The New Education Landscape

The second keynote speaker at the Minnesota eLearning Summit was Goldie Blumenstyk, a higher education journalist for The Chronicle of Higher Education. In her address, “Mapping the New Education Landscape,” she discussed some of the continuing problems for higher education and offered several ways to handle them. To begin with, and matching some of the concerns mentioned by the previous keynote speaker, Bryan Alexander, she expressed her concerns over withdrawal of “federal regulations protecting students as consumers.”

In effect, the cost of higher education, she said, has risen faster than the cost of most other consumer goods, which accounts for the increased number and size of student loans and the growing debt burdens of college graduates. Blumenstyk identified the increase in numbers and levels of administrators in higher education as one factor contributing to higher tuitions, and ultimately higher debt, and she claimed that the burgeoning layers of administration at colleges and universities were also putting shared governance with the faculty at risk.

Blumenstyk also reinforced the previous day’s comments regarding the increasing divides between income levels in American society, which she characterized as a divide between the haves and the have-nots, and also between ethnicities as racism continues to be a serious concern in our culture. To address these problems and to achieve a better balance of equity and opportunity she began by advocating free courses for those who are academically qualified and more open source material. To counter the technological divide driven by the widening economic divide, she also advised finding ways to increase access to and training for new technologies.

Finally, she hoped that colleges and universities would avail themselves more frequently of data-driven tools, using collected data on students, teachers, grades, policies, and pedagogies, for example, to determine how individuals are being affected by the complexity of the academic environment, who is being affected and how, and to use this data to revise or, if supported, continue practices that serve the greater academic and human needs of all the people academic institutions serve.