News & Updates
Small Talk from the VP: Preparing for the Class of 2030
By Dave Smallen
November 10, 2015
My granddaughter, Stephanie, just entered second grade. She will be ready for college in the fall of 2026. How do we at Hamilton prepare for her generation, one that has had their entire lives documented online? Considering she was raised with smart phones and iPads, what new technology will she expect to find at college? These were some of the questions explored by Jamie Casap (@jcasap), Google’s Chief Educational Evangelist, in a talk he presented at the recent Educause conference in Indianapolis. His presentation was titled “The Digitally Native Generation Z Is Going to College: Are You Ready?”
I’m confident that the residential liberal arts experience will still be the gold standard of learning for traditional aged students. Small classes, 24 x 7 learning, with regular opportunities for students to interact with faculty and increasingly diverse classmates. We will still be the near-perfect learning environment, but we will have evolved.
As an institution, we will implement new approaches to student learning. For a generation of students who will have taken notes on computers or tablets, rather than paper, will we really ban the use of these devices in class? I don’t think so. Will we increasingly provide more interactive materials for students to learn with in and out of the classroom? Absolutely.
Our current experiments with MOOCs and online learning will look quaint - even in ten years – and the MOOC of today will be the online textbook in the future, with interactive materials that can be regularly updated. In fact, students in her classes will contribute to the creation of content for the textbook used for the next class. I also believe that she will be taking online courses while at Hamilton, facilitated through the guidance of our faculty. The best of the liberal arts colleges will recognize that while we can’t offer everything ourselves, we can create learning environments that draw on the expertise of faculty elsewhere through online learning while keeping the close faculty-student interaction that is our hallmark. We will create “learning communities” composed of our faculty and students, around these online experiences. Early experiments are underway at peer institutions. This may not reduce the cost of a Hamilton education, but it will expand opportunities for Stephanie without increasing cost.
Stephanie has known only a global, networked world in which the answer to almost any question can be “known” – to at least a first-order approximation - in seconds, through a device she will carry with her at all times (or wear). Likely, early efforts to develop her information literacy skills will take place in high school, or earlier. But I still expect that enhancing these skills will largely be the result of her interactions with faculty and librarians. Her ability to evaluate, analyze, synthesize and create knowledge will be shaped by these college mentors. I expect that our current Open Access initiatives will begin to gain momentum, with information even more abundant and “free,” creating even more challenges for her as knowledge creator.
We will be ready.
