Building a Nation of Learners Key to U.S. Meeting Global Competition, Report by Business-Higher Education Forum Concludes

Washington, DC (June 12, 2003) – Higher education leaders and policymakers must work together to develop and adopt new approaches to teaching and learning to forestall an impending shortage of up to 12 million college-educated workers by 2020 that threatens the nation’s ability to compete in a global economy, warns an in-depth report issued today by the Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF).

In Building a Nation of Learners: The Need for Changes in Teaching and Learning to Meet Global Challenges, the BHEF concludes that America must create “A Nation of Learners,” one where students learn basic life skills and obtain training tailored both to their individual needs and workplace demands.

Among the key recommendations in the report, BHEF urges policymakers to create new policies, priorities, and programs needed to transform the United States into a true Nation of Learners. Specifically, the report calls for the president to create a Nation of Learners Commission to help identify ways to tap the expertise necessary for improving learning and to quantify the technology infrastructure investments needed for the U.S. to reach educational parity by 2010.

“With the pending retirement of the baby boom generation and the continued expansion of jobs requiring college-level learning, higher education institutions must devise bold new approaches to teaching and learning that respond effectively to these demographic, economic, and social forces,” said Molly Broad, president of the 16-campus University of North Carolina and co-chair of the BHEF’s working group on learning and technology.

Comprised of U.S. business executives, college presidents, researchers and administrators, the BHEF has published groundbreaking reports and calls to action on American education for more than 20 years. In this latest undertaking, the BHEF identifies five key changes needed to redesign education to produce graduates prepared for the 21st century. They include: ensuring educational content that is challenging, motivating and relevant; adapting objectives to specific outcomes and certifiable job-skills; increasing opportunities and access to education; encouraging learning through more interaction and individualization; and focusing education on lifelong learning skills and attributes.

“Even if employees are equipped for today’s jobs, they need to be ready to learn, relearn and, in some cases, unlearn to respond to the changing workplace,” said Sean C. Rush, global general manager of education for IBM and co-chair of the working group with Broad. “The traditional style of ‘lecture, listen and learn’ needs to be replaced with a more active style of learning that emphasizes reasoning, interpretation and problem solving.”

One Approach to Building A Nation of Learners

Information technology, including so-called e-Learning and distance learning via the Web, can be instrumental in helping education systems improve, says the BHEF report. During the 1999-2000 school year, about 1.5 million of the 19 million students enrolled in higher education took at least one online course. In 2002, an estimated 84 percent of four-year institutions offered at least one such course. As these numbers rise, so will the need for more e-Learning initiatives, including the rise in digital campuses, online flexible semesters, and flexible semesters. The resulting drive to improve the quality of web-based learning will expand content from traditional sources such as textbooks, journals, and periodicals to digital media that combine voice, data, and videos through any number of computers and other electronic devices.

This new educational model must help students learn what they need when they need it – providing “learning on demand.” This will force colleges to adapt or modify traditional academic calendars, course credits, and means of delivery, the BHEF report continues. Some institutions already have begun to redesign education at the local level. The report cites examples at the following institutions for development of innovative solutions: eArmy University, Fairleigh Dickinson University (NJ), Georgetown University (Washington, DC), Pace University (NY), Rio Salado Community College, Tempe (AZ), The Ohio State University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Illinois, and the University of Nebraska and Peter Kiewit Institute.

While technology provides a powerful transformational tool, it cannot replace the traditional teacher-student relationship, says the report. To the contrary, technology innovations such as instant messaging have extended teacher-student interaction far beyond face-to-face consultations. The most successful learning models are those that blend the best of traditional classroom and online technologies to allow the teacher to maximize learning.

Currently, most higher education institutions lack the resources required to aggressively pursue information-technology improvements. Some 25 percent of public universities and community colleges are reporting cuts in their academic computing budgets. The report also notes a disparity between technology resources available at community colleges, which enroll larger percentages of minority students, and other institutions.

To help address these resource shortfalls, the report calls for the creation of Regional Innovation Centers for Learning Redesign to foster research in learning science, explore the role technology can play in enhancing learning techniques, develop new learning models, facilitate partnerships in support of new learning models, and disseminate best practices. It also calls for the creation of a federal Learning and Networking (LAN) Grant Program that would enable campuses to redesign course content and learning processes, build and sustain robust technological infrastructures, and provide additional resources to achieving widespread learning transformation.

The full report, Building a Nation of Learners, can be downloaded from http://www.bhef.com/

Copyright © 2007 Business-Higher Education Forum