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“There’s never been a more exciting time to work in education,” said Matthew Rascoff, Associate Vice Provost for Digital Education & Innovation at Duke University. In this month’s Higher Ed Careers interview, Andrew Hibel spoke with Rascoff about the latest trends in professional development for faculty, why universities need to offer these types of support to their faculty, and how online learning is transforming the landscape of higher education.
Hibel, HigherEdJobs: Matthew, you are currently the Associate Vice Provost, Digital Education and Innovation. Your title is unique, what is your role?
Rascoff, Associate Vice Provost for Digital Education & Innovation, Duke University: I lead Duke Learning Innovation in pursuit of our dual mission to help Duke students learn more and to help more people learn from Duke. We partner with faculty to reimagine the learning interactions among people and technology and the contexts in which learning happens.
There are two paradigms of social change makers: “social entrepreneurs” and “community organizers”. Social entrepreneurs develop an innovative solution and pitch it relentlessly. Community organizers build trust among people from diverse backgrounds, study the nuances and complexities, and try to get to the root causes of problems so they can make progress through “collective impact”.
To innovate in higher education you need to be a little bit of each type, but I try to place the emphasis on listening, empathy, understanding, and making change through collaboration.
Hibel: Would you expand on the work that Duke Learning Innovation does?
Rascoff: Duke Learning Innovation works in four areas. Through fellowships and consultations, we offer professional development for faculty in evidence-based teaching and learning practices. Second, our online learning team partners with faculty to design and develop digital learning experiences — from short “Level-Up” pre-courses to online degrees. Third, we curate and integrate Duke’s ed tech ecosystem, which includes hundreds of learning tools and technologies that we license, build, or are open source. And fourth, we collaborate with faculty to advance the science of learning through research and development.
Transparency is essential to making our work legible. Lots of organizations publish an annual report, which we do, too. But we also post a detailed update on our projects every month and have found that this helps potential partners understand what we’re trying to do and gives them a way in. We also publish a widely-read blog and are active on social media (@DukeLearning).
Hibel: Duke provides wonderful opportunities [link removed no longer active] to your faculty to enhance their teaching from personalized support to peer-to-peer best practice discussions. Please explain a little about these programs and other opportunities Duke Learning Innovation offers. Why does Duke feel this program is a priority and what do you feel are the major benefits in offering these faculty opportunities? In other words, why should other campuses consider these types of support?
Rascoff: Faculty fellowships are the single best way we’ve found to transform instructional practice. Learning happens in communities. In our two signature fellowship programs, the Active Learning Fellowship (focused on course redesign), and the Course Design Institute (where instructors develop new courses), faculty learn evidence-based practices from expert professional developers. Just as important, though, fellows build trusted peer learning and support networks that serve them as educators at Duke and throughout their careers.
Hibel: Would you explain more about how Duke Learning Innovation works with faculty? Specifically, are all faculty levels required or invited to take part in the opportunities through Duke Learning Innovation? If not, what statistics of faculty have taken part in these programs and what types of feedback have you received from those participating?
Rascoff: Part of what makes faculty fellowships work is that they are voluntary. Faculty apply and are selected based on merit.
We work with those who want to work with us. This is the core idea of a community: you join of your own free will. Faculty participate in professional development because they are motivated to learn and contribute. And Duke faculty are motivated. We work with about one-third of the faculty each year.
A new way we are partnering with faculty is in learning research and development. Our WALTer project (“We Are Learning, Too”) makes it easier for faculty to navigate the processes for doing educational research in their own classrooms. Through new technology, policy, and templates we’ve reduced the lead time for approvals from months to days. We’ve just open sourced the WALTer workflow and technology to lower the general barrier to entry to this kind of research.
Hibel: Online teaching and learning is one of the core components of Duke Learning and Innovation. Why has Duke focused on online learning and how does this change the landscape for accessibility to education?
Rascoff: Duke is one of the largest providers of online learning in the world. We’ve had nearly 6 million enrollments on Coursera, where we’ve had more completions in the past seven years than the degrees Duke has conferred in the 95 years of its existence.
We’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible with learning and technology. Higher education’s “trilemma” is access, quality, and low cost. At best, you can get combinations of two, but not all three at once. Online learning our best shot at breaking the trilemma and having it all.
Digital learning is transforming professional education. Some of the greatest universities in the world, including Duke, now offer professional degrees online. Within 20 years, almost all professional master’s degrees are going to be fully or partially online (e.g. hybrid programs with short on-campus or traveling residencies). Programs will be flexible, modular, and “stackable.” Students will earn and learn at the same time, reducing the opportunity costs of graduate education and increasing the number of students who can pursue graduate education.
Online learning offers a compromise in the debate between foundational liberal arts education vs. applied technical training. Duke innovated a program called Coursera for Duke, which offers online co-curricular technical skills to complement the undergraduate liberal arts. The debate is a false choice, as one of our students said. You can go to college to become educated for life — and also acquire skills that help you get your first job. In just over a year our community has spent 32,123 hours learning data science, programming, and other valuable, practical skills. The Coursera for Duke model has now scaled to dozens of universities worldwide.
Online learning will reshape how institutions relate to alumni. Rather than viewing graduation as a culmination, in the future, it will celebrate the commencement of a life of perpetual learning. Institutions will offer alumni opportunities to remain engaged with the learning community, which they will never leave. And at critical moments of transition, when alumni need infusions of expertise and support networks, universities will invite alumni into programs that help them make life and career pivots successfully. The result will be deeper and more meaningful connections among alumni, and between alumni and institutions.
Hibel: In a Forbes article, it states, “A dirty little secret of higher education is that faculty members at most American colleges and universities have never taken a course on how to teach.” It also goes on to say, “poor teaching is passed down from generation to generation.” What are your views on the preparedness of college and university faculty?
Rascoff: Duke is at the forefront of preparing the next generation of faculty with the skills they need as educators and learning experience designers. Our long-standing program for graduate students, the Certificate in College Teaching, involves coursework, teaching experience and observation, and an online teaching portfolio.
This year, Duke Learning Innovation, in partnership with the Duke Graduate School, launched the Bass Digital Education Fellowship program. This graduate fellowship provides valuable digital teaching and learning skills, community, and a year of funding. Following a semester-long intensive introduction to learning design, we pair graduate students with educational projects, where they apply their skills as apprentices, supported by Duke Learning Innovation staff, faculty mentors, and one another. The program is less than a year old and we’ve already heard about replications across the country.
Hibel: What keeps you engaged working in higher education?
Rascoff: There are few areas that are as important as education that have so many unanswered questions, so many unsolved problems — and so much opportunity for progress, all seemingly at once.
Three-quarters of earth’s adults now have a smartphone. How will we use that access to spread knowledge equitably? fMRI machines can decode how brains work with ever-greater precision. How will we apply neuroscience to deepen human understanding? Machine learning algorithms can predict which students are most at risk. How will we ethically use that information to intervene? Skills biased technological change and artificial intelligence will require the retraining of millions of workers. How will educational models and providers change for the future of work?
Each of these questions is worthy of a career’s attention. Education is asking them all at once. To me, that means there’s never been a more exciting time to work in education.