appeal to students for whom “paying for food and paying for rent” is the first priority. But he noted that it’s not a simple switch: “You have to convince the math faculty that the HVAC certificate is of equal value to these things that they’ve been teaching for years.” (He wasn’t saying that it was or wasn’t, but you get the point.) Hill suggested that a curricular flip could be accomplished with more deliberate thinking about a pathway that begins with a certificate — the same “certificate first” idea now being championed by the folks at BYU-Pathway Worldwide. As I told Schack in Austin, if she was looking for allies for her cause, she should start with them.
Alan Cheville: A new approach to higher ed, straight out of Dungeons & Dragons
The pitch: Arguing that nothing in higher education could change “unless you change the underlying structures,” Cheville, a professor of electrical engineering at Bucknell University, declared that his idea was to “change that structure through Dungeons & Dragons.” He wasn’t actually pitching the game. Instead he proposed replacing traditional courses with the principles of role-playing games, giving students the chance to develop agency by going through a series of quests. “Quests, unlike courses, are not linear. They’re circular. They’re personalizable,” he said. He confessed a big problem with his grand plan: Personalization might not come cheap. “I need an eccentric billionaire for this idea,” he told us.
