Learning before the 21st century was mostly about accessing and retaining theories, facts and figures; now it is mostly about applying theories, facts and figures in creative and critical ways to solve problems and advance society.

Increasingly, higher education is less about memorization and more about problem solving. In years gone by, access to facts and viewpoints often involved the purchase or acquisition of books. Huge personal libraries were assembled by the well-educated wealthy in prior centuries. Now we all have access to the immense electronic library that we call the internet. As Julien Barbier points out, “The assumption of 19th century education was that building a student’s knowledge base is everything. But, today, with the biggest library that has ever existed at everyone’s fingertips (the internet), skills are what matter. The OS of education approach shifts 90% to 95% of a typical student’s time to applied learning. Content is not the problem. Learning how to learn is the future of education.”

Increasingly, college students have been found to be living on the outer edge of their finances. For many, food insecurity is a reality and housing is not regularly available, and the American Psychological Association has discussed how basic needs for college students are not being met:

A study of 43,000 students at 31 community colleges and 35 four-year universities in 20 states and Washington, D.C. found that 36% of college students are food insecure, and 36% are in precarious housing situations. The lead author of this report told National Public Radio, “It really undermines [college students’] ability to do well in school. Their grades suffer, their test scores appear to be lower, and overall, their chances of graduating are slimmer. They can barely escape their conditions of poverty long enough to complete their degrees.”

Yet, in far too many cases, we are still requiring very expensive textbooks in our classes. Over the degree program, students are expending thousands of dollars for texts that many sell back to the bookstore for less than half of their original value. Much of the material embedded in the texts is either already available freely online or could be assembled by the instructor from open-access sources. At the same time, many instructors still complain that the text does not precisely fit their needs; they skip chapters and assign additional readings to update the material in the text that is already one or two years out of date before the book hits the students’ desks. Why not just create your own texts and update them as often as is needed?

During the first three semesters in COVID times, awareness of open educational resources (OER) has surged among faculty members. Faculty members who put their classes online through remote learning discovered more fully the range and timeliness of relevant materials that are available online. In a study by Bay View Analytics, sponsored by the William and Flora Hewitt Foundation, it was found that faculty who adopted OER rated their materials superior to the commercial alternatives, and while the percentage of required OER materials did not increase, the percentage of supplemental OER materials did.

Development of OER materials is often supported by colleges and universities as one way to make their classes more affordable. Foundations also provide funding to assist in reimbursing the time and other expenses incurred in development of the materials. This can make a huge difference to students who are living on the edge of poverty while attending college. A Edmonton Journal opinion piece recently made the case for how OER makes college more affordable: “Connor Braun, a student at the University of Calgary, tells of the impact that OER can have. ‘A $200 textbook on its own can be a huge hurdle, but when you’re taking five, maybe six, classes, the cost of textbooks gets ludicrous. For people who are already struggling, free alternatives like OER can make a real difference.’”

Over all, many students seem to do better in classes where the textbooks are open. It may not be that the OER materials are superior — rather it may be that when the class materials are free, students actually obtain and use them. The research is alarming: “A 2017 survey of 1,000 current students, conducted by Wakefield Research in the United States and Canada, found that nearly 40 percent have avoided purchasing course materials for at least one of their classes. And a widely cited 2014 report called ‘Fixing the Broken Textbook Market’ by the United States Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), was even more damning. It included a survey of 2,000 students, on 150 campuses, and found that 65 percent of students had decided to forgo at least one textbook purchase.” If half the students in the class do not have a textbook, the instructor and students are both put in a disadvantageous position in creating a thriving learning community. Opening free access to all can make a huge difference in the success of the class.

C. Edward Watson, CIO and associate vice president for curricular and pedagogical innovation at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and co-author Barbara Illowsky describe their “epiphany” in discovering the meaningfulness and impact on equity and affordability of using OER. “Yet one of the best-kept secrets for improving student equity and college affordability is within the hands of faculty: using Open Educational Resources (OER) in their courses instead of commercial textbooks and paid electronic materials.”

A host of guides are available to assist faculty members in developing OER materials for their classes. A couple of examples are from the University of Texas and the University of South Carolina. Resources are easy to find, with many libraries providing open creation collections. With more than one and a half billion open works licensed, Creative Commons provides tools to assist in searching for relevant open materials.

Over the past few years, I have been chronicling the new initiatives, programs and activities daily in the UIS OER blog. There are an amazing number of initiatives across the country and around the world that are supporting the opening of educational resources for the sake of affordability and access.

Is it time for you to make a commitment to your students, your institution and your colleagues that you will identify and/or create open educational materials in your classes? I encourage you to do so for the sake of ensuring that your students can afford all of the class materials that you expect them to have for success in your classes.

This article was originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s Transforming Teaching & Learning blog. 

Employers are seeking graduates with both hard and soft skills that enable them to be effective employees on day one. Are we documenting those skills for our grads?

Increasingly, higher education is placed in the position of updating and upgrading the curriculum to assure that students are prepared for the careers of today — not those of yesterday or those careers that will never materialize due to the impact of artificial intelligence, shifting societal needs and the changing economy of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). The advent of 4IR will bring the “blurring of boundaries between the physical, digital, and biological worlds. It’s a fusion of advances in artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), 3D printing, genetic engineering, quantum computing, and other technologies. It’s the collective force behind many products and services that are fast becoming indispensable to modern life.”

When you hear about AI and robotics, you might think of automated assembly lines and smart machines that take the jobs of blue-collar workers requiring less education. But 4IR is not about your grandfather’s AI. It is about algorithms taking on accounting, legal and managerial tasks. It is about displacing baccalaureate and graduate degree holders in the roles for which our curricula have been designed.

The key initial step in the process is to engage employers with educators to determine the skills and abilities that are needed today and in the next few years. LinkedIn’s 2020 list of skills in most demand includes these soft skills at the very top:

• Creativity
• Persuasion
• Collaboration
• Adaptability

And these hard skills at the very top:

• Blockchain
• Cloud computing
• Analytical reasoning
• Artificial intelligence

Of course, these are further refined, discipline by discipline as industries and fields move to require differing skills, abilities and credentials over time. A good practice is for departments to create employer advisory councils to assist in identifying the needs for graduates in each discipline. These councils should include the array of employers — commercial, noncommercial, governmental and organizational — that are representative of the field of study. In the case of each department, a list of required or desired knowledge, competencies, skills and credentials should be developed and revisited often. These should be incorporated into regularly updated learning outcomes for the degree.

Best practices are being developed for how to best create credentials that recognize and document the achievement of competency in a given area. The University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA) has just released the “Hallmarks of Excellence in Credential Innovation” that explores the emerging best practices and considerations for effective and efficient credentialing.

Employers have become increasingly impatient with the slow rollout of relevant credentials from universities that recognize the new competencies and abilities needed. Google recently announced a massive effort in creating an array of new career certificates. Deployed through Coursera, no college degree is required for career certificates in IT support, project management, data analytics, associate Android developer and user experience design. Google has lined up 130 major employers who promise to hire those who successfully complete one of the certifications in the program. The programs last between three and six months and cost only $240. Google is also offering 100,000 need-based scholarships.

Clearly, the pressure is on for universities to respond. Failure to adequately prepare students for the current job market will result in accelerating the steady decline in enrollments that we have seen over the past decade.

There are a range of university options now — from informal or formal certificates; certifications, degrees and licenses to document achievement of knowledge; skills or competencies. Workcred has a useful chart of the differences among these categories. A Lumina grant enabled UPCEA, APLU, USU and Workcred to investigate the future of aligning and embedding industry credentials into baccalaureate degrees. This pathway provides a blueprint for the future. Further steps have been taken independently by universities that are utilizing blockchain technology to disseminate transcripts containing rich detail and documentation not available in the traditional paper document.

Yet much remains to be done if higher education, as a whole, is to engage in the development of an infrastructure aligned to industry needs. Experimentation must begin now, even as we are losing hundreds of thousands of prospective students to industry-initiated programs such as the Google career certificates. The process to pilot programs must be focused, easily assessed and open to modifications as it expands. A modest approach might follow these direct steps:

1. Form an industry council at the academic departmental level
2. With advice from the council identify the key skills, proficiencies or abilities desired in grads holding specific degrees
3. Select among these competencies to add to the learning outcomes of the degree curriculum through required classes
4. Award a badge to each student for each attribute when they are successfully assessed
5. Promote support of the badges throughout the university and encourage students to use their badges in their social media and on their résumés
6. Assess the success through surveys of students, graduates and employers

Who, at your university, is taking leadership in developing the documentation of relevant skills, proficiencies, knowledge and abilities among your students? Are you ensuring that your students are graduating with what is necessary for their career success in the emerging 4IR context of today and tomorrow, rather than the outdated, unnecessary and expired needs of the first two decades of this 21st century?

This article was originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s Transforming Teaching & Learning blog.