vinay's thoughts

Education as Professional Development

It has been a little over 2 months now since I joined 2Tor, as their Senior Content Strategist. During this time I have worked almost exclusively on the MBA@UNC program, which is scheduled to be launched in July. The program will provide students an MBA from the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, a top 20 school, completely online. Prior to my arrival,2Tor launched the MAT@USC(Teaching) and MSW@USC (Social Work) and we are about to launch the Nursing@Georgetown (MSN) on Monday.

One of the most appealing aspect of these programs is the ability for students to gain a top-tier education without having to move or quit their jobs. Moreover, the flexibility of learning online makes it even more feasible to remain employed while learning new skills to advance one’s career.

However, I believe that what 2Tor is building digs deeper than simply leveraging internet technologies to make graduate education more accessible. At its core, 2Tor has embraced what seems to be a fundamental shift regarding what education in today’s world actually is. Education must have a clear connection to your short-term professional development. What you learn must be directly applicable to what you are currently doing, otherwise in today’s hyperactive world, you lose someone’s attention span.  

One startup that is targeting this notion is Grovo, who developed short, focused tutorials on popular websites and web-based applications. These lessons are efficient and only discuss what you need to know to accomplish a specific task. In contrast, students of University of Chicago professor Gary Becker, have painstakingly recorded and edited hours upon hours of his Human Capital and Intergeneration Mobility course and uploaded it to Youtube. However, the course at this juncture is 19 videos long, and I have no way of identifying a specific point of the video to learn the topic I need to learn now. 

In my opinion, education will need to move towards a more digestible, modular approach over time – one that may challenge 2Tor’s own approach to disrupting education. The world is only getting faster, and the mechanism by which education keeps all of us up to date must also do the same.

15 pounds in 15 weeks

I just signed up for Stickk.com and made a commitment to lose 15 pounds in 15 days. I have enlisted the help of my quick to deprecate sister as a referee for this inane adventure, but if I am good I will be well on my way back to fighting shape by summer.

In need of a common language

Those of you that have taken the time to read my first few posts have probably gathered that one of the books I am knee deep in right now is Disrupting Class by Clayton Christensen. As a fan of his previous work and also the work that his consulting company Innosight does, I was excited to see how Christensen would apply his theory on disruptive innovation to the field of education.

You say tomato; I say virtual learning

One of the key points Christensen raises in the book is in order to create movement or change within an organization or industry, there must be the development of a “common language and a common way to frame the problem.” Christensen argues that although the creation of a common language will not solve the problems, it is a prerequisite to discovering solutions. In his opinion, education currently suffers from a lack of standard frameworks to communicate across parties the challenges facing education today, and that part of the book’s goal is to help bridge that divide.

Moreover, I believe that identifying and building a common language is a necessary step for the professionalization of any industry. Lawyers, doctors, engineers, scientists, etc. have all developed entire lexicons specific to their own professions, and as annoying as these terminologies may seem to outsiders the vocabulary actually increases the opportunity for efficient and effective communication within each community. This in turn results in a stronger, healthier community dynamic amongst the language’s users.

This pursuit for establishing a common language can be seen beyond the conventional. For example, one paper I discovered discussed the need to develop a common framework in the field of dance therapy. The paper’s second paragraph states:

Dance  therapy  lacks a common understanding  of words  that describe and interpret movement. Effective communication depends  upon  the comprehension of words for achieving patient-treatment goals. Effective teamwork emerges as members understand each other's roles and functions, as well as their different language systems.

While education has been regarded as an integral part of society for that past century, the field’s lexicon is relatively undeveloped. Much of this disconnect can be attributed to the number of stakeholders invested in defining eduction and its components, each of whom have differing and often times conflicting priorities. Education also suffers from its ubiquity, especially with regard to the fact that anything can effectively be described as learning or an educational lesson. Despite these hurdles, attempts to develop shared frameworks emerge constantly. One example is New Jersey’s Professional Development Standards for Educators, which focuses on developing a common language for professional learning communities. This framework identifies issues like,

• What is essential for students to know?
• How will we know when they have learned it?
• What interventions will we put in place when they don’t learn it?
• What do teachers need to know and be able to do to support the student learning?
• What professional learning must the team engage in for student learning?

and also attempts to define the criteria for what a professional learning community would look like. More informal communities are also springing up everywhere. A few weeks ago I attended the NY EdTech Meetup and met a number of people trying to understand the intersection of education and technology, the effective business strategies to meld them.

Two steps forward, few steps back

Professional learning communities while important still result in a piecemeal approach to identifying answers to these critical questions. Conversations across the social graph, including Twitter, blogs and other sources are also contributing to this dialogue in a decentralized way. For education to reach its next stage of reform and innovation, we must continue to germinate these homegrown discussions into a national and eventually global discussion. In doing so, we must also be willing to accept at the core that education itself is a multi-faceted concept that serves multiple roles in society and thus the language used needs to be sensitive to that.