Changing Higher Education

Harvard inaugurates its Initiative for Learning and Teaching

ON ONE HAND:

The good news is that Harvard is beginning to play a public leadership role in increasing student learning! The Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT) had its inaugural event, a symposium, on February 3. HILT was founded as the result of a generous $40M gift from Harvard alumni Gustave and Rita Hauser. The invitation only event brought in several outside luminaries with considerable expertise in learning, such as Physics Nobel Laureate Carl Weiman, and around 300 people from the Harvard community including Harvard's own luminary in the field, Eric Mazur.

The poor state of undergraduate student learning over all has been chronicled in many books and studies (see an earlier discussion here).  One of the most readable of these books was written by Harvard's own Derek Bok - Our Underachieving Colleges, so the issues are not unfamiliar at Harvard itself. As Bok (and many others) pointed out, the problem is not that there aren't many well documented ways to greatly increase student learning, it is that these methods have not been adopted widely by colleges. The powerful forces of the status quo have dominated teaching and learning.  

A valuable new offering at StraighterLine

A key issue for one of our potential disruptors, StraighterLine, has been creating credibility among four-year institutions so that its students can transfer their credits easily when they are ready to enter a bachelor's program.  Although their courses have been blessed by The American Council on Education's College Credit Recommendation Service, with current, input-focused approaches to accreditation, StraighterLine is unlikely to be able to achieve the stamp of approval of accreditation for its courses. Recently, in a very interesting move, StraighterLine has begun an effort to shift the focus away from input-focused accreditation towards student outcomes.