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Journal of College Student Retention and Recruiting for both On-Campus and Online Universities
George Lorenzo
Trends in Higher Education: A Different School of Thought
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PEOPLE WITH IMPACT INTERVIEW - George Lorenzo, Writer, Editor and Publisher of Educational Pathways, and Founder and President of Lorenzo and Associates, Inc.
Q: In what capacity have you been involved in higher education, and how does your involvement in the field give you a fresh perspective on emerging trends?
George Lorenzo: I work with higher education in two different capacities. Since 2002, I have been writing, editing and publishing a publication called Educational Pathways. Over the course of those six years, I’ve interviewed well over 1,000 educators, primarily in the field of online higher education, but in many other areas as well. In addition to writing, editing and publishing Educational Pathways, I also founded a company called Lorenzo and Associates Inc., a provider of research, writing, editing and publication production services for select clients in the higher education sector. Some of Lorenzo and Associates’ clients have included the Sloan Consortium, EDUCAUSE, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of California, Michigan State University, Blackboard, and Hezel Associates.
That said, I am both an education journalist and a researcher. I am not a faculty person or administrator, but an entrepreneur who is working in the field of education. In short, I write about higher education, and in doing so, I have learned a great deal about emerging trends. I report on these trends with a focus on what’s working in the field, as well as to provide and synthesize information about some of the theoretic frameworks and factors that are driving education now and into the future.
Q: What emerging trends have you noticed in the higher education space lately?
George Lorenzo: Recently, I’ve been conducting a great deal of research and writing about four major trends in higher education: the globalization of education, the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, a call for information and computer literacy, and the importance of tracking learning outcomes.
In regards to the globalization of higher education, the issue today, as opposed to say, twenty years ago, is that education in general is now tasked with producing good global citizens. We live in an increasingly global and knowledge-based economy more so now than ever before, and part of that reality means developing competent and ethical knowledge workers. In general, students today are not being taught the appropriate skills to become good global citizens and competent knowledge workers. One contributing factor to this lack of international competence is language; unlike other countries, we are not multilingual and we are not teaching our next generation of leaders to be multilingual. Students must be fluent in at least two languages to remain relevant in a global context and to be good, contributing global citizens.
Emerging Web 2.0 technologies are becoming more and more ubiquitous in higher education, both inside and outside of the classroom. This is a broad term that encompasses many different activities, but we are seeing increasing numbers of faculty adopting podcasting, social networking sites and online communities, as well as web conferencing tools in face-to-face, online and blended courses.
The information literacy motif, which is related to the globalization theme, is also common in the higher education space, especially as it relates to conducting online research. The notion of information literacy, or how today’s students find, analyze and use the information they discover online, is a critical issue.
There is a large need to train students to be not only information literate in this sense, but also to be computer literate. Computer literacy entails students understanding how to use hardware and software. Most students are not offered that class until they get to high school, and even then, it is usually an elective course and not a mandatory class. To cultivate information and computer literacy in students, there should be a required class in elementary school that addresses these topics. Gaining information literacy and computer literacy skills entails becoming fluent in a modern language that is the driving force behind our global knowledge economy. Just like there is an English course, there should be computer and information literacy courses required in the k12 levels. These are skills that are definitely important today and will become increasingly important in the future.
Another consideration that is becoming more popular in the higher education space is the assessment of student learning or learning outcomes transparency. This notion relates to what students are actually learning in college; what are we paying for as consumers of education. Educators have been discussing this topic for a while now and it currently seems to be growing in importance. One tool being increasingly utilized to make learning outcomes transparent is the use of electronic portfolios, which are utilized primarily in teacher education programs and colleges of education. Electronic portfolios can be a way of assessing student learning in a very transparent way, and adopting these technologies and pedagogies throughout the curriculum could potentially be a way to increase learning outcomes transparency in other programs as well.
George Lorenzo, Writer, Editor and Publisher of Educational Pathways, and Founder and President of Lorenzo and Associates, Inc.
George Lorenzo is the Founder and President of Lorenzo and Associates, Inc., a provider of research, writing, editing and publishing services to select clients in the education industry. Mr. Lorenzo is also the writer, editor and publisher of Educational Pathways, an online quarterly newsletter that addresses topics in higher education including educational technology, fully online and blended teaching and learning, information literacy/fluency, and the globalization of higher education. For more information about Educational Pathways or Lorenzo and Associates Inc., please visit http://www.edpath.com.
See an index of all the "People with Impact" Interviews
Additional sections of this journal address student recruiting and student retention. We have also placed all articles with a common theme of online education and distance education programs in a separate portal. New articles will be posted each Monday, please check back by bookmarking this site or placing a link to this Innovative Practices in Communicating with Students portal.
