Currently, while confronting our external challenges, we are constrained by an institutional design problem. With our current design, it is not possible to increase productivity without a corresponding threat to quality. If colleges increase productivity by either increasing average class size or increasing faculty workloads, for example, there are serious negative consequences for educational quality.
Corporate America has adopted organizational restructuring and process redesign as a strategy to cope with increasing domestic and world competition. These are, after all, the great levers of individual human activities. Change the structure in which people work and you increase or decrease the leverage that multiplies the effect of their efforts. For example, earlier this century manufacturers enormously increased the leverage of their human resources by changing their one-at-a-time product assembly processes to mass production assembly lines.
Organizational restructuring and process redesign in colleges offer the hope of greater efficiency and effectiveness. But a new paradigm of our nature is required for such restructuring and redesign to be anything more than superficial, for it to truly affect instruction and faculty roles, or for it to be seriously undertaken by more than a handful of colleges. The paradigm of what a college is that we now operate within is a very powerful force inhibiting transformative innovations in the technologies, methods, and structures colleges use to produce their results.
A good place to begin constructing a new paradigm is by surfacing the assumptions of the current paradigm. The key assumption of the college paradigm is that the purpose of colleges is to provide instruction. If we change this, everything changes. A new paradigm based on the declaration that the purpose of colleges is to produce learning shifts everything.
It is revealing that virtually every mission statement contained in the catalogs of California's 107 community colleges fails to use the word "learning" in its statement of purpose. When it is used, it is almost always bundled in the phrase "teaching and learning," as if to say that while learning may indeed have something to do with colleges it is only present as an aspect of teaching. Community colleges refer to ourselves as the premier teaching institutions of higher education. Institutional success is judged comparatively on the basis of the quality and quantity of resources, students, faculty, programs and courses, not on learning outcomes and student success. Clearly instruction has been our purpose, not learning.
To say that colleges are in the business of providing instruction is equivalent to saying that auto companies are in the assembly line business. It is to say that our method is our product. To make instruction our end -- corollary paradigm assumptions specify what counts as instruction -- is to say that a particular means for producing learning is the only legitimate, acceptable means for doing so. It is no wonder that our institutions have been so resistant to innovation and reform in their methods and structure. Since classroom-based instruction is the archetype, TV courses, computer-based distance education, and credit for life experience, for example, continue to be suspect and are widely resisted.
Surfacing this key assumption takes us a giant step toward uncovering its corollary assumptions. For example, the nature of roles will change under the new paradigm. Faculty will be important under the new paradigm but their role will shift. Under the current paradigm, faculty are primarily teachers -- "sages on stages" -- providing classroom-based instruction. Under the new paradigm, faculty would be primarily designers of learning experiences and environments. In fact, under the new paradigm, students and all employees would share a single purpose: to produce learning and student success. Under the current paradigm, faculty teach, nonfaculty support faculty and teaching, and students learn -- a triumvirate of different purposes.
The new paradigm implies that colleges take responsibility for learning and judge their success not on the quality of instruction but on the quality of learning; on their ability to produce ever greater and more sophisticated student learning and success with each passing year, each exiting student and each graduating class.
By taking responsibility for learning and holding ourselves accountable for learning outcomes, we do not relieve students of any of their responsibility for learning. The logic of responsibility is not that of a zero-sum game. In communicating knowledge, a person loses nothing, perhaps even gains something in the process, while the other gains new knowledge. Likewise, two people may both take 100% responsibility for the same results. When this occurs, there is a synergetic, win/win interaction producing results greater than the sum of what could be produced separately.
The new paradigm allows for the fulfillment of the student outcomes accountability movement. While the movement has been active for decades, under the current paradigm, it has not penetrated very far into normal organizational practice. There are only a handful of colleges across the country that systematically assess student outcomes. Virtually no college can say whether this year's graduating class has learned more than the class that graduated five years ago. The reason for this is profoundly simple. Student outcomes under the current paradigm are simply irrelevant to the successful functioning of a college.
A shift to the new paradigm produces a profound shift in the criteria for success. The new paradigm implies a new definition of productivity. Under the current paradigm, productivity is defined as cost per hour of instruction per student. This may be measured by the number of weekly student contact hours per full-time equivalent faculty. Under the new paradigm, productivity is defined as cost per unit of learning per student. Not surprisingly, there is no statistic that measures this notion of productivity. Under this new definition, it is possible to increase outputs without increasing costs. An abundance of research shows that alternatives to the traditional semester-length, classroom-based lecture method produce more learning. Some of those alternatives are less expensive. Under the new paradigm, producing more with less becomes possible.
A continual restructuring of the methods and structures will be required to produce learning ever more effectively and efficiently. One might even imagine the eventual disappearance of the lock-step semester system and the traditional classroom. Many implications are not yet clear, and as with all paradigms, the new paradigm will carry its own set of unspoken or unrecognized assumptions.
The change to a new paradigm will not be easy. There are entrenched systemic forces that support the current paradigm. We are funded on the basis of student attendance. This powerful force severely constrains the kinds of changes that can be made in learning methods.
It virtually limits them to changes within classrooms leaving intact the basic one-teacher, one-classroom structure. If we were funded for learning outcomes, then experimenting with new means and structures for producing learning would not only be easier but would be encouraged and rewarded.
The external forces supporting the current college model and its basic structures are themselves, of course, a result of the near universal societal acceptance of the current paradigm. Widely accepted paradigms are self-fulfilling. You know a paradigm is functioning when people say, "That can't be done" and "That's impossible." Thus, the initial response to a suggestion that we fund colleges on outcomes is likely to be a form of "That's not possible." But as the new paradigm takes hold, forces and possibilities shift and impossible becomes possible.
Paradigm shifts occur when at least two conditions are met. First, difficulties or anomalies begin to appear in the functioning of the existing paradigm which cannot be handled adequately or any longer ignored. Such serious difficulties have appeared in the functioning of schools and colleges. Report after prestigious report has concluded that our schools and colleges are in "crisis" and are not getting the job done.
Second, there must exist an alternative paradigm that will account for all that the original paradigm accounts for -- not in the same way, of course -- and which offers real hope for solving the major difficulties facing the current paradigm. The paradigm based on the idea that colleges exist to produce learning is such a paradigm.
The consequences of not adopting this new paradigm and its implications for restructuring and learning process redesign is to be judged ever less effective in meeting the needs of our communities and society. Eventually, society will reform us.