Crossing “Major” Boundaries to Co-Create the Future

Crossing “Major” Boundaries to Co-Create the Future

THE WORLD — NOT JUST THE WORLD OF HIGHER EDUCATION — IS FEELING THE TENSION OF ACCELERATING CHANGE. SOME ANTICIPATED, OTHERS NOT.

by Aaron Bradley Faculty Innovation Fellows candidate University of Cincinnati

FUTURES IN FLUX

Information is instantly accessible for free, but it’s loosely regulated and not always accurate. Society faces increasingly complex challenges where solutions are undefined. Disruptions to social and economic systems are inevitable and likely perpetual. This could sound like the opening lines of an essay on dystopian futures, but disruption also breeds an opportunity for innovation. For the world of higher education, rising to meet this moment means examining and adapting instructional methods, models of academic programming, and our general role in the social and economic landscape. Several pre-pandemic industry and economic forecasts were already challenging the confines of traditional discipline-driven educational models. In 2017 the McKinsey Global Institute suggested that by the year 2030, 8%-9% of labor demand will be in occupations that have never existed before, and that up to 375 million workers could be forced to change job categories entirely1. For recent college graduates and current students, this means there’s a very real possibility that the career they’ve spent 4-5 years preparing for won’t exist by the time they’re 30 years old. Similarly, the World Economic Forum suggests that global economies are increasingly driven by jobs that require solving unstructured problems and effectively analyzing information.2

Post-pandemic, the timeline for many of these forecasts have accelerated or have already become a reality. In this landscape, spending 4-5 years in university preparing for a career that may not exist within a few years of graduation becomes a difficult value proposition. While the value of a college degree shouldn’t be measured solely by its direct line to a specific career, these forecasts, coupled with the rising cost of higher education, do set the stage for thoughtful discussions about how we might respond. This moment presents educational institutions with an invitation to innovate and place an emphasis on developing graduates who are resilient, adaptable, critical thinkers, capable of embracing ambiguity with curiosity and confidence. Rather than curating and disseminating discipline-based information, we have an opportunity to create and facilitate unique educational experiences that shape the way our students thoughtfully engage with the world. In this future, universities will be home to subject-matter experts in a diverse array of fields AND experts in the creation of programs that facilitate cross disciplinary exploration, discovery, and experiences that keep pace with the world outside of the university.

PROTOTYPES, PIVOTS, AND PILOTS

What would happen if students’ undergraduate careers were filled with experiences designed to foster a sense of curiosity and comfort with navigating complex uncertainty? What if we trained students to see disruption as an opportunity for innovation rather than a potential setback? What if we introduced these experiences early and often in a student’s undergraduate career, while they still have some runway to let it shape their path? At the University of Cincinnati, one of our responses is a newly launched, cohort-based innovation program called NEXT Innovation Scholars (NIS). Each year a cohort of high potential students from a variety of majors and academic years are selected to join NIS, inviting them into a diverse, multi-disciplinary community of innovators that we describe as “humble, hungry, curious, and bold in our pursuit of innovation and future creation”. Students from any and all undergraduate majors across UC’s thirteen colleges are invited to apply, and each year’s cohort is selected through a rigorous, multi-round review process by a committee that includes university leaders who specifically work in areas with cross-college reach. The students selected for NIS receive scholarships to support their UC tuition for the remainder of their undergraduate career, and gain access to signature cross-disciplinary educational experiences that sit outside the boundaries of traditional courses within their major. They remain in their traditional degree program and complete all degree requirements, but these signature experiences “wrap around” their degree to enhance it and give them ongoing opportunities to work outside the boundaries of their degree program. They’re also immersed in a network of mentors and advisors from inside and outside the university who guide them along the non-linear path of becoming “more than their major.” Using the metaphor of the T-shaped professional, if their degree is the vertical line of their T, and the experiences they’d naturally encounter outside of their major are the top of it, NIS is like an amorphic sphere that encompasses their entire T and makes it possible to collide with other T’s and absorb their energy to grow stronger. We’re also designing the program to enable fluid, agile collaboration with industry and community partners tackling real-world challenges together to explore future-focused solutions; students, faculty, and external collaborators come together to explore a messy challenge together, in an environment where no one has the upper hand. NEXT Innovation Scholars simultaneously have one foot in their degree program and their college, and one foot in an ambiguous world of experiences created to blur the lines of majors, disciplines, and industries. In exchange for scholarships and access to these experiences, students in the program are charged with sharing feedback on their participation and learnings, developing their own student-led cross-disciplinary innovation initiatives across campus, and working with faculty to co-create future experiences for their peers. This nimble, invested group of students are working alongside faculty, administrators, and external collaborators to test and refine transformational models of teaching, research, and service with the potential to scale across all colleges and departments at UC (and eventually beyond). Prototyping and experimenting within this program has already revealed opportunities to disrupt existing paradigms - as an example, we’ve had great success experimenting with project-based industry or community-partnered experiential learning engagements that last between 5-8 weeks and aren’t constrained by traditional class structures. Students in NIS participate in these short-term, highly experiential projects on short notice and in addition to their existing courses because they’re invested in the program (and incentivized by a scholarship), but credit hours are still the currency of a university degree. So, part of the vision for scaling these offerings across campus includes finding creative ways to give students course credit for experiences that start and end before or after traditional academic terms and present themselves on short notice. Learning comes through the lens of applied problem-solving in real-time response to the world outside of the university, and beyond the confines of their major. Repeated educational experiences like these will train students to be comfortable in the uncomfortableness of messy problem solving and moving at the pace of change, while still allowing them to meet their degree requirements. Using the NEXT Innovation Scholars program as our prototype, we’re now in the early stages of exploring how to develop a scalable system for creating, vetting, and delivering classes like these across multiple colleges and departments, starting with other faculty and staff who are willing to experiment and learn with us.

This is just one example of what can happen when we give students and external collaborators a seat at the table and suspend some of our assumptions about how a course is structured or delivered, and I believe we’ve just started to scratch the surface of what’s possible when we embrace these principles. In just one year, students in the NEXT Innovation Scholars program have also used their platform and resources to create and teach design thinking and innovation modules to more than 200 first year students in cross-disciplinary gateway courses, developed a 4-week social innovation project with a local non-profit that attracted cross-disciplinary student teams and allowed them to earn community service hours for participation, and delivered a student-led workshop series teaching human centered design to faculty and instructional designers in our College of Nursing. Most of these projects involved early tests and multiple pivots along the way, and all of them have moved past the prototyping stage and into the “pilot” phase where they’ll be offered regularly to expanding audiences. It’s exciting to imagine what else these experiments might spark or evolve into as they scale up and we invite collaboration from additional faculty, students, and partners.

WHAT’S NEXT?

So, where do we go from here? “We” as in higher education collectively, not just this newly launched program at the University of Cincinnati. Just like any human-centered-design challenge, staying alert and aware of the changing landscape is critical. We must also adopt a bias toward action, and culture of experiments, prototypes, and pilots. We need to invite external collaborators as co-creators of educational experiences, rather than sponsors or clients. Similarly, we’ll have to see our students as collaborators and co-creators rather than consumers. In this world, the role of the professor or instructor tends toward coach, mentor, and leader, rather than lecturer or keeper of the “right” answers to the test. There’s a responsibility to design and steward the experience in a way that ensures student learning and moves the class forward toward benchmarks, but we’re also invited to learn alongside students and seek input on how the experience might adapt based on what everyone is learning together. For the new program described in this article, we’re in the “messy middle” of ideate, prototype, test, and repeat, but we’re still on a clear path toward our original goals - we’ve also discovered and then met a few new ones along the way. The same is true when zooming out and surveying the landscape of higher education, and arguably the world as a whole in modern times. Embracing rapid transformation is fatiguing at times; as soon as a prototype is tested, another is waiting in the wings and the world may have already changed around us and made our original ideas obsolete. But, this also sharpens our ability to build structures and systems that stay nimble and leave room for real-time responses to changing landscapes. It teaches us to ride the wave of momentum and opportunity, instead of trying to force action through a static system. If we invite students into the mess with us, they’ll learn to live in that same tension along with us — a skill they’ll inevitably need as they venture out to create the future when they graduate. What might this look like on your campus, with your students and collaborators from industry or the community? Better yet - what might it look like for us to collaborate across campuses, states, and continents, to create the future of higher education together?