I have been reflecting deeply on some startling predictions I read recently that indicate significant changes within the organizations of workplaces. In an effort to be adaptable and agile in today's rapid changing environment, business leaders are embracing social business models. One of the major changes that is expected to occur in just a few years is a significant increase in the use of social networking within organizations to facilitate stakeholder relationships and communications -- replacing today's commonly used tools, the telephone and email (Gartner).
This led me to discover some compelling data from IBM's 2012 study, Connected Generation: Perspectives from Tomorrow’s Leaders in a Digital World, which examined the perceptions and values of a global sample of 3,400 college and university students. The study found that the way college students are using social media is fostering a greater sense of awareness of global issues, increasing an individual's perception of his/her voice in society, and increasing engagement in real life activities. There is no data to indicate that college age students value virtual relationships more than face-to-face relationships but there is evidence that these two types of connections are valued equally.
The IBM report certainly doesn't paint the typical portrait of the technologically obsessed, apathetic college student that is so commonly referenced in discussions about technology and college teaching. In fact, it seems to suggest that engaging in the use of social technologies has some educationally compelling outcomes.
What are the takeaways here for higher education?
We must be active participants in the social era. The ability to use social technologies to foster relationships is a highly valued skilled in a global, digital society. As the use of social networking trickles from informal learning (i.e. the perceived "fun" stuff like YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.) into the workplace, faculty, staff, and administrators must recognize that they too must step up and join the conversation. Twitter handles will need to become commonplace, just as email addresses are. Experiencing the value that comes from interacting with one's own Personal Learning Network (PLN) will need to become part of the natural progression of being part of a campus community.
Social media tools are valuable assets to the college learning landscape. The boundaries between formal learning and informal learning in the social era must blur in order to sustain relevancy, students for success in the social workplace, as well as find one's authentic self through the development of one's own digital footprint. Recognizing this is one thing, overcoming barriers (like leading the way through the gray areas of FERPA because it's the right thing to do) will set the successful organizations of the future apart from the rest.
"Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation." -Brene Brown Risk-taking is the new norm. This is true for professors, for support staff, for administrators, for college presidents, and for students. We all need to learn to embrace discomfort, to experience vulnerability, and to know that through this pathway we will find new opportunities to create the learning spaces of tomorrow and the learners of tomorrow. This is hard. This is very hard. The successful college leaders of the future will be those who will do the things they imagine to be the right thing to do, instead of just talk about them or imagine someone else doing them.
Last night I had the tremendous pleasure of facilitating the Mobile Learning Think Tank workshop at Pasadena City College, which was the brainchild of Rachel Fermi of PCC. It was an evening of sharing teaching experiments and inspiring new ways of thinking about learning through the use of social media and mobile applications (or both).
Ideas Really Do Grow On Trees by Michael Kieley
The evening opened with a presentation from Michael Kieley from Loyola Marymount who shared an activity idea from his class Visual Thinking. Michael took us through a visual journey about the power of mindmapping to facilitate brainstorming and organic blossoming of new ideas. Kieley has taught his class for more than a decade in a traditional face-to-face setting. I was honored (and inspired) to hear that he transformed his entire class after hearing my presentation last spring, Painting, Power and Pedagogy, at EduSoCal10. (And I should note that he attended the presentation virtually through the online UStream session...applause for the potential of technology here to engage remote audiences!) Since then he has blended web-based technologies into his students learning, including student-generated podcasts and VoiceThreads. That's an awesome feeling.
Mindmaps are visual renderings that begin with topic in the center, surrounded by sprouts that bifurcate into smaller branches. Participating in this growth-oriented, organic model of thinking, which is found plentifully in nature (trees, rivers, etc.), pulls students out of their linear thought pattern and dislocates the human (or should I say "adult") tendency to accept the first idea that "sounds good."
Michael shared how he offers students the option to use MindNode, a mobile app, to create mind maps on the fly from anywhere at anytime. I'm intrigued by the app and love that it offers a simple mind map creation process (drag, drop, label) and then offer the option to import the maps into a desktop to integrate hyperlinks, images, etc. Here is Michael's presentation from last night. Enjoy.
Welcome to our Classroom Dr. Spivey! by Lori Rusch
The award for student empowerment and inspiration goes to Lori Rusch for her enriching presentation about a Skype-based, student-organized and facilitated interview of a world renown art historian, Dr. Nigel Spivey. You may know Dr. Spivey from his engaging PBS video series, How Art Made the World (and if you don't, check it out!).
Rusch is a self-proclaimed "Freeway Flyer," a term used frequently in higher ed to describe the reality of part-time instructors who teach at multiple campuses, typically with no office and limited to no access to campus resources and often no clarity about the existence of their job from term to term. Lori's dedication to teaching and learning was evident long prior to her presentation. It was actually here on my blog several months ago when she wrote to me about this amazing student-driven project -- so it was quite a treat to hear the story in person and meet her.
The "event" that she shared was not part of her lesson plan. It was the result of student curiosity and a passion for learning. The process began when Lori shared clips of "How Art Made the World" with her high World Art History students at Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. The video series inspired quite a passion and curiosity about Dr. Spivey amongst the students -- who would imagine an art historian becoming a celebrity on a high school campus? Go figure. Rusch let this energy and wonder flow naturally on its own and one day, she proposed to her students that maybe the class could interview him. The students responded with looks of awe and asked, "Why would he want to talk to us?" She shared with them that Dr. Spivey is a professor -- a teacher -- at Cambridge University and if he is an educator, why would he not want to speak to a group of students? Then the conversation unraveled and resulted in the ultimate question -- "Could we do a video conference with him?" Isn't that a beautiful scene to imagine in your mind?
Next, the students drafted a long letter to Dr. Spivey and crowd sourcing their own interview questions in Facebook, all facilitated -- not managed or controlled -- by their awesome teacher. Dr. Spivey replied and accepted the invitation. Ms. Rusch elected to leverage Skype for the interview platform -- totally free -- and had a preliminary chat with Dr. Spivey to lay the groundwork.
The interview occurred on a Friday morning -- 2 hours before the students' classes actually began. Colleagues told Lori that she'd be lucky to "get two kids to show up." They were wrong, oh so wrong! Not only did students come but they packed the room. These students arrived to hear/see this interview because they were excited and inspired, not because they had to be there. All the myths and comments I've heard about students "these days" being apathetic and unwilling to do more than they're required to do are sunk by this story -- which, I think, is why I love it so much!
Below I'm sharing two resources that Lori shared with us: 1) a presentation showing screenshots of the Facebook group and promotional posters the students made to encourage campus participation at the interview and 2) a clip of the live interview which focuses on her amazing, inspirational students. BRAVO!
Increasing Course Access and Communications with Blackboard Mobile Learn by Roopa Mathur
Blackboard is the dominant course management system used throughout higher education (while this statistic, I believe, will continue to shift as open source software redefines institutional preferences and options for personalized learning). Despite the widespread use of Blackboard, many faculty aren't leveraging the option to share their course content with their students through the Blackboard Mobile Learn app.
Ms. Mathur shared an eloquent picture of what the app experience is for a student user and noted that delivering her content through the app requires "zero extra time" on her part -- an important point for faculty to realize. What I was impressed with was the ability to actually participate through the app, not just push content out to students. The discussion board feature of Blackboard is live and dynamic on an app, which is nice. But I do wonder how engaging in a discussion board through a mobile app changes the quality of the interactions. Personally, I moved away from discussion boards and towards blogging and VoiceThreads because I found most student participation too shallow in DBs. The rhythm of mobile access is quick and occurs in spurts -- these are questions I'm left with. While I like to interaction option, it seems like a microblog (like a Twitter status update) would be more appropriate than a discussion forum on a mobile app?? Thoughts?
Increasing Student Engagement in the Classroom with Poll Everywhere by Sandra C. Haynes
Our final activity idea was shared by Sandra C. Haynes, of Pasadena City College. Ms. Haynes shared her personal experiences teaching large lecture classes to students who are increasingly more connected and interested in their cell phones than her art history lectures. This reminded me of a story that was shared by a session presenter at the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) Focus Session on Mobile Learning last spring. I read about this story in subsequent white paper written by Malcolm Brown and Victoria Diaz. There were two villages in China that each came up with unique solutions to the same problem. Each village devised its own method for managing the overflow of melting snow from the mountains at springtime. One village elected to construct dams, restricting the water's access to the village itself by forcing it out. The other chose to build channels throughout the village which would allow the water to run freely and, ultimately, become integrated into the village's landscape. This story is, of course, an analogy for the use of mobile devices in classes today. They are there. What to do with them is the question posed to faculty.
Well, Sandra has created effective channels in her teaching to welcome the use of cell phones by her students. She astutely noted that only a small percentage of her students own smart phones, which sharply contradicts the statistics shared in the 2009 ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology that notes about half of higher ed students have smart phones. This point is important, as community college student demographics are unique and there are too few studies about technology ownership and use that focus explicitly on this student demographic (!).
So, in her quest for identifying a teaching activity using cell phones, her criteria was the use of a cell phone with SMS text messaging capabilities. She turned to Poll Everywhere which is a simple, web-based tool that offers the option to create poll in advance or on the fly (which she demonstrated last night) for free (up to 30 responses). Upgrading to a premium service yields more options. But the free version is pretty great and, as a group, we were able to respond to Sandra's poll she created before our very eyes. We all shared a chuckle when Sandra told us how much quicker her students were at responding, however (grin).
One of our virtual attendees (who engaged our discussion through Elluminate/CCC Confer), Zack from Folsom Lake College, noted that his campus has integrated PollEverywhere across the campus on electronic screens, enabling a constant pulse check on students' thoughts, opinions, and perspectives. Cooool!
Posterous Group Blog Experiment
In an effort to capture more ideas and continue to flow of discussion from the evening, I took my own risk with a social media tool experiment. I created a group blog with posterous.com. I am impressed and will use it again! Posterous has a reputation for making blog posting as simple as possible, and it didn't let me down. A user who wishes to post to a posterous blog (users can be restricted to a single author, a selected group or totally public), simply sends an email to a pre-subscribed posterous email address. That's it. Oh -- and media is embedded automatically. For example, I attached a PDF of a brief presentation and posterous engaged the use of Scribd to embed the pdf directly into my post. If you include a YouTube video url (not embed code) in the post, posterous also converts the url into an embedded video.
Check out our group blog here: http://mobilethinktank.posterous.com You'll find some great ideas and resources shared by Catherine Hillman, another virtual participant, about how she teaches her students how to leverage social media to manage their lives.
When using Posterous for a group, it becomes like a virtual bulletin board for posting ideas, examples, or evidence that meets the group's overarching topic or goal. If I were teaching art history now, I'd put my ancient art history students into groups and have them take photographs of buildings (think houses, strip malls, everything!) in their community that reflect influence of ancient architectural elements -- barrel vault, arch, pediment, etc. I did this as an individual project years ago and it was always a hit -- but making it mobile would be really incredible.
Live from the Archive!
Well, that about sums up the fantastic evening. Again, I was truly inspired by the energy and dynamism of the presentation and the conversation that followed -- I hope it continues! If you're as excited as I am, don't miss the archive of the Elluminate/CCC Confer session (which is closed captioned). Click here to launch the archive.
Today was a historic day. The first ever White House Community College was held in Washington, DC. The veil that has been cast over the vital role community colleges has been lifted.
Read the transcript of the entire speech here. My Community College Roots
I am proud to have seven years of experience as a full-time faculty member at a community college. My former students still serve as inspirations to me. I work at home now and keep letters, cards and artwork from former students nearby. They were given to me as "thank you" gifts -- for being an inspiration in their lives. Today, those objects of gratitude motivate me every day. I miss my students. And days like today make me miss teaching at a community college tremendously.
I've shared this story before on my blog but think it deserves to be shared again. My father, now a retired research chemist, came from an impoverished immigrant family in New Jersey. He was the only child, out of fifteen siblings (yes, I said fifteen), to go to college. In the 1960s he began his college experience after hearing a story about magical institutions of higher education in California that admit anybody ... for free. He left New Jersey on his own, drove across the country and enrolled at Porterville Community College. After completing his associates degree, he transferred to San Jose State where he completed his BS and MS and then went on to complete his PhD in Chemistry from Iowa State University.
After college, my dad had a very successful career as a research scientist at IBM's Almaden Research Lab. His story plays a role in fueling my passion for learning. He is seventy one now (and still learning, by the way). If you were to ask him today to reflect on his college "successes," he would credit community colleges with granting him the opportunity to explore his dream -- to learn. But that rarely gets highlighted, as one continues with his/her life crediting their terminal degree granting institution, not the one that got them on the road to success.
A New Society Calls for a New Learning Paradigm
What's dramatically different today is the fact that the internet extends opportunities to learn to anyone with web access. We need to be rethinking the relevance of the college learning experience in the context of our digital, information society while we're strengthening our community colleges. I believe that is key to this dialogue and I sincerely hope it played a major role at the summit today. I believe the learning environments faculty, administrators, and staff create and support for community college students play a significant role in ensuring student success. Dyslexic students, students with other forms of learning disabilities, english as a second language students, international students -- these are just some of the demographics of a community college classroom.
Faculty, administrators and staff need to be supporting their learning by crafting inclusive learning environments which can be supported through the use of podcasting for "presenting information" and saving precious class time for applying the information, fostering higher order thinking skills, engaging in debates, sharing unique perspectives, working in teams and presenting projects. Lecture is an exclusive learning environment. Some students can succeed just fine through listening and taking notes but most cannot. The human brain cannot listen and take notes at the same time -- even without a learning challenge. When you're taking notes, your brain is processing the note-taking and is not listening to the lecture, creating gaps that the brain then needs to simultaneously fill in order to follow a presentation.
Moreover, students don't feel confident enough to raise a hand and ask for clarification once, twice, three times in a lecture setting. Podcasting provides opportunities to for students to receive the lecture content before of the classroom, stop/pause as necessary, and even learn mobility (on the bus, in the gym, etc.). Moreover, podcasts (audio alone or video) can be accompanied by a text-based transcript. When I shared lecture podcasts with transcripts with my students, only 15% of them chose to "only listen" to the podcast. In a classroom, listening is your only option! 30% of my students chose to listen and read at the same time. I believe this is significant and changes the way we frame "learning" in a college classroom.
Once the content is delivered, classroom time is spent on applying it through a variety of engaging activities and addressing questions along the way. The lecture still plays a role but this model enables the freeing of classroom time to make learning relevant and community-based. Students understand that they need to come to class so they can learn -- rather than passively receive information. The YouTube generation has high expectations for face-to-face time. They'll tune out or -- worse -- never come back. If the classroom experience can be replicated online then it should be. It makes sense. Spend face-to-face time on activities that cannot be replicated online.
I realize this shift rocks the traditional foundation of higher ed, considering lectures have been the method of college learning since the Middle Ages. A new society that requires new skills calls for a new learning model.
New Opportunities for Community College Innovation
The day of dialogue included the announcement of several new innovative programs, offered to bolster student success and increase the completion rates for community college students. Here they are (the following is excerpted from "Building American Skills by Strengthening Community Colleges," publicly shared on the White Houses Community College website).
Get ready -- grant funds will be allotted through a competitive application process. The time to innovate is now!
Gates Foundation: Completion by Design
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will announce Completion by Design, which aims to dramatically improve community college graduation rates by building on proven, existing practices to implement model pathways making the college experience more responsive to today’s student’s needs and education goals. The competitive grant program is a $35 million investment over five years to 3-5 multi-campus groups of community colleges in nine states serving the largest populations of low-income students (Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, New York, North Carolina, Texas, and Washington). Completion by Design supports tough-minded campus- or college-based analysis to learn where along the education journey students are being lost and to design an intentional educational pathway that employs proven and promising practices at every critical moment from enrollment to credential completion.
Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence
The Aspen Institute, the Joyce and Lumina Foundations, and the charitable foundations of Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase have partnered to announce a new, $1 million annual prize to recognize, reward, and inspire outstanding outcomes in community colleges nationwide. The Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence will shine a spotlight on outstanding performers and rising stars that deliver exceptional results in student completion rates and workforce success; distill and share successful practices; and contribute to the development of high-quality, consistent measures and benchmarks for assessing community college outcomes. By focusing the field on a clear and bold definition of success, honoring excellence with prizes and prestige, and accelerating the spread of successful practices, the prize aims to galvanize the work of reform-minded educators, governors, employers, and community college presidents across the nation. The Aspen Prize will launch in the spring of 2011 and celebrate the first winners that fall.
Skills for America’s Future
On October 4, President Obama announced the launch of Skills for America’s Future, a new initiative to expand innovative strategies and improve the skills of America’s workers. Skills for America’s Future will build high-impact partnerships with industry, labor unions, community colleges and other training providers in all 50 states, all in support of the President’s goal of 5 million more community college graduates and certificates by 2020.
Skills for America’s Future is in response to a key recommendation by the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, which spent the last year surveying employers about their workforce needs and development strategies.
Skills for America’s Future will be spearheaded by Penny Pritzker, Chairman and Founder, Pritzker Realty Group, and Walter Isaacson, CEO, Aspen Institute. Together, they will advance this effort by recruiting additional private sector leaders; providing a national voice for effective public/private partnerships in workforce development; developing a “certification” for best-in- class partnerships; and leveraging new opportunities for online learning, measuring program impact and sharing lessons learned. Several Fortune 500 companies, including PG&E, Gap Inc., McDonald’s, United Technologies, and Accenture, have already committed to support the Skills for America’s Future initiative and will work over the next year to expand their training partnerships to provide American workers the skills for the jobs of today and tomorrow.
Yesterday I stumbled upon The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age report by Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg and the assistance of Zoe Marie Jones funded by the MacArthur Foundation, which was posted on the Creative Commons blog back in June 2009. I really can't begin to put into words how much this report has captured my excitement and my creative juices. It's a great way to start the new year!
Over the past several years, I've found myself aligned with K-12 bloggers and educational theorists who seem to be light years ahead of higher education in keeping their finger on the pulse of learning trends of young students and stressing the critical need to shift our tools and pedagogies to engage and educate this new generation. And, may I add, that I've learned tremendously from them! However, what has amazed and frustrated me is the fact that this "new generation" of Millennial students that are generally the focus of new learning studies and new approaches to pedagogy is now entering their 30s. That's right -- several graduating classes of Millennials have already cycled through our colleges and universities and we, the pontificating professors holding all the answers, are just beginning to rub our eyes and realize that a semester in our disengaged lecture halls offers fewer learning moments than a five minute customized search on YouTube. My 21-year old nephew is currently a senior at the University of California. Last year he received a very high GPA and in a casual conversation, I congratulated him on his academic achievements. Then I asked, "Did you learn a lot?" He paused, placed his hand on his chin and reflected for a moment and said, "Yeah, yeah, I did. I learned how to memorize and how to figure out what my T.A.s expect me to know for the tests." Terrific. I encourage anyone who is reading this blog post to have a similar conversation with a young person you know enrolled in college today. And, hey, drop me a comment and let me know what they say.
Despite the revolutionary effects that the Internet has had on the way individuals live, learn, play and ultimately learn, higher education has gone virtually unchanged since the medieval period -- and that's really not an overstatement. I've had this internal dialogue, often a scathing dialogue, with myself and colleagues many times. The report summarizes it best:
"Our argument here is that our institutions of learning have changed far more slowly than the modes of inventive, collaborative, participatory learning offered by the Internet and an array of contemporary mobile technologies. Part of the reason for the relatively slow change is that many of our traditional institutions have been tremendously successful, if measured in terms of endurance and stability. It is often noted that, of all existing institutions in the West, higher education is one of most enduring. Oxford University, the longest continuously running university in the English-speaking world, was founded in the twelfth century. Only the Catholic Church has been around longer and, like the Catholic Church, universities today bear a striking structural resemblance to what they were in medieval times. As is typically the case in the present, the medieval university was a separate, designated, physical location where young adults (students) came to be taught by those, usually older and more experienced, who were authorized (scholars, professors, dons) to impart their special knowledge, chiefly by lecturing. Over the years, such features as dormitories, colleges, and, later, departments were added to this universitas (corporation). The tendency toward increasing specialization, isolation, departmentalization, and advanced (graduate and professional school) training developed in the wake of the Enlightenment, gathering steam through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century."
But when I read the report, The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, I found all these issues acknowledged, from the perspective of higher education, and the call for innovation loud and clear. Beyond that, the report acknowledges the validity of participatory learning as part of our culture that is "no longer exotic or new but is a commonplace way of socializing and learning." Participatory learning, according to the report,
"includes the many ways that learners (of any age) use new technologies to participate in virtual communities where they share ideas, comment on one another’s projects, and plan, design, implement, advance, or simply discuss their practices, goals, and ideas together."
Any individual who has a young person in his or her life or spends much of his/her time online understands this concept clearly. My son demonstrated it to me most clearly at age seven when he was both passionately learning about Pokemon and when he received his first digital video camera for Christmas. While I was expecting him to immediately use the camera to record his surroundings, the first thing he did was record himself playing his Pokemon video game on his Nintendo DS (he recorded the screen). His objective was to record the capturing of a specific Pokemon which, apparently, was quite an accomplishment. He then requested my assistance in uploading it to YouTube. We logged into our family account and I uploaded it for him.
I watched in amazement. Within hours, the comments began to pour in. Users, other Pokemon players, began to ask questions about how/where/when he captured the character. My son eagerly responded to an inquiry or two. YouTube had been his community for learning how to play and interact with the Pokemon game and he felt the obligation to participate, to give back to that community, once he was able to do so.
Today we have fifteen videos in our family YouTube channel. Fourteen of these videos have been viewed anywhere between 3 and 288 times. However, the ONE video that is related to Pokemon (all the others are videos of my family or videos of vacations we have been on) was viewed 5,622 times and it has received 22 comments. Hmm. I think you see where participatory learning is coming into play there.
The point here is that college learning experiences are still based upon a straight forward exchange of information, rooted in traditional hierarchies of professor-student roles anchored in physical classroom spaces. While our digital learners have been molded in a society that fosters participatory learning in informal environments -- encouraging participation, input, reflection -- their formal learning in college demands them to learn in entirely different ways that are foreign to them.
Even when learning occurs online, rarely is that learning transformed into participatory learning experiences. I have often imagined how dismayed students must be by this experience. I picture students in front of their laptops with multiple browsers open -- one of them being "Blackboard" or some other disengaged LMS, containing a course designed entirely in text, in which they're required to enter to learn english or philosophy or physics, while the other windows hold dozens of connections to individuals around the world, interactive games, opportunities to author and publish their thoughts through their blogs, etc. Because of the fact that online classes embrace the internet as the medium of the learning experience it seems incredibly unjust to transfer traditional pedagogies into this method of learning. If, instead, we view the Internet as an institution of learning with participatory learning at its core, as the MacArthur report encourages us to, then we are beginning to move into a new terrain, a new discourse.
On a more personal note, my interests in encouraging new ways of thinking about learning in our digital society is taking me into a new direction in 2010. 2009 was professionally surreal for me, as I ended up resigning from two full-time positions in higher education. One was a tenured faculty position at a community college that I had held for seven years, a position that I learned tremendously from and had grown out of professionally. And the other was a management position at a four year university that I had hoped would lead me to opportunities to foster more teaching and learning innovations with faculty. Why in the world would I resign from two positions in the midst of economic crumble as I have colleagues around me who are preparing for lay offs? I know, it does sound a bit "plucky" (an actual reaction from one of my colleagues). I can honestly say that teaching and learning will always be my passion. And, sadly, that's why I left higher ed. After years of reinventing my own teaching, carving new learning spaces for my students and receiving exceptional feedback from these students about the quality of their learning ... even winning the national Sloan-C Excellence in Online Teaching Award, I needed to find another, a better way, to contribute to changing our institutions of learning. That's why I left.
Today, in the dawn of 2010, I begin my adventure as an entrepreneur and educational consultant for my new business, Teaching Without Walls: Life Beyond the Lecture. I hope to leverage my experience and share my teaching ideas and resources with other educators. The validation of participatory learning and critical need for higher education to bend and morph in the face of new pedagogies of learning is breath of fresh air.
Where will this lead us as professors, as administrators, as support staff of institutions of higher education? What does participatory learning look like exactly? How shall it be measured? We don't know exactly. And this is also something the report is honest and lucid about which I think all educators will appreciate. We do know that we're in this together and we need everyone to embrace these new ways of thinking about learning in order to best meet the needs of our students today and prepare them for a successful life in our digital society.
Let's embrace this amazing shift and experience the new opportunities that await.
Thank you to the MacArthur Foundation for funding the report -- I look forward to seeing the effects. I also hope future studies will include community colleges in the frame of "higher education," as two year institutions are critical stakeholders in ensuring students of all socioeconomic backgrounds have access to college. I didn't see any community college professors included on the list of collaborators and I believe CC professors have unique perspectives on the learning needs of diverse student populations (as it relates to open access to education).
