No Textbooks, No Lectures, and No Right Answers. Is This What Higher Education Needs?

Norm Shafer for The Chronicle

It was early in the semester, and Lindsey McLucas already felt in over her head.

A senior at James Madison University, she had been a volunteer during the summer at a nonprofit that served homeless people. This course on community innovations, in which students would solve problems for local nonprofits, seemed, she thought, like a good fit.

Instead, she was stunned to hear what her professors expected from her: to solve homelessness in the local community. Her response: “I’m not going to be able to do that.”

As it turned out, nothing about the course was straightforward. It came with a bare-bones syllabus, few prescribed readings, and no textbook. Her professors encouraged her and her classmates to think big, but they provided no road map. For many weeks, McLucas recalls, she simply felt frustrated.

“They tell you all these things and they want you to do all this crazy big stuff and I was like, this is silly, we can’t solve homelessness,” she recalls. “My big thing is, I am in college. If this could happen, it wouldn’t be me doing it.”

Tackling big problems is the point of JMU X-Labs, a four-year-old experiment in undergraduate education. Through a blend of interdisciplinary collaboration, project-based learning, and unscripted, open-ended research, each course takes students through the long and often aggravating process of developing new ways of thinking about complex problems.

They might design drones to help with environmental problems, tackle foreign-policy challenges, build autonomous vehicles, or develop medical innovations to help with the opioid crisis.

If everything goes well, students will produce a prototype of a product, plan, or service in 15 weeks. Nothing ever goes entirely right, however: Teams implode, ideas fail, creativity runs dry.

And that’s exactly what professors here expect. Struggle and failure are important elements of JMU X-Labs. Other campuses have makerspaces, boot camps, and entrepreneurship programs, often designed to fuel start-ups. At JMU, however, the focus is on the education process itself.

All of this has forced professors here to think carefully about what, exactly, they’re supposed to be doing. How do you develop a course in which students learn to be innovative? What is the role of the instructor if he is no longer the authority in the classroom? How do you evaluate students when there are no right answers? And what is innovation, anyway?

These questions are not only deeply important to the people who run JMU X-Labs; they are also existential concerns for higher education at large. College is designed to turn out graduates with a solid grounding in, say, history or engineering, business, or economics. But it often comes up short in preparing students to wrestle with intractable problems and unending disruption.

People can feel this disconnect. According to one survey, only 36 percent of students believe they will graduate with the skills and knowledge to be successful in the workplace. Employers have also expressed skepticism about the ability of recent graduates to apply their knowledge to the real world and to solve complex problems.

Why this kind of education remains a challenge for colleges isn’t hard to fathom. To develop coursework that mirrors the world beyond campus, faculty members must climb out of their disciplinary silos and engage in open-ended exploration alongside their students.

JMU thinks it has such a vehicle in X-Labs. But the program is not for everyone, says Nick Swayne, who has headed it since its inception. Faculty members need to be game enough to teach a class in which they’re as much learner as expert, and students must be intrepid enough to sign up for a course with no predetermined outcome.

“In the age of standardized tests, where there’s always a rubric and right answer and a checklist to get an A, some students can’t handle that,” says Swayne. “We’ve had some students say, ‘This is crazy, I can’t do that.’ We’ve had some faculty say, ‘This is crazy, I’m used to being in charge and you can’t do that.’ We say, ‘This is life.’”

Norm Shafer for The Chronicle

A couple of weeks after McLucas experienced her first wave of doubt, Seán McCarthy, a kinetic Irishman who teaches writing, rhetoric, and technical communication, surveys his students as they trickle into class, tossing their backpacks onto long wooden tables inside the garagelike space of JMU X-Labs, housed in a former television station on the edge of campus.

Here in what Swayne jokingly calls the public university’s “blue-collar d.school” — a reference to Stanford’s prestigious design program — courses are run out of two main rooms, a traditional classroom and a large makerspace. The makerspace is the heart of JMU X-Labs, an industrial interior with concrete walls, a high ceiling, and side rooms filled with computers, drone parts, and 3D printers.

It’s more than a month into the semester, and, in McCarthy’s opinion, the students are floundering. Their interviews have been awful, their research minimal, their ideas obvious. But he’s not worried: This is pretty much what he anticipated would happen.

“It’s bad cop tonight,” he says quietly, with a smile.

He is joined by his co-instructors: Joi Merritt, an elementary-education expert and first-timer teaching an X-Labs class; Bill Grant, another X-Labs novice, whose focus is normally on health economics; and Aaron Kishbaugh, who manages the lab and brings with him experience as a community organizer.

During the first few weeks of class, students had been prepping for their big projects. They heard from representatives of the community groups they would be helping, learned interviewing and research techniques, and engaged in short, if somewhat puzzling, exercises — like making lamps from paper.

One group is working with an elementary school that wants to create a makerspace for students. Another is helping a traditional thrift shop modernize and develop a long-range sustainability plan. McLucas’s team is assisting the Suitcase Clinic, a nonprofit that provides health care in local shelters and human-service agencies around Harrisonburg.

Tonight they begin the process of presenting, and defending, their research and ideas to professors and classmates. This is where the tough-love portion of the course comes in.

Over the next two and half hours, McCarthy and his partners will challenge, cajole, encourage, and often frustrate these undergraduates.

The thrift shop that’s looking for a long-range sustainability plan? The team — somewhat predictably — floats the idea of promoting it on social media to encourage JMU students to shop there. The professors push back. How, they ask, does that help build the operation 25 years out?

The Suitcase Clinic? The students suggest finding a neighborhood church willing to support the operation. The professors treat this as rudimentary — “We need really big ideas,” says Grant — and suggest they explore the root causes of homelessness and study how other communities support similar nonprofits.

The discussion bounces around but carries a clear message: Think bigger, work harder, dig deeper. McCarthy calls this “relentless feedback.” “They’re thinking in predictable ways, and that’s fine,” he says later. “But they need to connect the dots.”

McLucas considered the experience something else: incredibly frustrating.

“I’m used to professors telling me what they want, and I do what they want, and I get a grade,” she recalls. “Now it was very much working with them and trying to figure out a solution to a problem nobody had a solution to.”

How do you teach a 20-year-old to dive into the problems of homelessness, design a drone to help with historical conservation, or devise interventions around opioid addiction?

College students don’t lack ambition or creativity, professors here say, but the education system has trained them to think within existing boundaries and frameworks. If you put them in charge of figuring out what they need to learn, they are willing to wrestle with uncertainty, challenge themselves, and work long hours to find answers.

JMU X-Labs courses are built around the concept of design thinking, an approach to problem-solving championed by Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, more commonly known as the d.school.

In practical terms, JMU students are expected to read widely and interview extensively — as many as 50 people over the course of the semester, including those from the groups they’re helping and from related organizations, fields, and industries. That exploration will, ideally, equip them to clearly define the problem they want to tackle, come up with possible solutions, then create prototypes and test them out. Throughout the semester they will also take detailed notes on their readings and their ideas so that the information can be turned over to their community partners at the end of the semester.

“It’s about as far away from traditional chalk and talk as you can get,” says McCarthy.

For students in “Community Innovations,” that meant conducting at least two interviews a week, plus readings, site visits, phone calls, and team meetings. McLucas and her teammates researched homelessness. They researched health care. The Affordable Care Act. Mental health. Temporary housing.

In the weeks after McCarthy played bad cop, the teams churned out more and more solutions. McLucas’s team proposed a health hotline, then an app that connects people to resources in the community, then a mentoring program, then JMU internships at the Suitcase Clinic.

Too small, they were told over and over again.

OK, they said, let’s use 3D printers to build more affordable housing. Let’s get more federal funding for Section 8 housing.

Sorry, the professors said: Too big.

Through it all, her professors were incredibly supportive, McLucas notes. They made themselves available at all hours, directed students to resources, told inspiring stories from past X-Labs classes, helped teams build out their ideas, and shared their own research.

“No one was hiding anything, like, ‘I have a secret answer and I’m not going to tell you.’ They were trying to help us along the way,” she said.

But her frustration continued to mount. “I knew that they had a plan of what was happening,” she says. “But I didn’t get it.”

Innovation is tricky to define, let alone teach. That is one reason why JMU X-Labs professors spend as much time focused on the process as the final product. Have the students done enough research? Did they identify the right questions to ask? And how do their solutions attempt to answer those questions?

Benjamin S. Selznick, an assistant professor of postsecondary analysis and leadership at JMU, has attempted to map out some of the skills that go into innovative thinking, on the idea that to understand what it is leads to understanding how it can be taught.

In a recent paper, “Measuring Undergraduates’ Innovation Capacities,” he and Matthew J. Mayhew, a professor of educational administration at Ohio State University, divide these traits into three groups: intrapersonal, social, and cognitive. To be truly innovative, people need to develop skills like motivation, proactivity, teamwork, persuasive communication, creativity, confidence, and a desire to innovate. Research, they say, shows that you can increase these skills through practice.

“These are practices we’ve seen popping up in engineering and elsewhere,” says Selznick. “Bringing it all together in one place with interdisciplinary groups of students, with faculty, with external partners, that to me is what’s really exciting about JMU X-Labs, and where it’s really novel in terms of pedagogy and student experience.”

The people who run JMU X-Labs say that the structure of their courses is integral to their success. Each course is effectively a network of courses taught at the same time, with every member of the teaching team listing the course in his or her department. So a physics major signs up for a physics course on drones, and a technical-writing major enrolls in a technical-writing course on drones.

Each member of the teaching team is also responsible for enrolling a few students — typically juniors and seniors — to ensure a multidisciplinary classroom. Classes are taught in the evening to minimize scheduling conflicts. The program remains fairly small, in part because of these logistical challenges: On a campus with 20,800 undergrads, 264 students are enrolled in JMU X-Labs courses this academic year.

Teaching teams meet well before the semester starts to build the curriculum, using the principles of backward design. Patrice Ludwig, an assistant professor of biology who has been involved with X-Labs since its inception, says the goal is to define those lasting pieces of knowledge and skills they want students to walk away with, the things they’ll remember five or 10 years from now.

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In a course on using drones to solve environmental problems, for example, she and her team decided they wanted students to understand how drones operate, the biology of the organisms upon which they are working, and design theory and design thinking. Each professor can also add on a few extra things for students in their majors. For biology students, Ludwig’s additional goals included using math and statistics to analyze biological phenomena.

X-Labs professors say these course are effective, in part, because they build on students’ disciplinary expertise. An education this unorthodox is meant to synthesize their knowledge and skills, not replace traditional learning.

One overarching goal is for students to learn how to communicate their work to a variety of audiences. Navigating team dynamics is another key outcome. Not only do students have to figure out how to work as a group, they have to adapt to the fact that each of them comes with a different set of disciplinary skills.

Emma Richer can speak to that.

A nursing major, Richer came across her X-Labs course, called “Hacking for Defense,” almost by accident. Her team studied the challenges that government, nonprofit, and emergency-services organizations have in communicating during a crisis — say, the California wildfires. It was a huge learning curve, she says, given that she knew nothing about the subject.

Add to that a dysfunctional team in which several students weren’t pulling their weight, Richer says, and she often felt like she was failing: “I really think it was the hardest class I took at JMU,” she says.

Week after week she interviewed, researched, and designed prototypes. But more important than the final product, she says, was how the course improved her confidence in her ability to think creatively, keep an open mind, and communicate with a wide range of people.

Now a nurse working in Washington, D.C., Richer reflects on a day when a patient went into cardiopulmonary arrest. Although only 23 at the time, she says, she was able to take charge of the situation to get a team in place to revive the patient. She credits her X-Labs experience for helping instill that confidence.

Nick Sipes also had a steep learning curve. A self-described lazy kid in high school, Sipes had become a strong student in college, but didn’t particularly like being in a classroom. He also hated working in teams, he says, because he often felt he was the smartest one in the group.

What he loved was building robots. So when he came across an X-Labs class on drones, which counted toward his physics major, he signed up.

Sipes ended up taking two courses. For the first time in his college career, he says, he worked alongside people who were good at things he wasn’t, like communication or industrial design. He saw firsthand how his knowledge of physics was a piece of the puzzle — an important one, but just a piece. He also had to communicate what he was doing to his team, and to the outside world.

“In real life,” he says, “no client is ever going to come up to you and say, ‘Hey, will you build me a robot? Don’t tell me anything at all. Don’t talk to me. I just want this robot to show up on my doorstep in six months.’

“I realized that even if I thought I could do it by myself, I couldn’t.”

Elise Trissel

If defining and teaching innovation is difficult, assessing it can be even more challenging. Instead of relying primarily on tests, papers and quizzes, many JMU X-Labs courses have started using a learning record, which attempts to capture both what and how students learn. The portfolio-style assessment system requires students to record their progress at least twice a week, focusing on what they did and what they learned from it.

A student might write about the challenges of effective teamwork, an interview she conducted, or some research she did and how it fit into her project.

Ludwig says that one way to measure students’ development is to see how many pivots they make over the course of a semester in their exploration and analysis of a problem. That’s one reason why professors don’t let students settle on the first idea they come up with — and why so many students feel overwhelmed for much of the semester.

Instructors may also use some external measures, such as a critical-thinking assessment test sponsored by the National Science Foundation, or the Torrance Test, which evaluates creative thinking.

Ludwig is starting to survey students who have been through JMU X-Labs to see what stuck with them. Anecdotally, she hears students say they’ve never stopped tinkering with ideas they developed in class. “The confidence they build from trial and error seems to have a pretty big effect,” she says, “because they see that a failure isn’t a life failure.”

That was Sipes’s experience in his X-Labs course on using drones to solve global problems, like landmine disposal and bee-colony collapse. His team worked with a graduate student in Cartagena, Colombia, to design a drone that could help map the effects of climate change on a historic city wall.

His team’s project turned out to be a bit of bust: The winds were so fierce near the wall in Cartagena that the students couldn’t make the drone fly. It may not have been the best engineering solution, he says, but it inspired him to start his own 3D-modeling business after graduation. That didn’t work out either, but it led Sipes down a new path: He is getting a master’s degree in robotics engineering.

He credits the course, and his physics professor, Kevin Giovanetti, in particular, for giving him the confidence to think of himself as an engineer. “I owe JMU X-Labs, like, 97 percent of my success for the rest of my life.”

Elise Trissel

JMU may be unusual in developing such a wide range of semester-long, credit-bearing, innovation-focused courses, but other campuses have also created programs to teach their students similar skills. Vanderbilt University built the Wond’ry, an innovation and entrepreneurship center that offers a range of courses. Lehigh University stresses creative inquiry in courses offered through its Mountaintop Initiative.

Trinity College, in Connecticut, runs the Liberal Arts Action Lab in collaboration with community partners. Ball State University has a long history of engaging students in semester-long immersive learning projects. And Hacking for Defense, a program adopted by JMU X-Labs, originated at Stanford.

JMU is now wrestling with how to expand X-Labs. Recruiting faculty into the program remains a challenge, in part because it’s so time-consuming. It also runs counter to traditional teaching. “If the first two questions are, where’s the syllabus and how much extra do I get paid,” says Swayne, who leads the lab, “I know they’re not a good fit here.”

Neither is it right for every student. Some drop out or check out if they can’t handle the unstructured environment and demands on their time.

But the program has received strong backing from the JMU administration, and support from a wide range of organizations. Some, such as the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and NATO, have acted as partners in particular courses. Others, like the defense contractor BAE Systems, have offered financial support. The state has also provided financial support through 4-VA, a partnership among several universities in Virginia. Administrators hope that JMU X-Labs can also help them draw professors and undergraduates to campus.

The lab has also raised its profile at JMU with the creation of informal, pop-up classes and has drawn more than 1,000 students into the space through open lab hours.

McLucas doesn’t have the distance yet from her course to say what its larger impact may be. But at some point in the semester, the ideas her professors were trying to convey started making sense. The goal, she realizes, wasn’t literally to end homelessness, but to understand and address the deeper problems that lead to it.

Her team’s final idea — the one that got the thumbs up — was to build a health clinic inside a mobile shipping container. The container both expands the services the Suitcase Clinic can offer and allows it to bring its services to low-income housing communities and other places where people lack quality health care. And it can be placed just steps away from where homeless people are.

Once her team hit upon the idea, she says, her professors helped assemble a prototype, including finding an actual shipping container. They presented their full report, with reams of research, to the clinic.

“It wasn’t so much about the grade you’re getting, but it’s about being able to think in a whole new way,” says McLucas, who plans to continue her work after graduation with the nonprofit in Virginia Beach where she was a volunteer. “There was no right answer. Some of them were bad and some of them were good. The main thing was there wasn’t an answer the professor was trying to lead me to.”