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This conversation is with the author of the chapter “Architecture of the Unexpected: Beyond the Learning Paradigm” in our new co-edited book, Recentering Learning: Complexity, Resilience and Adaptability in Higher Education (JHU Press, 2024). The book (in paper and ebook form) is available for order from JHU Press and Amazon.
Randy Bass is vice president for strategic education initiatives at Georgetown University.
Q: What main themes of your chapter would you like readers to take away and bring back to their institutions and organizations?
A: In my chapter, I ask whether the experience of the pandemic will help or hinder the advance of an emerging learning paradigm for higher education. Every disruption has the potential either to help a new paradigm come into being or to sustain the force of the dominant paradigm. One post-pandemic challenge for higher education is to put educational innovation in the service of a desired and emerging future and not just as a response to current pressures and stresses.
This kind of future-focused transformation requires both a different mindset and infrastructure. The mindset asks institutions to support both the short and long game of innovation. While educational innovation needs to address current and short-term strategic concerns (instructional challenges, new enrollments, etc.), it should also be focused on long-term goals, such as how best to prepare all students for thriving in an uncertain future and how to make the curriculum more responsive to societal needs. The infrastructure for future-focused transformation requires that some institutional resources be focused on experimentation, where even small-scale innovation can be seen as part of a larger systemic transformation.
If we are preparing our institutions and our graduates for uncertainty, then we need to live with some uncertainty as institutions. Some educational R&D will be emergent. Not all the outcomes of academic innovation can be known in the short term. Yet, if we don’t make room for speculative innovation, then we will never push past the current paradigm. The capacities that enabled higher education to survive the pandemic adaptation were 20 to 30 years in the making. Similarly, the capacities that will enable our institutions and students to thrive 20 to 30 years in the future need to be incubated now.
Q: What are potential opportunities and levers to recenter learning in research-intensive colleges and universities?
A: I’d like to think that the pandemic pedagogical experience made inroads into faculty culture around valuing quality teaching through evidence-based pedagogies. I’m afraid the force of culture in research institutions will make any gains ephemeral.
Of course, the category of “research-intensive universities” is not monolithic. For traditional research-intensive universities that are highly selective in admissions (public and private), there are many opportunities to recenter learning distinctive to their positioning in U.S. higher education. These are institutions with well-prepared undergraduate populations. They expend relatively lavish resources per student and have community-intensive campuses. With the pandemic opening up new modalities of learning for a wider range of faculty, these institutions should be at the forefront of experimenting with new fluidities between classroom learning, self-regulated learning and place-based high-impact practices (such as challenge-based learning, global experiences and credit-bearing professional development.)
These are also institutions with the financial stability and deep admissions pools to be experimenting with new degree paths, including more flexible reduced-cost (and potentially reduced-credit) bachelor degrees that also still value whole-person development and relationship-rich mentoring.
Yet, there is a new category of research-intensive universities, dubbed by ASU president Michael Crow as “national service universities.” These institutions, such as Arizona State University and the University of North Texas, are research-intensive institutions that break new ground in combining broad access, cutting-edge technological innovation and academic excellence, while accelerating positive social outcomes and public value.
These new national service universities are seeking to educate a far more unevenly prepared student population in transformative ways, at scale. These institutions are the nation’s living laboratories for recentering learning in a post-pandemic world. Operating with fewer resources and larger numbers of students than the traditional R-1s, these institutions have the opportunity (and imperative) to recenter learning within the institution through new mixes of online and face-to-face learning, structural reorganization and the deployment of AI and other emerging technologies, for institutionwide approaches to student success.
Q: How might the rapid evolution of generative AI impact the work of recentering learning?
A: Like the pandemic, generative AI is a disruptive force that can either serve to advance the learning paradigm or sustain the older transactional one. In the short term, we know that faculty and students on every campus are exploring and testing ways to use generative AI to enhance learning, problem-solving and AI literacy. We also know that many faculty are pushing back or sidestepping AI for the sake of legitimate concerns about learning, original work and assessment.
In an optimistic view, generative AI should offer the opportunity to scale intelligent tutoring and personalization in new positive ways that enable institutions to reallocate resources where they are most needed for ensuring large-scale student success. This shift should be powered by the people closest to the ground—faculty, students and educational developers—who can help institutions integrate the capacities of generative AI in thoughtful and intentional ways.
The rapid and long-term impacts of AI make it all the more important for higher education institutions to have a vision for the kind of future they want to enable. The merging of human and artificial intelligence into a new “co-intelligence” (Mollick, 2024) is going to take us places we cannot fully predict. Having a directional vision for where we want to go—an emerging new paradigm—will make it far more likely we will end up there.