Member-only story
A Critique of The 60 Year Curriculum
On October 26, 2020, John Richards and Chris Dede published The 60-Year Curriculum: A Strategic Response to a Crisis on Educause Review. I feel it misses several important points.
First, Richards and Dede state, “After decades of procrastination, higher education has finally been spurred, by the necessity of the COVID-19 pandemic, to enter the 21st century and offer online courses tailored to the needs of the synergistic digital economy for nontraditional students across a spectrum of ages and career stages.” If only the second half of this sentence were true. Let’s look at this sentence in detail.
The vast majority of higher education institutions have indeed procrastinated — and they have ridiculed and — where possible — blocked efforts by innovators like Southern New Hampshire University, Western Governors University, and others. In my home state of Indiana, where my institution — Ivy Tech — is an innovator in the online learning space — we still even after 20+ years of delivery high quality online content in disciplines even including foreign languages and sciences must occasionally come to the aid of students where their transfer institutions (think Purdue, IU, etc.) will attempt to not accept credits if the student says the course was taking online.
