An Ecosystem Intersecting Humanities, Computational, and Engineering Disciplines with Cultural and Other Assets of Our Communities

Stephanie E. August, California State University-Los Angeles; Gustavo Menezes, California State University-Los Angeles; Bettyjo Bouchey, National Louis University; Alan Cheville, Bucknell University; Melissa Ko, Stanford University

Note around Language:
In this document, we refer to our main product as a manifesto. A manifesto as used in this document refers to a public declaration of views or stances, acknowledging what is generally already commonly-held knowledge from publications and past conversations, but then presenting new ideas of what should be done. We are crafting this manifesto to make our vision for the future of STEM education clear to others and give examples of what we could someday attain.

We acknowledge that manifestos have been used and referenced in extremely problematic ways. As a result, they have an association with individuals who have pushed for violent action on the basis of prejudice and hate. We hope to reclaim the original use of the word with our document, but note that you could also equate this manifesto with a “Declaration of Our Vision” or a similar phrase.

The STEM Reimagined Manifesto

Mission Statement

The STEM Reimagined Manifesto is a guide for faculty and administrators in higher education who are interested in widening access and participation. The manifesto seeks to guide all agents involved (students, faculty and staff) toward achieving their full potential by first identifying, then moving away from traditional models of higher education based on industrial metaphors which focus on production and system efficiency, and standardized inputs and outputs, into an ecosystem-based model, in which agents are seen as assets that enrich a learning environment, valued for who they are, their strengths, their desires, and the dreams they bring in, and they are nurtured to thrive. It is only by shifting our thinking from metaphors of production to ones of growth that we can open up alternative futures.

Description

As we redefine the future of STEM education, it is imperative that we consider the diversity of all agents involved, and design an academic setting that works for all. Our product is defined in three deliverables:

1. A program manifesto that defines key elements of a healthy STEM ecosystem that institutions, colleges, programs, and/or faculty can adapt to the needs of their system,
2. Day-in-the-life scenarios in the STEM ecosystem, and
3. An example program following the principles of the STEM ecosystem (biology).

Our manifesto and accompanying materials provides a complete picture of a healthy STEM ecosystem of the future on multiple levels:

• Physical: institutional => departmental => course-level
• Teaching & Learning Theory and Philosophy => practice

The manifesto connects the past to the future and is a powerful document that reexamines institutional practices, provides recommendations that support innovative and interdisciplinary program/course design, and creates a pathway to establishing and cultivating a healthy STEM ecosystem.

Values

The challenges of the historical higher education model rises from the fact that it has been designed, in most cases, with a factory-based mindset, in which inputs (students) and agents (faculty and staff) are only valued if they can conform to the specifications of the system, while the diversity and people’s well-being are virtually never considered. As a result, for every output that meets the specifications of the system and “successfully” go through its processes, there are many more who are discarded as “maladjusted”. Also important, is the fact that in conforming to the system inputs and agents often neglect their own backgrounds, desires and strengths, and by doin so they fall short of their full potential.

Herein, we propose an ecosystem-based model for education, in which the well-being of agents (no more inputs) takes the front-stage of planning, designing and implementation activities, people are valued and nurtured, and everyone is thriving (based their own definition of thriving). As the key product, the manifesto begins by defining the set of values we believe can set the stage for meaningful transformation in STEM education:

• Prioritizes the well-being of the educational stakeholders/agents in the ecosystem, including students, faculty, staff, administrators, and members of the community-at-large
• Centered on experiences rather than content delivery – “I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think” – Socrates
• Recognizes that individuals develop at different paces, based on their particular circumstances, goals, and background
• Driven by reflection and formative assessment
• Honors the diverse cultural wealth and recognizes the competing needs and value of cooperation among multiple stakeholders
• Multimodal teaching, learning, and assessment designed with the needs of agents in mind.

Goals

The goals of the manifesto are to:

• Reimagine the STEM experience, in which diversity of stakeholders and agents are valued and nurtured so they can achieve their full potential and thrive.
• Shift the ideas that educational stakeholders / agents / policy makers have of higher education away from industrial metaphors and towards more inclusive and holistic ecosystem metaphors.
• Propose revised reward mechanisms for stakeholders agents that are aligned with the values of the ecosystem model.
• Empower agents in the system to make changes towards a healthy ecosystem environment
• Present health indicators to guide individual and unit assessment in place of traditional metrics to guide groups as they grow their ecosystems.

Assessment Based on Ecosystem Health Indicators

Reflection on Our Assumptions and Values

We reject the idea of learning outcomes that are independent of individual development. We are looking at higher education as an ecosystem and pull our metrics from those which indicate health of the ecosystem. Our metrics are devised from the belief that all individuals are agents of their own development, that each brings in cultural wealth, and also thrive in environments which provide autonomy.

We also push back against the desire to measure easily quantifiable phenomena that actually represent complex issues: admission rates, pass/fail/withdraw rates, retention rates, N-year graduation rates that are aggregated across populations. We aim to reframe metrics from production-oriented educational outcomes historically based on the “factory model” to metrics based on the health of an educational ecosystem. This aim raises several questions that provide lenses or perspectives to contrast current practices drawn from historical factory or pipeline schemas with those of an “ecosystem model” and commensurate changes in what we choose to value.

Based on viewing assessment as asking “actionable questions” we define metrics for success as questions then suggest types of measures that could inform answers and actions:

• Are all individuals within the ecosystem healthy mentally and physically? Individual, informal questionnaires pushed to a mobile device, trends in campus health data.
• Does the learning environment reflect the diversity of the region, state, or country? Comparisons between institutional databases across scales (institution as a whole, programs, classes) and demographic data.
• Does the environment offer the abundance of resources that needed by all individuals who desire to learn? Link university budget processes to defined areas of resource need and track resource use.
• Can the resources be utilized productively by every individual within the ecosystem? Collect data on resource use and extract patterns.
• How sustainable and/or resilient is the environment? Make budget scenarios public, plan for catastrophic events such as a global pandemic, draw from resource use data to make decisions.
• Do individuals show resilience to changing circumstances throughout their lives? Conduct or partner to conduct focused longitudinal surveys of graduates.
• To what extent can individuals develop at their own pace, based on their individual circumstances, goals, and background? Conduct survey and focus-group research and compare results with institutional data examining student pathways. Understand how students finance their education.
• To what extent can resources be accessed by all members of the community? Look at resource use, survey community members.
• Are resources equitably distributed, and can they be shifted readily so they are shared and accessible rather than hoarded? Shift to more flexible budget models, support common-pool resources, examine access policies on a regular basis.
• To what extent does the learning environment address pressing challenges, and do individuals feel they are contributing solutions to the challenge at-hand? Use survey tools and focus groups. Consider tools such as SenseMaker.
• To what extent are individuals developing and being nurtured in their growth in the three areas of foundational, meta- and humanistic development? The narrative portfolio system described next would assess this outcome.
• To what extent are individuals continuously reflecting on their own personal development and able to change direction as new visions and opportunities arise? The narrative portfolio system described next would assess this outcome.
• To what extent is every individual able to act to change the educational ecosystem to improve the ability for themselves and others to thrive? Again, narrative portfolios.

Central to the many of the suggested measures is more widespread data collection than most universities currently undertake. As many predict the onset of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schwab, Currency Press, New York 2016), universities would need to consider how to invest in such data collection, storage, and analysis.

Assessing Individual Growth through Narrative Portfolio Assessment

The ecosystem model puts the individual–whether student, faculty, or staff–at the center of their own experiential environment and strives to enable learning by ensuring that: 1) there is a focus on personal development in the domains of foundational, meta, and humanistic knowledge; and 2) the environment offers rich and readily accessible learning opportunities and resources to everyone. This emphasis on development- and resource-based assessment is in some ways antithetical to an outcomes-based assessment since outcomes are negotiated by, rather than defined for, the individual and change over time as the individual grows in all three domains of knowledge.

For this reason we propose that assessment be based on development of student narratives supported by materials that demonstrate their pathways. Portfolio systems are well-suited to this type of assessment. As Jerome Bruner noted, education can be seen as either creating new cultures or consuming existing cultures. The goal of this project is to stimulate new cultures in education which requires individuals be given freedom to experiment and create. Bruner, building upon Vygotsky, argues that there are two modes of cognitive function, rational and narrative, and that we make sense of lived reality through stories as much as reason. Each mode has its own logic that implies causality, but while rational modes of thought require proof, narrative modes are based on likeliness or alignment with one’s past experience. In the ecosystem framework narrative modes are important since while rational modes of thought strive for abstraction independent of human concerns, narrative modes strive for situatedness and connection to others. The ability to connect an individual’s experiences to the learning environment and enable their own voice in expressing plans for their future is central in connecting assessment to our vision.

In our vision of assessment, all members of a university construct stories about their experiences in an ongoing, recursive process that leads to valid, generalized abstractions about the world. Thus constructing a narrative about one’s future self is the process by which discrete learning experiences are synthesized into a coherent, and self-referential whole that takes into accounts one’s own history and cultural wealth. How the narrative changes over time illustrates the college is not just a place to learn things you did not know, but to be able to envision new futures for yourself that were not previously within your own scope of possibilities.

While there are multiple definitions of narrative, our working definition for assessment purposes is individuals taking actions to achieve specific intentions in settings that offer particular means. The narratives an individual creates emerge through tensions or exigencies between these elements such as when the means available to a person do not support action, or their intentions do not align with the setting (location) they find themselves in. It is our hypothesis that meaningful learning occurs when faculty, staff, and students have to navigate such tensions and it is this we hope to capture through narrative portfolios. By having students and others use portfolios to capture self-narratives about how they must navigate educational spaces and opportunities, we believe it is possible to develop ontological commitment. Ontological commitment captures that is you have to make a conscious commitment to try to be someone (e.g. an engineer or biologist) in order to become that person in the future. Such personal commitment to a larger cause is aided by consciously developing a self-narrative and exploring new roles and story pathways. Evaluating these narratives and connecting them to lived experiences through portfolios allows assessment of individual student trajectories along the dimensions of foundational, meta, and humanistic knowledge.

Assessing Individual Well-being and Satisfaction

Awareness of individual well-being and satisfaction is critical to achieving success. Measuring whether individuals are healthy mentally and physically, whether they feel they are nurtured and developing well, if they are continuously self-reflecting, changing, improving, is an incredibly complicated picture to capture. These aspects have often been implied or inferred through performance-based metrics such as the individual choice to persist in a course or degree program, as well as interpersonal observations.

A system that values students, faculty and staff satisfaction with their intellectual engagement and career trajectories, a deeply personal and culture-dependent notion, necessitates some self-reporting on the part of the individual. To this end, we can borrow from instruments developed to capture the different elements of a person’s wellbeing. Some dimensions of wellness (taken from Berea College at https://www.berea.edu/thrive/overview/) include:

• Spiritual Wellness is expanding our sense of purpose and meaning in life.
• Emotional Wellness is coping effectively with life and creating satisfying relationships.
• Cultural Wellness is being aware of their own background, and acknowledging, respecting, understanding and engaging with other cultural backgrounds.
• Occupational Wellness is personal satisfaction and enrichment from one’s work.
• Intellectual Wellness is recognizing creative abilities and finding ways to expand on skills.
• Social Wellness is how we relate to and connect with others.

One possible mechanism that complements narrative construction through portfolios is to survey all members of the institution (our “ecosystem”) or a random subsample of them at multiple timepoints to capture general wellbeing and whether there are inequities between different groups based on factors like identity, demographic, or status. Such information would complement the data already often collected such as classroom observations, evaluations, etc. This information would be used in a formative, quasi real-time basis to make adjustments to the campus environment.

Note that aspects of well-being have also been constructed to relate to notions of resilience, a key property that is analogous to ecosystem sustainability. We will address the sustainability of the institution as an entire system, and how it will be assessed, in later sections.

Assessing Ecosystem Diversity

One other critical guiding value we propose is the idea of diversity that mirrors the essential property of biodiversity in natural ecosystems. In ecosystems diversity is critical to resilience. If the institution identifies that there is a stark discrepancy between the identity make-up of the population they aim to serve, and the actual members of their current ecosystem, this is a critical problem that must be remedied strategically and thoughtfully. This notion is true at all levels of the institution: parity should be observed at all status levels (e.g. students, faculty, staff) and across all degree programs.

At present, many institutions do measure the demographics of their different members, but we choose to highlight this metric as an area that should guide action and decision-making over other traditionally favored metrics. We acknowledge that many institutions exist in a state where deliberate action (e.g. affirmative action in admissions or hiring) may not be allowed. However, in-depth reflection on whether there are implicit or explicit barriers that are causing individuals to be filtered out or less likely to persist.

Note that it is important that rather than just achieving the right proportions of different identity groups, it is critical that they truly are well-integrated and thriving parts of the ecosystem. In line with knowing that you have achieved representative numbers from historically marginalized groups, the system should show that these individuals have no disparities in well-being (the prior section) and access (the following section).

Assessing Equity in Ecosystem Opportunities

Even if there is some representation of different entities in the ecosystem (e.g. numerous species present in the biome), we have some notion that it is important that there is a balance between all individuals. That is, all individuals should be able to thrive through equal access to the resources they need and opportunities that enable thriving. Note that in an ecosystem there is not competition for one set of resources. Different species utilize different resources in a way that leads to a synergistic relationships; all contribute.

Equal access to resources can be ascertained both on the student’s end (self-reporting of practice) and on the level of the offices that control different resources. For example, departments can track who is taking advantage of the opportunity to conduct research with a lab, whether that be for academic credit or for a paid internship. Is this engagement fairly equal between students regardless of their identity or background? On a similar note, students might also have discrepancies in access to leadership positions, committee involvement, and work opportunities on campus that would be important to study.

Similar phenomena should also be studied within staff and faculty, especially as relates to funding support and opportunities for growth and promotion.

Such access includes more difficult-to-address factors such as family wealth and social capital. We have no great insights on these matters other than to note that they will affect the larger ecosystem and attempts should be made to help develop social capital for those who lack it and minimize how individual resources can interfere with access generally.

Healthy and Unhealthy Ecosystems

From the biological perspective, independent of human observers, ecosystems are neither good nor bad, they simply are. But an educational ecosystem needs to align with and support societal values, and thus is subject to societal judgements. It is important, then, to consider the case of what might distinguish a healthy from an unhealthy educational ecosystem. Here we explore this question while trying to avoid making judgements from our own position of privilege.

The Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrum worked on practical systems for governing common pool resources (Governing the Commons, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990), that is natural resources upon which groups of people rely for their livelihood such as water systems for agriculture, forests, fisheries, etc. She found that systems that were managed well had several commonalities and hypothesized certain social structures were necessary. These provide guidance for how to manage an educational ecosystem, particularly in the case it begins to become unhealthy, that is be managed non-sustainably or not support agents in the system.

In brief, sound and sustainable management of common pool resources, such as a university in the model proposed here, relies upon several factors. These include having well established norms and ensuring all members have social capital. The university community needs to define shared moral and ethical standards and help each other enforce them. Agents need to have shared knowledge of the socio-ecological system so educating newcomers about the ecosystem would need to be integrated into formal educational activities. Agents also need to find the resources that are available to them are also important to them. If agents cannot find value in what is provided the self-organization of the system becomes more difficult to maintain. Thus an educational ecosystem needs to clearly articulate what values it provides and align recruiting standards of new members with these values. Maintaining the norms that lead to ecosystem well-being requires that leadership be invested in the environment and be both skilled and respected. Community elders have a key role in resolving disputes.

In the case that agents violated norms or ignored community guidelines, Ostrum found that sustainable common pool resources were governed by a rapidly escalating scale of responses that started with noting bad behavior, having the community work to address the factors responsible for the behavior, punishing the bad behavior, then removing offenders from the community. While somewhat draconian sounding and somewhat at odds with the liberal values of higher education in a system that relies on student tuition to function, maintaining the ecosystem at the expense of individual participation may be an important factor to avoid “invasive species” and maintain ecosystem health. Just as there are currently a diversity of universities that offer students different experiences and cultures, developing an ecosystem needs to build from institutional beliefs, attitudes, and values and be clearly communicated to potential future members who may wish to join the community.

Examples: Day-in-the-Life Scenarios in an Ecosystem Model

Here we share some more “micro” or course-level examples that envision specific student experiences in parallel with faculty perspectives of the same experiences. These scenarios provide a more tangible, deeper dive into a particular class one might take (e.g. Sleep, Building Bridges, Data Privacy). The intention of these short vignettes is to contrast how individuals’ experiences in a program that is based on the ecosystem-based design principles articulated above could differ from more traditional program that derive from more factory-based paradigms which are designed to provide a pipeline of students.

Scenario 1: Sleep Course in the Biology Department

Please see a description of the Biology degree on this page.

Day-in-the-Life with the Sleep Course

The Sleep course in the Biology department meets from 1-2:50 PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays each week. This quarter, there are 30 students enrolled, of which five are seniors who are taking or retaking the course in a leadership role. Two faculty are the instructional leads and represent the Biology department as well as the Psychology department at this institution.

In the first few weeks, students formed teams guided by one of the five seniors (hereafter referred to as a peer mentor or PM) and one of the faculty instructors. Each team started out by investigating “what do we know about Sleep, and how do we know this” for a question of their choosing. Some questions that groups addressed included:

• How much diversity do we observe in how much/often we sleep?
• What happens if we do not get enough sleep?
• What happens inside our bodies while we sleep?
• What kinds of sleep disorders exist and how are they treated?
• What factors (e.g. lifestyle, chemical, physical environment) disrupt sleep?
• What are some ways to improve the quality of our sleep?

Each group organized to perform literature reviews and just-in-time learning around relevant disciplinary knowledge such as cell signaling (as it relates to sleep hormones) or twin studies research methods (as it relates to possible genetic components of sleep) based on their background and their own learning needs. Each group created a learning experience (e.g. podcast, slideshow, interactive fiction, museum exhibit) that was presented at a learning showcase on Sleep open to all students and members of the community.

In week 4 of the quarter, the students are forming new teams focused around answering some unsolved question in the world of Sleep. Teams are formed such that each person is working with mostly new students in the course and gets a new PM and works with the other faculty member.

During the team formation process, teams are always asked to meet together with their PM and complete a team contract where they share their own interests, strengths, and constraints. The team agrees on group norms (e.g. how to communicate, how decisions are made) and identifies a few unanswered questions they are interested in. Going from Tuesday to Thursday, each member of the class does some preliminary research and comes back Thursday to discuss together with their group. Groups then do informal chalk-talks in a jigsaw fashion to pitch their selected question, and how they might answer it, to other members of the class. Questions are then refined with feedback and approved by PMs and faculty.

Some projects currently underway after this process are:

• Can humans evolve to need less sleep?
• Are there more efficient patterns to sleep than one 7-9 hour block?
• Are dreams important for our health/wellbeing when we sleep?

Su-Jin (Biology Major) Perspective

Su-Jin is a junior who has declared Biology as their major. They are currently taking courses full-time and their schedule this quarter includes Sleep, Pandemics, Visual Communication, and Project Management.

Core Courses: In the Sleep course, Su-Jin just finished and presented a team project where they created a museum exhibit to explain the factors that impact sleep and how we know that they do (i.e. what is the scientific evidence). In their Pandemics course, Su-Jin is in the process of designing a new project where Su-Jin, alongside three peers, are trying to answer the question: how might viruses have first evolved? To answer this question, the team is trying to build computational simulations to see how evolutionary dynamics may have influenced the rise of viruses. In the lab, Su-Jin’s team is also studying viruses from a biochemical and synthetic biology approach.

Linker Courses: In their learning community on Visual Communication, Su-Jin shared their work on putting together elements of the museum exhibit and focused on the user experience of viewing each element and how to sequence/connect them. As the project progressed, Su-Jin brought in drafts of the elements and the plan for spatially arranging them to each course meeting to get feedback from their peers (who are taking all kinds of core courses, not just Sleep or Pandemics). Feedback focused on visual elements such as use of color, engagement, clarity, and accessibility. Su-Jin used this feedback to improve their contribution to the Sleep team.

In the Project Management learning community, Su-Jin is working together with their peers to craft the plan for their Pandemics research project. This plan includes mapping out the different elements (e.g. computational simulation, biochemical experiments), who is responsible for what, how long they estimate each task will take, and whether they are interdependent or independent. Their peers provide feedback on these estimates, as well as help identify milestones and benchmarks for quality. Su-Jin takes all this feedback and brings peer contributions back to the Pandemics course team.

Shelby (Non-Major) Perspective

Shelby is a sophomore interested in majoring in Public Health. Shelby is currently taking courses part-time due to family obligations during this term. Shelby is progressing towards their degree by taking a Public Health course in Epidemiology, but they chose to also take the Sleep course from the Biology department because their father lives with sleep apnea.

Shelby brought their interest in health to the table when participating in the team project on sleep disorders and their treatments. This project had two peers representing Biology majors and one peer from the Exercise Science degree program. Their investigation incorporated personal experiences with sleep apnea and insomnia, but also used the lenses of the role of exercise, obesity, pharmacology, and health awareness/misconceptions. Shelby knows a lot about the large-scale approaches to studying diseases or thinking through public health concerns and outreach.

However, Shelby is less familiar with the medical details such as human physiology and the genetics/molecular biology that relates to disease pathology. To better educate themselves, Shelby self-studies materials around the human brain, the head and neck (as relates to sleep apnea), the genetic components of sleep disorders, and biological changes in the body that occur with exercise or excessive weight. Shelby identified these gaps in knowledge through conversations with their team as well as mentoring and guidance from their PM and faculty lead Dr. Tomomi Ah. In contrast, Sasha, one of Shelby’s teammates and a current Biology major who is aspiring to be a doctor, needed to reach more into the psychology and sociology around health conditions to write about health awareness/misconceptions from an academic perspective.

Their project product was a podcast that Shelby (with permission of their peers) as an aspiring community health program coordinator includes on their professional website to show their ability to clearly communicate on sleep conditions to the public.

Dr. Camryn Amore (Faculty) Perspective

Dr. Amore is an associate professor in the Biology department who is co-teaching the Sleep course with Dr. Tomomi Ah from the Psychology department. Dr. Amore runs a research lab where they study neural development and how chemical signaling influences synapse formation. Amore has previously taught the Consciousness and Pain courses.

Dr. Amore and Dr. Ah both guide the formation of teams and identifying/connecting to the just-in-time learning that different teams need. Teams are formed by professors looking through the student interest profiles and the diversity of strengths they bring to the team. The two professors have split up their individual mentoring of the teams based on mentoring style or disciplinary specialty. For example, Dr. Amore mentored the group that focused on what happens in the body during sleep while Dr. Ah worked with the group that focused on improving sleep quality.

During each course meeting, the faculty start the session by giving an agenda of goals for teams to accomplish during their meeting time as well as any general announcements. The instructors move between checking in with each group, answering questions, and finding resources as needed. For example, Dr. Amore in talking to the aforementioned project group finds several videos, review papers, and course materials to provide the group as they familiarize themselves with concepts like different organ systems and homeostasis principles.

Dr. Amore and Dr. Ah must work together to provide formative assessments for students. This process may include individual meetings with students on observations of their contributions to process, team meetings to discuss dynamics of working together, review of project milestones, and lastly assessment of the final products to assist students in putting this work into their growing portfolios. In this they are aided by the university-supported electronic portfolio system and access to rich information on the pathways each student is taking through the program.

Scenario 2: Introduction to Computer Science Scenario

Students

Friends Jody Rhys, accepted as a first year computer science student, Alex Gueye, transferring into Studio Arts from Rosedale Community College, first year engineering student Nour Gomez, and undeclared second year student Riley Takada gathered to look over the list of courses still open for enrollment. Riley mused, “Wouldn’t it be great for the three of us to take the same class?” Alex responded, “Yes, especially if we could work on a project together.” After a few minutes, Jody declared, “Ah, ha! The Intro to Computer Science course is project based, satisfies the programming badge for computer science and engineering majors, and is open to all students.” “There are 8 slots left – let’s enroll now,” replied Nour.

Seeing the possibilities, the quartet explored the nano-courses available to give the team the background needed to success in the anticipated course project. As students enrolled in the course, each automatically received a personalized list of suggested nano-courses structured to their own background. These short-duration courses would be available for each student to complete on-line in modular form at any time. They agreed to commit to completing as many of the suggested modules as possible to ensure their team’s success in the course, and to check in frequently on each other’s progress and needs for additional support.

Instructor

Dr. Sage Sanchez looked over the survey that went out to all students enrolled in the Introduction to Computer Science course. Students were from ten different majors. Three potential four-person teams had already formed. The rest of the groups would form the first week of the term after students met one another and assessed their interests and abilities. The members of the Computer Science, Studio Arts, Engineering and undeclared group would each contribute a different skill set to the project. The survey results collated with automatically generated baseline measurements of each student’s foundational, meta, and humanistic knowledge, based upon the student’s university application, past performance, and survey responses.

The undeclared major had previous programming experience gained on the job during an internship at an aerospace firm, but appeared to lack creativity. The Computer Science major gained a significant amount of Humanistic knowledge through a Youth in Government program, but had no programming experience. Ethics and problem solving were the strengths of the engineering student, who was weak in communication skills. The Studio Arts major had worked as a graphic artist, demonstrated creativity, and had familiarity with digital tools used in graphic arts.

Dr. Sanchez thought this would be a solid group in which each of the students would contribute complimentary talents and would successfully complete the multimedia project they proposed. With an iterative development cycle for the project, each of the team members would be able to demonstrate competency or mastery by the end of the term, based upon their starting point and their individual gains during the term.

Classroom

Jody, Alex, Nour, and Riley began the semester by entering a list of the skills, knowledge, and nano-credentials each planned to gain over the course of the project into the instructor’s online tracking system. Dr. Sanchez met with the group and together they designed a project that would enable each student to achieve those personal goals, and the hardware, software, and communication platform needed for success. Along the way, the team members were encouraged to identify additional nano-courses that would support the project while also satisfying other requirements. Jody and Riley selected a creativity workshop that they would complete together. Alex chose an ethics workshop, and Nour chose a rhetoric workshop, to build confidence in presenting the team’s work. A team plan of learning objectives, roles, responsibilities, activities, and review schedule was drawn up with the guidance of Dr. Sanchez as a contract, mapping out individual and team expectations. The schedule included periodic peer review events, self-assessment exercises, and weekly reflection on individual and team progress, as well as plans for the future.

Over the term, each team progresses at its own pace. Students are encouraged to name their teams and take ownership of their projects. Individuals are expected to contribute their expertise to their own projects and demonstrate altruism by providing a sounding board and advice to other teams. Students are not all expected to have all knowledge, just to know where and how to find it. They are comfortable seeking guidance from Dr. Sage and fellow students when they hit roadblocks. Dr. Sage provides a range of questions for the teams to address during their bi-weekly team peer reviews. These interactions energize the students over the course of the term.

The student development platform supports collaborative design, coding, and documentation, as well as peer review and personal reflection. Built-in automated observers or tutors are available to guide students as they design, code, and write, providing just-in-time hints and easy access to additional resources.

Student work environments communicate with an instructor dashboard that tracks each student’s contract and their progress toward growing along the foundational, humanistic, and meta knowledge components of their work. The work environment also support intra- and inter-team communication, and as well as a channel for maintaining contact with the instructor.

The team contracts become part of Sage’s faculty portfolio, along with an overview of the mechanics and goals that Sage has for the course. These are shared with peers, department chair, and mentors, who are encouraged to provide feedback and support throughout the term.

Intervention

Instructor dashboard reflects a lag in the team project and meets with each member individually and as a group. Instructor suggests helpful mini-courses that were not automatically flagged previously, and refers one student to counseling after sensing that something was amiss in the student’s outside life.

The student work environment and instructor dashboard enable the instructor to track team progress on a daily or more frequent basks, and receives alerts when a team appears to be experiencing obstacles, or is ready for additional challenges.

Assessment

During the term, each student receives is able to track their improvement slopes for foundational, meta, and humanistic knowledge. They are also able to see how their personal performance as well as the team performance along the three trajectories compares to the class average.

Scenario 3: Roger the Registrar, an Administrator’s Perspective 

Roger’s life as an associate registrar had been upended since the university chose to shift to an ecosystem framework in an attempt to offer a more just and equitable education. While not as confusing at the change had been initially, he had realized over time that the changes in mindset to understand the ideas behind to the new program would take quite a bit of time to achieve. Yet he was committed to helping the faculty and staff adapt to the new perspectives the ecosystem framework Coriolis U had adopted. Looking at his to-do list for the day Roger blocked out his time into changes to the student learning tracking system, student petitions, and preparing the monthly evaluation statement for chairs and other administrators.

Walking across the admin building to the conference room, Roger stopped to get a cup of coffee before the systems planning team meeting. Today’s meeting was about integrating new modules into the record system that allowed students to choose which assignments in courses would count towards the competencies reflected on their narrative transcripts. Enabling students to have more control of their grades had been one of the most difficult changes to the university infrastructure, but by tagging individual assignments with competencies students no longer were subject to a poor grade by messing up on one exam. Today’s meeting focused on the implementation of a system that allowed students to edit and customize the competencies listed on narrative transcript to better reflect their own educational journey. The team spent most of the meeting preparing a presentation for the university advisory board so that stakeholders such as local industry who hired graduates would understand the changes.

Heading back to his office Roger worked on student petitions over lunch. In the shift from a department-centered curriculum to university supported educational pathways Coriolis U had found that advisors, faculty, and department chairs often didn’t understand or appreciate the educational benefits of the competencies students had assembled if they were too far outside the discipline. Having a central location to approve such learning experiences had greatly facilitated the process of approval. After reviewing the requests Roger passed them to the student-faculty panel who had final authority over the decisions.

After lunch Roger turned his attention to assessment. Initially Roger had dreaded the thought of providing monthly updates. Fortunately Coriolis U’s adoption of more flexible software that allowed micro-learning experiences to be approved and assessed made it much easier to understand the trajectories of thousands of students. The adoption of a university-wide portfolio system that enabled students to connect assignments to their own emergent narrative provided a rich dataset. The monthly report generated by the system showed several pathways that needed to be investigated. Despite advertising the expanded hours of the video lab and campus Makerspace, it seemed students still did not utilize these resources despite clear data showing the need for the learning offered in these facilities. Roger noted they were both managed by Campus Activities, an office headed by Dolores Umbridge and scheduled a short meeting to see if overly draconian space access policies inhibited student participation.

Conclusion and Connection with Foundational, Meta, and Humanistic Knowledge

In the above we have sought to outline how particular assumptions and mindsets affect the conceptions of higher education that students, faculty, staff, and administrators hold. We advocate moving from mental models or schemas based on pipelines or factory- or production-based analogies to that of an educational ecosystem. We outlined several foundational assumptions, explored ways to assess student progress, and provided some vignettes from the perspective of students, faculty, and administrators to highlight some differences between existing programs and a speculative instantiation of an eco-system based paradigm.

The model we outline above does not directly address foundational, meta, and humanistic knowledge, but rather creates a space in which such knowledges naturally emerge. In other words we see as an underlying assumption that knowledge has to reside somewhere in order for it to be taught. In traditional programs it is assumed such knowledges reside in faculty and other experts. In an ecosystem model all agents within the ecosystem are repositories of foundation, meta, and humanistic knowledge. If one reinterprets the figure below (drawn from the foundational document for the workshop) as representing the repository of knowledge within an agent, then the distribution of knowledge may vary, i.e. a faculty member hold much more foundational knowledge within their discipline than a student does, but all agents have knowledge that benefits the larger ecosystem. In other words knowledge of any type is a key resource in an educational ecosystem.

The challenge then is not to implement curricular or course change that seeks to re-balance knowledge in STEM degree programs, but to create an environment which recognizes that all agents hold varying degrees of foundational, meta, and humanistic knowledge and enable each to develop in ways that align with their envisioned future (as well as envision new futures for themselves). We believe this is best done by assessing outcomes that are development- and resource-focused which enable institutions to make sure each agent has access to needed resources and the agency to utilize it for their own betterment.