The Learning Cloud

Social progress requires not an evolution in education, but a revolution to synchronize educating and learning

Global social progress depends more and more on education. The meaning of my assertion is captured more urgently in H. G. Wells quip from 1920: "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." Education is now running a lax race against catastrophe, in spite of the urgency implied by a recent international "social progress index." I will elaborate both points.

The global Social Progress Imperative was created in 2012 as a nonprofit organization in the U.S. Its Advisory Board is chaired by Harvard Business School's Michael Porter, who appeared in April (2014) on Fareed Zakaria's Global Public Square on CNN, which provides a transcript of their discussion. Recently published on the web in online format are the Imperative's Social Progress Index 2014, its Findings among 132 nations, its Watch Our New Video on Results of the Social Progress Index 2014!, and much more.

Reading more about the organization and its work reveals that SPI 2014 neither includes economic indices (such as GDP) nor ranks indices and nations on a zero-sum competitive basis. Instead the Index is a framework of social indices and nations' rankings designed to help advance humanity's progress, especially for every human in every participating nation. One of the organized charts from the data table of the SPI 2014 reveals that the United States ranks 16 in the overall aggregated macro-level index while being, among these cited component indices, at the index rank of 39 in Access to Basic Knowledge, 23 in Access to Information and Communications, 22 in Personal Rights, 15 in Personal Freedom and Choice, and 13 in Tolerance and Inclusion, yet nevertheless ranked first in Access to Advanced Education! These few indices and others not identified here can be useful in thinking about education's role in social progress in the U.S. and elsewhere. Perhaps my work over recent years can also be useful.

My long-standing career in and around education remains committed to social progress that can be derived from education. I'm pleased to be full-time with Ellucian and also active with the a) Board of Governors of Antioch University, b) Board of Directors of the IMS Global Learning Consortium, and c) Board of Vistors of the School of Information and Library Science at UNC-Chapel Hill (where I was a math professor and, at various points during a 30-year career, also a senior IT officer and an academic officer). I respect and owe much to these organizations but will not assume to represent their opinions on various positives and negatives that I describe here for education's role in social progress. 

Incremental evolution within traditional education is unlikely to advance social progress, as will be suggested below by multiple problems amidst education's lax racing against catastrophe in the U.S. and some other nations. Some of the revelations below also touch upon how to revolutionize and synchronize educating and learning as a common-good purpose for advancing global social progress.

• Is "Access to Advanced Education" truly affordable today? Washington Post Opinion Writer Katrina vanden Heuvel published on April 22 (2014) her thinking about "Elizabeth Warren' s needed call for student loan reform." Senator Warren is attempting to resolve today's student debt crisis of $1.08 trillion, which is twice as much as in 2007 and now exceeding total credit card debt.
• Do SPI's Personal Rights and Personal Freedom and Choice require revolutionary attention and changes? Yes, according to Elizabeth's Dwoskin on April 21 (2014) writing for the Wall Street Journal that a "Student Data Company to Shut Down Over Privacy Concerns." InBloom is the nonprofit company selected and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to control data that should instead be under the control of each learner and the rights and responsibilities that the learner has relative to various interactions and negotiations with educational, political, and other entities.
• In contrast to the "shut down" of InBloom is the growing success of the IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS), which is the most accomplished and economically viable IT standards organization for interoperability among the applications and data systems used in education. A 2013 IMS project discussion touched on the nascent concepts of "educational positioning system" (EPS) standards and an early EPS-like application developed by Michael Mathews, Lone Star College, and a few other partners. The Global Positioning System (GPS) provides a thoughtful metaphor for the "Educational Positioning System" and its need to "flip" control of a learner's educational data and artifacts from the InBloom system to the learner's private control and personal rights available under an EPS application. While the EPS is transparent as a concept, it is complex as a potential system of IMS standards that would have to be tackled by collaborating IMS Contributing Member education institutions, education suppliers, governments, and others. 
• When requested and supported by its Contributing Members, IMS helps develop and compliance-certify an increasing number of interoperability standards that can be adopted in order to forego often hidden integration time and costs among educational applications and data. "A New Architecture for Learning" was recently published in the EDUCAUSE Review by Rob Abel (IMS CEO) and IMS leaders Malcolm Brown and Jack Suess. Standards and architectures in many cases can enable major social progress initiatives that rely on education. For example, IMS QTI/APIP standards are critical to IT-delivered learning evaluations and assessments, including those under development for the Common Core State Standards Initiative in the U.S. The Common Core is developing core mathematics competency evaluations that can lead to advancing environmental, economic, and other forms of social progress. A number of states, including NC where I live, are on the verge of withdrawing from the social progress goals of the Common Core. This bodes poorly for the already distressed SPI 2014 U.S. rank of 39 in Access to Basic Knowledge. A similar mistake originated at state levels in the heyday of developing "no child left behind" when most states insisted on non-comparable proprietary assessments. 
• Zakaria and Porter discussed their surprise and dismay not only on SPI 2014 U.S. rank at 39 in Access to Basic Knowledge, but also to the rank at 23 in Access to Information and Communication. These ranks are not overly surprising for two reasons:
• The Robert's Supreme Court in the U.S. often rejects social progress viabilities, which are seldom favored by more than four reliably progressive Justices. For example, a recent decision implying diminishing Access to Advanced Education was reported in "Supreme Court Upholds Michigan Affirmative Action Ban," which explains the Court's 6-to-2 decision of April 22 (2014). 
• The Internet Society (ISOC) is a nonprofit, nongovernmental, global, open economic governance organization for the Internet. ISOC's social progress vision is that "the Internet is for everyone," unlike the Court's decision to uphold Michigan's affirmative action ban on college admissions. In spite of the exponential growth of Internet-enabled services and businesses, many nations and educating organizations have not yet enabled a model of Access to Advanced Education that can use the Internet and the IMS standards to scale up affordable learning opportunities and credentials for every human and for humanity.
• Scaling up education to affordable learning opportunities and successful credentialing for all is core to improving the learning progress indices analyzed by the Social Progress Imperative. Consider this related progressive abstract: "Education is being economically squeezed in a Holy Grail pursuit of educational justice and attainment at scale. Together, IMS standards-based mash-ups and an Internet-like governance model for the credentialing economy can improve flexibility and affordability for all beneficiaries." The quoted abstract frames my recent EDUCAUSE Review Online publication, "The Credentialing Economy: Transformed by and for Its Benefciaries," which accordingly defines "Education Leadership Commons" (ELC) to be an economic governance organization for the credentialing economy. The ELC model is akin to the ISOC economic governance model. ISOC and ElC also have similar economic governance characteristics that should be applied to common-good natural resources, as researched and recommended by Elinor Ostrom, who thereby became a 2009 Nobel Laureate in Economics before passing away in 2012. An ELC start-up work could be inclusive of the IMS, the Social Progress Imperative, various foundations such as Gates and Lumina, educational organizations, learners and their families, governments, suppliers, and employers. All would have to become open and agreeable to balancing economic rights and responsibilities mutually to their individual benefits and to the benefits of social progress that depends on educating and learning. The ELC start-up team would have to agree to design and sustain a long-term ELC financial model, which might have a parallel in ISOC. The .org domain managed by the nonprofit Public Interest Registry is a long-term source of funding for ISOC and therefore for many core ISOC affiliate members, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force and others. Two IMS-standards related projects could help think through a possible funding partnership for SPI, ELC, and IMS. One project could ask the IMS QTI/APIP Alliance to help develop the delivery of core learning readiness evaluations as evidence of Access to Basic Knowledge at various levels of accomplishment and cross-walks among independent learning readiness providers. CHEA leaders might also be interested in this project for evaluating critical thinking and basic fluency skills for learners. A second, less mature project could architect EPS standards that could help IMS Contributing Members pursue applications that would "flip" control of a learner's educational data and artifacts from the InBloom-like system to the learner's private control and personal rights consistent with improving upon SPI 2014 education-related indices. Meanwhile, some challenges in scaling up social progress to educating and learnng together are below. To include more than U.S. problems in scaling up, a few references are from the social progress theme "Rethinking Education: Shaping the Future" covered in the International Finance Corporation's 6th International Private Education Conference in 2014.
• Scale up educational attainment to increase the percentage of tertiary-credentialed learners among various adult populations.
• The tertiary-credentialed learners among U.S. adults at least 25 years of age have been near 40% for almost 40 years, suggesting that educating has been stagnant relative to the need for learning from inside traditional education.  
• The Lumina Foundation focuses includes a core tag line on every Lumina web page: “to increase the proportion of Americans with high-quality college degrees, certificates or other credentials to 60% by 2025.” The Gates Foundation is similarly committed. President Obama and the Department of Education have similar attainment scaling goals. According to Inside Higher Education's Doug Lederman, “First in the World” will be administered by FIPSE as a $75 million grant program focused on educational attainment and finally announced on May 15 (2014), and the new attainment program will also address some of the goals of the President's August 2013 announced hope to “Make College More Affordable: A Better Bargain for the Middle Class." 
• Scaling up educating and learning together was a core story told by an IFC conference panel featuring four leaders from Latin America and India. President and CEO Pete Pizarro of Whitney International in Latin America, for example, spoke to 1) scaling up learners through one IT-integrated platform, 2) focusing on learner centricity (as opposed to faculty and institutional centricity), 3) developing regulatory innovation because Whitney International's private campuses have to be for-profit in some nations (Brazil, for example) and nonprofit in others (Argentina, for example).
• Scale up educational justice by reacting to two critical factors:
• The strong statistical correlation at almost 1.0 between the levels of family income and the levels of credentialing in the family has been documented around the modern world for some time, including the efforts of the Census Bureau in the U.S.
• Families with middle to low incomes are an increasing proportion of the family population (in the US and also in many other countries). 
• The two factors together imply that scaling up educational attainment proportions will require credentialing a growing proportion of learners from family incomes on low to mid rungs of the economic ladder.
• Scale up international financial sources to supply the various forms of grants and loans — especially micro-loans — that could become subject to the ELC economic governace of the credentialing economy as part of social progress to advance and sustain humanity’s environmental, social, economic, and educational justice.
• Scale up new forms of “educating” to start increasing 1) educational attainment that has been stagnant for about 40 years in the U.S. and 2) educational justice that has moved in the wrong direction in the U.S. partially as the result of higher education student loans currently in debt by more than $1.08 trillion that is greater than total credit card debt.
• Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World is the latest publication (2012) by Tony Wagner (Expert in Residence at Harvard), who keynoted the IFC conference on “Rethinking  Education: Shaping the Future." He quipped that education needs to focus on creative and timely learning, not on educating as long practiced by traditional universities that now cannot meet the scale issue. He said that engaged, creative learners would benefit primarily from outlier faculty members and outlier executive leaders. Educational institutions in the US, for example, are managed and delivered by revenues based on credit hours or course hours, not on outlier faculty and executives interested in changing the old business models.
• Bill Gates and at least ten or so other famous entrepreneurs dropped out of “prestigious” educational universities over the last few decades in the US.
• The first paragraph of my paper on the "credentialing economy" (cited above) quotes that “education is the slowest form of learning,” according to media guru Tony Schwartz in the 1960s. Tony Wagner is trying today to disaggregate traditional educating and then redesign credentialing that can be scalable, flexible, and affordable to learners aiming at the professions and workforces researched and offered by educators helping to "pay learners forward" to assist humanity’s environmental, social, economic, and educational justice. 

Scaling up the role of education in social progress is becoming neither affordable, accreditable, nor controllable by an increasing proportion of learners within the traditional practices of education. We need to synchronize educating and learning revolutions in order to advance social progress.

President Obama's affordability plan: for better and for worse

I was pleased to have my paper, "The Credentialing Economy: Transformed by and for Its Beneficiaries," published on December 6, 2013 in the 2013 November/December edition of the EDUCAUSE Review Online (ERO) and selected as an "Editors' Pick." Consider reading the paper if you're interested in how to scale up educational justice and educational attainment together, while also making credentialing more affordable to all private and public parties who benefit from the verifiable learning that leads to a credentials.

I wrote the paper after reading about a policy initiative announced by President Obama in August, 2013. The President's initiative is well underway, as summarized below via excerpts from the “FACT SHEET on the President’s Plan to Make College More Affordable: A Better Bargain for the Middle Class.”

“President Obama outlined an ambitious new agenda to combat rising college costs and make college affordable for American families. His plan will measure college performance through a new ratings system so students and families have the information to select schools that provide the best value. And after this ratings system is well established, Congress can tie federal student aid to college performance so that students maximize their federal aid at institutions providing the best value. The President’s plan will also take down barriers that stand in the way of competition and innovation, particularly in the use of new technology, and shine a light on the most cutting-edge college practices for providing high value at low costs.”

 “A higher education is the single most important investment students can make in their own futures. At the same time, it has never been more expensive. That’s why since taking office, President Obama has made historic investments in college affordability, increasing the maximum Pell Grant award for working and middle class families by more than $900, creating the American Opportunity Tax Credit, and enacting effective student loan reforms eliminating bank subsidies and making college more affordable.”

“However, despite these measures, college tuition keeps rising. The average tuition at a public four-year college has increased by more than 250 percent over the past three decades, while incomes for typical families grew by only 16 percent, according to College Board and Census data.  Declining state funding has forced students to shoulder a bigger proportion of college costs; tuition has almost doubled as a share of public college revenues over the past 25 years from 25 percent to 47 percent.  While a college education remains a worthwhile investment overall, the average borrower now graduates with over $26,000 in debt. Only 58 percent of full-time students who began college in 2004 earned a four-year degree within six years. Loan default rates are rising, and too many young adults are burdened with debt as they seek to start a family, buy a home, launch a business, or save for retirement.”

In my ERO paper, I suggest why and how we can work together to improve upon President Obama's plan.

Not that President Obama and Secretary Duncan need my approval, but I say “right on” to their advice for taking advantage of proven and emerging technologies and the innovation strategies they enable – course redesign, flipping classes, MOOCs, modular credentialing (“badges”), competency-based learning/credentialing, adaptive learning/testing, predictive analytics, and other actionable IT-enabled strategies for improving institutional and collective performance.

The President also requested $1 billion to fund a “Race to the Top for Higher Education” and $55 million to fund FIPSE’s “First In the World” (FITW) program aimed at increasing the proportion of adult populations holding a postsecondary credential. The FIPSE National Board endorsed FITW in 2012. As a member of that board, my intent in the ERO article is to offer constructive suggestions for improving upon the President’s plan in several dimensions, including how to meet the educational attainment goals of FITW.

Student financial aid is the President Obama's primary lever for making “college affordable for American families,” especially for those on the low-to-middle rungs of the economic ladder. Again, right on!

Higher education’s service model and its revenue-dependence on student financial aid (grants, tax credits, and loans) have become hot topics for education policy makers and, thus, also targets for programmatic grant funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates, Lumina, and other foundations, and from regional and national departments of education. For example, Inside Higher Ed reported in 2012 on Completions-Focused Financial Aid. The article described the Gates Foundation’s partnership with a research and advisory group, Washington, DC-based HCM Strategists. HCM is organizing and leading several different but related efforts to use financial-aid as a lever for improving credentialing processes and completion rates while serving a greater proportion of low-income students more productively – i.e., more affordably, not only to needy students, but also to the governments and institutions that support them financially as they earn credentials. With support from the Gates and Lumina foundations, HCM has guided and reported on a number of recent projects. HCM helped to develop (and now maintain) a website on College Productivity and also provide a newsletter and other resources addressing the productivity agenda. The titles of two HCM reports reveal the thrust of some recent work efforts: 1) Doing Better for More Students: Putting Student Outcomes at the Center of Federal Financial Aid, and 2) The American Dream 2.0: How FINANCIAL AID can help improve college access, affordability, and completion.

The American Dream 2.0 report was prepared on behalf of an “American Dream 2.0 Coalition.” The coalition’s agenda is strikingly similar to the agenda of the nonprofit, nongovernmental “Education Leadership Commons” (ELC) described in my ERO article and in the 2012 paper, “Is Education’s Past Its 2050 Prologue?” The paper draws on Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom’s work on the “economic governance of the commons,” as well as my earlier work. The idea is to “consumerize” the common-good credentialing economy by relying more and more on the multiplier efficiencies inherent in “shared services” – a sharable “mash up” of educational data and self-service apps enabled by IMS interoperability standards, along with sharable credentialing processes enabled by such mash ups. Perhaps the best high-tech metaphor for envisioning the credentialing economy as a consumer market is the Education and Career Positioning System that is analogous to the familiar GPS.

In spite of all of these recent initiatives, President Obama's underlying strategy is to 1) tie financial aid to institutional performance on a college “rating” system to be developed collaboratively uner the DoE, 2) challenge states to fund public colleges based on performance, and 3) hold colleges and students receiving financial aid responsible for time-based progress towards a degree. That three-fold strategy, in my opinion, would lead to increased and unnecessary regulation, which the plan itself eschews with its intent to “encourage innovation by stripping away unnecessary regulations.” I hope also that the implementation of the President’s new plan will emphasize needs-tested student grants over student loans. The Department of Education, after all, recently announced that outstanding student-loan debt now stands at $1.2 trillion, second in the consumer market only to mortgage debt. Higher education cannot become an entitlement, but should become a needs-tested right, for which the student also should assume some form of responsibility.

The recent White House initiative, the FITW plan, and many other policy initiatives call for increasing the rates of credentialing and attainment (the proportion of a population holding a postsecondary credential), while also making college more affordable. The “credentialing economy” thus becomes an apt phrase for referring to the education enterprise as an economy or market. The phrase “economic governance” is used in my ERO paper to describe a foundation for a strategy alternative to the President’s regulatory strategy. The economic-governance alternative strategy will attempt to balance economic rights and responsibilities among the students, families, educational institutions, governments, and other economic beneficiaries in the credentialing economy – thus explaining the phrase in the title my ERO paper, “education transformed by and for its economic beneficiaries.” In the closing sections of the ERO paper, I propose this alternative “economic governance strategy for the common-good credentialing economy” and explain it through analogy with the Internet Society (ISOC), Internet Engineering Task Force, (IETF), and their respective roles in the economic governance of the Internet, which continues to work “for everyone” – without regulation! If all people are created equal, shouldn’t education also be affordably and flexibly accessible to everyone and economically governed as openly and inclusively as possible under a set of trust-but-verify success metrics? Let’s pause to take a look at the Internet’s governance model.

We all know the remarkable story of the Internet – the “network of networks,” which today is a paradigm of open, global self-regulation. It is controlled by no one entity, but continues to race forward in response to the common-good interests of all of its economic beneficiaries. Through a Web browser connected to the Internet, the Web becomes a self-service access point for a wealth of resources and services, some free and some for a fee, some open and some by permission. The result has been exponential growth in new economic and social “wealth,” both private and public – the same spectacular results that the President hopes to achieve through his latest higher education policy initiative! Lynn St. Amour, President and CEO of ISOC, put it this way in a 2012 article on Internet governance: “The Internet works because its governance is open, inclusive, collaborative, and transparent.”

Right on, Lynn, that’s how we could govern the credentialing marketplace. Learning to do so will require schools and colleges to emphasize learning, rather than educating, and to expect leadership from, well, executive leaders, with some help from their CIOs and external investors in the credentialing economy, such as governments, employers, donors, for-profit suppliers to education, and nongovernmental nonprofit education-related organizations.

Get the comprehensive story in "The Credentialing Economy: Transformed by and for Its Beneficiaries."