Disrupting Ourselves

The article Disrupting Ourselves, by Randy Bass relates to what we are doing at College Unbound in a few ways.  It talks about how there have been a lot of innovative changes to the ways we learn, but the ways of teaching haven’t kept pace.  Teaching has stayed the same as was a hundred years ago.  In the article, it talks about the most powerful learning outcomes from a student’s perspective.  The students said that the most powerful learning experiences that they had in college were from common intellectual experiences, learning communities, collaborative assignments and projects, service learning and community based learning and internships, among a few others.  I mention these because I believe these are all things that we do at CU.

The article also talks about how the practice of high-impact learning could only be done through small classrooms, but now, with the use of technology, it can be done at a larger scale and have a better effect.  This can be made possible through the use of ePortfolio’s.  This is the same thing that we are doing at CU.  All of our work gets posted online so you can see a running timeline of work that has been done.  You can see the progress that is being made in the projects we are doing and the improvement in the work that we are doing.  You can go back and look at where we were, and look at the more recent posts and see where we are today.  In the article, Bass quotes Bret Eynin saying, “Drawing on the power of multimedia and personal narrative, recursive use of ePortfolio prompts students to expand their focus from individual courses to a broader educational process.”  This is what we do at CU.

Bass goes on to talk about bridging the classroom with experiential Learning.  He talks about paying attention to elements like prior learning, experiential knowledge, program-wide learning goals and the long view of expert practice.  These are all things that we do at CU to maximize the learning outcome.  We look at our past experiences and see how we can relate them to our current situations, or maybe even someone else’s situation that is in our cohort.  We set program-wide learning goals and work towards achieving those.  We have an end goal of what we are trying to achieve; for the semester and for the year.  We are able took past the short term and see our long term goal.

In this article, Bass also talks about how college students with the traditional learning style dont necessarily feel a sense of community, sense of mentorship, sense of collective investment and a sense that what they are creating matter.  At CU, we have all these things.  We have the mentorship from the staff at CU and also from our Professional Advisors at our internship.  We have a sense of community because we are interacting with each other, along with each others works that are in the surrounding community.  We also see what is going on in the community, whether it is art shows or plays that are going on and go see them and relate them to our learnings.

I think someone needs to get a hold of Randy Bass and let him know what is going on here in Providence, RI.  We have a lot in common with what it is that he talks about of higher education.  I think he would be presently surprised.