Learning 101

Sister Joel Read

President
Alverno College
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Just as manufacturers know that you can't let a product go through an entire assembly line and then reject it at the end, so educators need to assess students throughout the learning experience -- and not just fail or pass them at the end.

When done well, assessment becomes indistinguishable from the learning process itself, since people integrate information through their own thought processes -- not simply by receiving information.

That's why we have no grades at Alverno. At other schools, if you get an A, you don't get a sense of what was good and what you could have improved. Instead, we have eight criteria that students must satisfy at growing levels of complexity. They're given an online diagnostic tool that allows them to save work related to classroom learning, to internships, and to volunteer work. Those online portfolios allow both students and administrators to discern patterns in a student's learning early on.

One of the eight criteria is communication. When problems arise in the workplace, it usually isn't because people don't have the right information. Things go awry when communication breaks down -- often because someone fails to see something from a different perspective. That's why we have students work in groups: We want them to learn where their biases are. We assess them in such group situations, but, more important, they learn to assess themselves, so that eventually they become their own assessment centers. They leave here knowing how to live in a world that requires quick decision making -- and they leave understanding that there are pieces of information that they'll have to fill in for themselves.

Sister Joel Read (joel.read@alverno.edu) has been president of Alverno College since 1968. Under her leadership, Alverno has won many awards, including a MacArthur Foundation grant for its distinctive approach to education. Alverno, founded in 1887, is a four-year Catholic liberal-arts college for women.

Elliot Masie

President
The Masie Center
Saratoga Springs, New York

Now that the Web has become a ubiquitous learning tool, what can we do to make it perform better as a teacher? One big, untapped area is that of membership. The current model of learning and training -- whether you're talking about high schools or corporate universities -- will have to change to one that keeps its learners engaged over a long period of time. Why? The financial survival of educational institutions and the growing need for continuous, lifelong learning demand such a change.

Think about it: Higher education is the only business that has a ceremony for firing its customers. Colleges spend thousands of dollars on recruiting students, and then, after four years, those colleges make students dress up in a gown, march them across a platform, and then fire them. The only other time that happens is at an execution!

Imagine an MBA program that saw the value of its customers as extending far beyond the years that they spent on a campus. Instead of firing people after a few years, such a program would shift its emphasis away from graduation. Upon acceptance into the program, students would become "members," and they would remain members for as long as they took courses, whether those classes were conducted on campus or online. The goal would be to keep members over the life cycle of their careers -- and even into postretirement. In turn, the program could charge fees according to each member's level of involvement.

Rather than offer learning that has an end point, MBA programs could transform learning into something continuous. Educational institutions that survive will move from the Industrial Age "event" model to a model that turns students into members of a network -- a network that keeps them engaged over the course of their life.

Elliott Masie (emasie@masie.com) has worked in the fields of technology, learning, and organizational development for 25 years. Before founding the Masie Center -- an international think tank that focuses on issues of learning and technology -- he was president of a division of Ziff Davis Publishing. Recently, he was appointed to the newly created White House advisory committee on learning opportunities.