This past weekend I attended a conference on campus sustainability at Pace University put on by the Environmental Consortium of Colleges and Universities. The conference was titled “Sustain What? Preparing Our Students by Greening Our Campuses” and while there was a huge amount of information on sustainability projects at various campuses, the underlying theme of the weekend was the importance of higher education in the sustainability movement.
On one level, campuses are uniquely positioned in their communities to serve as role models of sustainability. Thanks to large endowments and government and privately funded grants, they are often able to invest in renewable energy projects, sustainable construction of new buildings, sustainable food systems including composting projects, and other efficiency projects that the general population is often unaware of or unable to afford. Colleges and universities can implement relatively new technologies, educating the community and providing business to new companies.
However, higher education has a greater responsibility within the movement towards sustainability than simply incorporating efficiency into new building design and urging people to turn out the lights. The language of sustainability, argued some at the conference, should be incorporated into all classes offered by a university. I attended a break-out session directed towards faculty that led to a discussion of this issue. Coming from SUNY ESF, where all (or almost all) of our courses and programs are directed towards the environment and sustainability, it was interesting to see the perspective of faculty from other campuses, including predominantly conservative campuses.
The faculty members in the session discussed the lack of basic knowledge that their students had about the environment, including the connection between food production and climate change, and the history of environmental disasters including Love Canal and Bhopal. They also discussed the existence of environmental science/studies programs at their campuses, but the isolation of these programs from the rest of the schools. We came to a few conclusions about the role of higher education in our session (and the conference as a whole):
– Incorporation of sustainability concepts into classes other than those in environmental science/studies programs is not only possible, but necessary to making students more well-rounded as they enter a world facing ecological crises.
– If students learn about sustainability within their field of study, they are likely to take those concepts into their future jobs. Ideally, this would mean the next generation of bankers, businessmen and women, scientists of all stripes, educators, and so on will view the world through the lens of the need for sustainability.
– And most importantly, if higher education is not involved in sustainability, it is not performing its role as higher education.
Higher Education
New Movement In Higher Education
The ideas in this New York Time article can be applied to many different areas of education in addition to higher ed. For those who do not wish to read the entire article, I’ll provide a brief summary. There is a recent movement in higher education to grant degrees for the amount of knowledge and skills you can demonstrate; this is in place of how long you have studied. In order to keep down the costs (money AND time) of obtaining a college degree, higher education institutions have begun to offer credit for finishing the work. These “competency-based” programs are all about outcomes, providing certification once learning requirements can be demonstrated. Many institutions, including the University of Wisconsin, have started testing these programs, and from what I can tell they are exclusively online.
Are you skeptical of these new programs? You’re not alone. A lot of questions (some are my own, and some are in the article) are being raised about whether or not degrees obtained this way can be compared to those conferred by a traditional college or university. Is the quality of education provided high enough? What about the classroom experience? If credits can be earned quickly, can we be sure the students have learned anything? How can we be sure they have learned the right things?
My largest concern is about assessment. In most areas of learning, it is a constant challenge for instructors to know how to create assessments that reflect what a student has (and should have) learned throughout the course. My initial reaction to this article was fear that it may be impossible to grade a student who a professor has never met, and who sprinted through the material in three weeks. But this is not entirely unique to online courses. College and university courses usually have only a few graded assignments; they just take four months to complete and occasionally an instructor will actually interact with the student. So in this light, any concern about assessment may actually be misguided.
This can also be applied to K-12 education. The role of assessment is growing in importance every day it seems. After No Child Left Behind, the results of standardized tests carry weighty consequences. If we’re comfortable with assessment when applied frequently (as in K-12), and infrequently (in higher education, online and/or on campus), what is it about a large standardized test that is so different and controversial? Is it the weighty consequences? College exams have weighty consequences. Is it their frequency? Some courses only have a midterm and a final exam.
I find myself unable to provide a full answer to the questions raised by this article and my own analysis of its significance. Please feel free to comment and let me know what you think.