Comment on Joe Pitkin's blog post The School Down the Hill From the Ivory Tower

 I wrote a comment responding to my colleague Joe Pitkin's blog post The School Down the Hill From the Ivory Tower. In it he talks about the democratization of information through the internet, and the role community colleges play in higher education. Here is my comment, mainly so I can have it in an accessible spot for me to reference later. 

Thank you for sharing your thoughts Joe! I’m having similar ‘big’ thoughts about community colleges and higher education in general. You’re right, our commitment to providing a high-quality, personalized education to anyone who walks in our doors is our value proposition, and we need support from the state, administrators, and colleagues to do that. Too often I see people from other departments operate under a scarcity model of resources, that to get ‘mine’ I must take from ‘yours’. That isn’t going to get us anywhere.

Where I see the biggest opportunities for growth in higher education is the mismatch between the new role of educators and the instructional methods that have been brought over from that previous age. As information disseminators, sure, lecturing makes sense in that we are to convey information quickly and efficiently. But if our role isn’t to disseminate information, rather to guide students to grow their own understanding of the world and develop skills, then our instructional methods must change.

The part that really bums me out is the fear that many faculty display when asked to do something other than lecture. Yes, it is absolutely scary to do something new professionally, but we can’t keep lecturing. Besides not aligning to our new roles, too much research has been done to show lecturing isn’t an effective instructional method, along with the negative effects it can have on BIPOC and first generation students.

If we don’t adapt to this new role, using effective instructional methods and technologies, then the private market is going to eat our lunch, ala https://www.outlier.org/.