Next Generation Learning Spaces Conference, Day 1

Pat Boone exhibit

This is my first time at the annual Next Generation Learning Spaces conference, happening this year in Los Angeles.  The first day consisted of three workshops focusing on new ways to think about innovation and entrepreneurship on campus, active learning and faculty development, and change management. In the late afternoon, I was able to visit Pepperdine University's library that just opened after a full-scale renovation of its 1970s space, including a Pat Boone exhibit.

Work with Emerging Technology to Accelerate your Campus Culture

Teggin Sumners, San Francisco State University

The presentation focused on pushing the concept of Makerspaces into its next iteration. Right now, many makerspaces are informal spaces for students to innovate, often not connected to a particular course or curriculum, and thus potentially not giving all students structure to succeed in such spaces.

Focusing on innovation and entrepreneurship, many universities are now taking the next steps to create not only spaces for innovation but processes and structures for students to innovate and then turn that innovation into a successful enterprise, turning the students into entrepreneurs.

Such a shift is happening now out of the realization that our work force needs across the globe will be radically changing in the next 20 years or so, making it necessary for us now to rethink the way we are teaching our students.  Some universities create innovation hubs, connected to particular degrees, others are opting for innovation learning communities.  The key components to consider are 

Strategy

Financial and human resources

Support infrastructure

Entrepreneur education

Start-up support

Evaluation approach

Universally designed

Sustainable

before you can think about what that kind of space needs to look like

Meta-Active Learning Can Help Faculty Engagement and Success

Beverly Bondad-Brown, California State University, Los Angeles

This workshop focused on giving faculty opportunities to think about active learning while experiencing it, so the workshop itself was giving us the same opportunities through multiple activities.

As we are already doing a lot of this at Auburn, the most valuable piece was the set of cards they graciously shared that we will be able to use in our future faculty sessions.

Change Management:  Interdisciplinary collaboration amongst faculty, technology providers and site planners

 Maggie Beers, San Franciso State University

In front of yet another scary statistics highlighting how California will be short 3 million workers by 2025 because not enough students are graduating college even though the number that enters has doubled, we learned about the six academic cultures, how they think and what they value, and how we can use this knowledge to create communication plans to talk to these different audiences to push for innovation.

The discussion is based Engaging the Six Cultures of the Academy by William Bergquist.

In addition, Maggie also shared a card set with different questions for future planning of learning spaces based on the Learning Spaces Rating System created by Educause. These cards allow for better sorting of where one still needs to do work, especially in a group setting.

She also reminded us of the principles of diffusion of innovation: Compatibility, triability, complexity, advantage, observability, and how we need to consider these for large-scale active learning implementations.

ELI 2018, Day 3

The final day of ELI covered Universal Design in Learning (UDL) and what Artificial Intelligence and Robotics may mean for higher education, our profession and the future.

Embracing challenges in UDL

Oakland University brought some excellent points to the discussion on creating an environment for Universal Design in Learning and where it creates some conflict with following recommendations for accessibility.

In particular, you want to remove barriers to learning and increase access, which means phrasing your approach as a social justice issue for all rather than a legal requirement for a few may be more convincing for many faculty.

They have seen evidence of increased student success and retention because of increased access opportunity and have created online videos both to make it easier for faculty to get started and student-created videos to show faculty the barriers students encounter when their course is not UDL structured.

Where the conflict with ADA compliance becomes visible is in the need to close-caption all video content made available to all students - if we want to give out students choices to access the material then we need to make sure this is all captioned, but that takes additional time that we often do not have.

We also need to remember to give our students some guidance -- they do not always know that there are different ways to access and thus learn materials and may not know the best way for them to learn.

CAST is another good resource for all things UDL.

What AI and robotics may mean to our professions and education - Diane Oblinger

The final keynote reminded us how technology, in particular AI and robotics, is changing the job world at amazing speed, and we need to take this into consideration at all levels of education.  Many of the current existing jobs will no longer exist in a few years, including such professions as stock brokers (you can already trade online, so why need people who are proven not to be as expert as they claim).

Elliq

Robots and AI will not be able to replace the critical thinking connected to ethics, but they will be able to provide social comfort for, for example, the single elderly -- see as an example Elliq, an Israeli product that interacts with older people, encouraging them to engage in activities, reminding them of tasks to keep their lives structured.

Other areas where AI is making major impact is: 

• knowledge curation
• online mediation
• online legal advice
• online medical advice and connecting within medical community
• job placement that is more fair

By 2030, many of our current professions will have gone through radical relearning because the technology will have introduced new dimensions that we cannot quite see yet. How nimble is higher education to adjust curricula, degrees, or certifications to account for such changes?  As Oblinger reminded us, what used to be called soft skills will become even more important, the core skills of critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and life long learning.

ELI 2018, Day 2

Day Two of this year's Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) brought interesting discussions on navigation privacy in a data driven world, non-cognitive factors, overcoming obstacles in academic technology leadership, the future of learning spaces as growing experiences, and making makers.  In the middle of all of this, my colleague and I had a productive poster presentation.

Navigating privacy in a data driven world (Jules Polonetsky) reminded us that the Council of Europe is soon (May 2018) coming  out with new regulations on data privacy that will affect also many non-European countries as new technologies. Key changes:

1. A company dealing with EU citizen private data, regardless where the company is located, has to comply with these new GDPR rules
2. Penalties can be up to 4% of annual global turnover or $20,000, whichever is greater
3. Consent language must be clear and precise, with clear indication what happens to protected data
4. Breach notifications need to be issued within 72 hours
5. Users have the right to access their data
6. Users have the right to have their data erased
7. Users have the right to take their data with them
8. Institutions are responsible for having data protection officers rather than negotiating with all the different countries their users hail from

This impacts any higher education institution enrolling students from EU countries.
Add to this innovative new technology that allows for multiple data access points for one person, and you can see how this can get quite interesting for everyone involved. For example, when you talk to your smart devices at home (Alexa, Siri, and all the other strangely named women around your house), do you know what happens to your requests? Are they forgotten or are the stored for some future use (AI development)? How often do we take the time to review the privacy settings of our social media tools, even when they try to force us to review them?
One interesting point about the ethical implications of any of this was to have a philosopher at the table when such discussions become important.


Incorporating Noncognitive Strategies to improve Learning Success discussed McGraw Hill's research on procrastination and learner profiles. While the findings are not surprising, it is good to have numbers associated with our common sense reactions.
Combining different disciplines, like Learning Science, Neuroscience, Behavioral Economics and Econometrics, new models can be developed, like the econometric model of skill formation, eg Eckman and Cunha's Technology of Skill Formation, 

Here some points out of this model:

1. Multiple skills are required for success
2. Cognitive skills only one part
3. Skills evolve over time
4. Skills are complementary build on each other
5. Different skills are malleable over time to different degrees
6. Different skills have different critical and sensitive periods
7. Skill gap emerges very early and persists
8. Non cognitive skills can be more malleable at larger stages

Other factors such as health and economic status also affect our skill formation
In their procrastination research of over 2 million data points from 100,000 students using the McGraw Hill learning platform, the presenters found that up to 50% of students procrastinate to some degree, and that the longer they procrastinate the more likely it is that they will fail their assignment completely. This of course makes sense, but to have the number of 37 times more likely to fail if you always procrastinate could be a good number for faculty to use when working with their students on noncognitive skills.  How to work against this - build in early low-stakes assignment to identify procrastinators and then give them the support to change such habits.
The learner profiles they developed (out of almost 700 students) include average student, gritty, struggler, coaster, plugger.  The gritty students tend to be the most successful ones as they keep sticking with it.Only 12-15% of our students fall into the gritty or coaster (students who just get it) categories, so the question is how we can move more students to the gritty stage (and this is where growth mindset would come in)

Kyle Bowen, Penn State, discussed The future of learning spaces is growing experiences, with such entertaining and useful terms as Cone of Distraction (the cone of viewers forming behind a person using a laptop) increased by the Probability of PowerPoint (use of a boring PPT in class). He reminded us that amazon ships everything in way too large boxes to ensure that one box fits all -- we have the same attitude with our classrooms. He reminded us that lecture has 10 sf per student, in comparison to 3.5 sf on a plane, 10.5 sf on a subway and 22 sf at Starbucks.
The takeaway is that our classrooms need to be designed to grow experiences - which may mean that we take the class out of the room completely.  Let's build spaces for creation; and let's move away from limiting ourselves to writing as creation.

Finally, Making makers   Students at the center of education, technology, and innovation, highlighted Brandeis and Wellesley's maker spaces and what it allows their students to do. The maker mindset includes prototyping and startup, design thinking in practice, a moment when I say I need this thing and it does not exist yet so I make it myself. Makers find gaps, find something that can be used differently, figure out how things work, collaborate and, most importantly, do all of this without any instructions or roadmaps.  Intrinsic motivation is 

Fail faster and fail smarter. Encourage breaking things and then fixing them.

And in the middle of this, Jerisha and I had our fabulous poster session....

Poster session at ELI