About the Book
Whether they recognize it or not, virtually all colleges and universities face three Grand
Challenges:
Improve the learning outcomes of a higher education: A large majority of college graduates are weak in capabilities that faculty and employers both see as crucial.
Extend more equitable access to degrees: Too often, students from underserved groups and poor households either don't enter college or else drop out without a degree. The latter group may be worse off economically than if they'd never attempted college.
Make academic programs more affordable (in money and time) for students and other important stakeholder groups: Many potential students believe they lack the money or time needed for academic success. Many faculty believe they don't have time to make their courses and degree programs more effective. Many institutions believe they can't afford to improve outcomes.
These challenges are global. But, in a higher education system such as that in the United States, the primary response must be institutional. This book analyzes how, over the years, six pioneering colleges and universities have begun to make visible, cumulative progress on all three fronts.
About the Author :
Stephen C. Ehrmann has received two national awards for hiscontributions to distance education research. He previously served as ViceProvost for Teaching & Learning at the George Washington University;Associate Director for Research and Evaluation at the Kirwan Center forAcademic Innovation at the University System of Maryland; Vice President of thenon-profit Teaching Learning and Technology Group; Director of the FlashlightProgram for the Evaluation of Educational Uses of Technology; Senior ProgramOfficer for Interactive Technologies with the Annenberg/CPB Projects; ProgramOfficer with the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE); andDirector of Educational Research and Assistance at The Evergreen State College.He might be best known as the co-author of the 1996 article, "Implementingthe Seven Principles: Technology as Lever." He has a Ph.D. in managementand higher education from MIT.
Jillian Kinzie is Associate Director of the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) Institute. She is also a senior scholar with the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) project.
Review :
"Faculty members, deans, provosts and presidents who want to improve their institutions can all find valuable food for thought in these pages. Dr Ehrmann uses the example of several colleges and universities that have had notable success in improving the quality of education, affordability, and graduation rates while drawing on his own many years of experience to present a wealth of useful ideas about how to bring about real reform."--Derek Bok "300th Anniversary University Research Professor and former president, Harvard University"
"Dr. Ehrmann's treatment of how to enhance studentoutcomes in higher education goes deep into the centrality of teaching andlearning as a core function of the college. It also explores the emergingfrontier of technology-enabled instruction and student services, data-drivendecision-making, and remaking the academy for the next 100 years. It is apractical and thought-provoking work."
--Louis Soares, Chief Learning & Innovation Officer "American Council on Education"
"Highereducation has been headed toward a crisis of cost, quality and equity fordecades. Institutions often attend to one issue but not the others, leavingthe enterprise sorely lacking in a way forward. This book is one of themost important to be published in higher education in decades. It showcasesinstitutions that have made progress on all three fronts. The book provides abeacon to lead other institutions into a sustainable and healthy future inwhich all students, faculty and staff thrive.
Thevision for higher education outlined in this book is fundamentally differentfrom how institutions have operated up until now. It requires institutionaltransformation which, although challenging, will ultimately give highereducation the resiliency it needs to endure in coming decades. This bookprovides the principles, approaches, and case study examples to helpinstitutions in this difficult but worthy work of change."
--Adrianna Kezar, Wilbur Kieffer Endowed Professor and Dean's Professor of Leadership, Director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education "University of Southern California"
"I plan to use this as a textbook in our graduate programon learning, design, and technology! It offers great insights into academictransformation and its implications for academic outcomes, culture, and professionalroles. For example, as the book illustrates, future leaders must be skilled atworking across organizational boundaries; Ehrmann shows how they will need tobridge hidden clashes in assumptions, culture, and even terminology, e.g., common terms with two or more widely used, clashing definitions, terms such as 'teaching, ' 'online course, ' and 'transformation.'"
--Yianna Vovides "Director, Learning Design and Research at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), Curriculum Director & Professor for the Master of Arts in LDT Program at Georgetown University"
"Theproblem: US higher education is teemingwith initiatives that seek to improve access, or quality, oraffordability But these efforts are typicallysiloed, fragmented, and under-performing, hindered as much by educators' ownsense of what can't be done as by other impediments. The Ehrmann solution: An evidence-informed Integrative framework for campus change that knits allthree priorities together and makes each a means to the other. Making superbuse of case studies from broad access institutions, research evidence, andEhrmann's own lifetime of leadership in the digital revolution, Quality, Access and Affordabilityprovides a persuasive, practical and long-view guide to implementingtransformative educational change across an entire institution and ultimately, US higher education as a whole. Every educator who wants to make highereducation more responsive and more empowering for today's students will findthis book both illuminating and immensely useful."
--Carol Geary Schneider "Consultant, Lumina Foundation, and President Emerita Association of American Colleges & Universities"
"In PursuingQuality, Access, and Affordability, Steve Ehrmann advances acompelling narrative on how higher education can be improved. Basing his analysis on six extensiveinstitutional case studies, he outlines how it is possible for institutions tocreate what he terms "3fold gains" in educational quality, equitable access, and stakeholder affordability. These gains are achieved through Integrativelearning-based constellations of mutually supportive educational strategies, organizational foundations, and interactions with the wider world. The book offers a cogent rationale for how suchcoordinated efforts can enhance quality, access and affordability on aninstitutional scale. As higher education prepares for a post-COVID educationallandscape much changed by current challenges, now is the time forforward-thinking institutions to imagine this future. And Dr. Ehrmann's careful study, based onactual experiences of institutions that have achieved success in these areas atthe core of higher education's mission and purpose, provides an excellentblueprint for success." --David Eisler "President, Ferris State University"
