Integration and Integrity: Higher Education in the New Learning Ecosystem
What would a higher education look like if we were designing it now, given what we know about learning, about the global digital ecosystem and the challenges that lay ahead? How might the scholarship of teaching and learning provide a compass for how to respond to these questions? This talk will explore the questions of transforming the undergraduate learning experience, at a moment when an expanded population of students are coming to our institutions. Challenged by costs, shifts in perception of higher education from a public to a private good, and years of talk that higher education can be unbundled, universities have to rethink how we engage students in designing their own education, help them connect theory to practice and prepare for a world of uncertainty. This is a critical, if not urgent, time for universities to rethink how breadth, depth and integration should shape the learning experience for all students.
About our Speaker
Randy Bass is Vice Provost for Education and Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he leads the Designing the Future(s) initiative and the Red House incubator for curricular transformation. For 13 years he was the Founding Executive Director of Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS).
He has been working at the intersections of new media technologies and the scholarship of teaching and learning for nearly thirty years, including serving as Director and Principal Investigator of the Visible Knowledge Project, a five-year scholarship of teaching and learning project involving 70 faculty on 21 university and college campuses. From 2003-2009 he was a Consulting Scholar for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where he served, in 1998-99, as a Pew Scholar and Carnegie Fellow. In 1999, he won the EDUCAUSE Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Technology and Undergraduate Education.
He is the author or editor of numerous books, articles and digital projects, including recently, “Disrupting Ourselves: the Problem of Learning in Higher Education,” (EDUCAUSE Review March/April 2012); with Bret Eynon, Open and Integrative: Designing Liberal Education for the New Digital Ecosystem (American Association of Colleges and Universities, 2016); and with Jessie L. Moore, Understanding Writing Transfer: Implications for Transformative Student Learning (Stylus, 2017).