The north side of Edmonton’s downtown is maybe the most amazing couple of square miles in Canadian post-secondary education. You’ve got Norquest College (15,000 students) on 102nd. There’s MacEwan University (another 15,000) between 104th and 105th, and then starting around 115th you’ve got the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT), which adds another 20,000 students or so. That’s a lot of teaching and learning.
So why isn’t it better known? I’d say the concentration doesn’t get the love/notice it should because there are no big-R research facilities in there (although NAIT could change that through the development of the old Muni airport grounds), but there is another reason too, and that is – how can I put this? – the norms of Prairie architecture. Put simply, they build a lot of big boxes, ideally linked together with skyways, which are as self-contained as possible to prevent walking outdoors in winter. Which means that even though the north side has all these institutions, they don’t create much of a sense of community that urban campuses often do. MacEwan looks particularly like a concrete fortress, built more to keep people out than bring them in (though in fairness its rec facilities seem pretty well-used by the community).
Speaking of MacEwan, its new strategic vision document, Teaching Greatness is to be released soon, coinciding with the end of the institution’s 50th anniversary celebrations. Strategic visions (which tend to have time horizons of 10+ years) are usually more interesting than strategic plans (usually 5 years, all hail the Central Committee) because they tend to be more ambitious and are more likely to talk concretely about challenges. And MacEwan’s, which is built around five themes plus a commitment to Indigenization, is one of the more interesting ones I have read in quite some time.
Why? Let’s start with theme number one, “Teaching Greatness”. It’s lovely and refreshing to have a university not just put teaching first, but to commit to being “great” at it. Or priority four, “Perpetual Motion” (some of these themes have non-intuitive titles), which is a commitment not just to being more community/employer focused in developing new programs, but also to pursue aggressive growth in student numbers, in part through hybrid learning. This one is interesting because across the river, the University of Alberta is aiming to do something similar and neither institution seems fazed by the idea of competition. But the one that really intrigues me is theme two, “Smash the Calendar”. This is something genuinely different, and if it works out, might have act as a real catalyst to change at institutions across Canada.
Maybe the ugliest, fussiest parts of university infrastructure are degree structures. God, they are painful. Every degree has a stated mix of i) required courses, ii) minimum courses for a major, iii) minimum courses for a minor – and they are all different. And if you try to do a joint major? Yikes. Incalculable computer power is needed to run degree audits on this mess of hundreds of options to make sure students are on-track to graduate. Institutions can solve this problem in two ways. You could go the radical simplification route and just mandate that all majors and minors have a certain number of credits and be done with it. Or you could say that all these degree requirements are basically capricious anyways and give students more power to create their own degrees by mixing and matching courses and coming up with degrees that are meaningful to them. This latter option is largely what MacEwan means by “Smash the Calendar” (it also means delivering more courses at nights and on weekends, but the interesting stuff is around degree structure).
Among other things, moving in this direction requires a real re-think of how advising works. First of all, it means advisors are going to need more authority to declare what is a degree and what is not. This might create some friction with academics and the General Faculties Council (what institutions outside Alberta call “Senate”), which currently has exclusive responsibility to decide what is and is not a degree. Second, it needs to be taken out of the hands of faculty and turned into a more centralized hub-and-spoke model so that cross-faculty degrees are not unduly hindered (my understanding is that MacEwan was already moving in this direction prior to the Strategic Vision). And two more enabling factors: it requires generosity of spirit from faculties to start thinking less in terms of designing programs and more in terms of enabling learners to construct meaningful pathways, and it also requires a provincial government – famous across Canada for being incredibly intrusive no matter which party is in power – to be flexible about what constitutes a degree.
I don’t think this is a path everyone should go down, by any means. I am nearly certain that going down this road makes program review and accountability for learning outcomes a lot more difficult, for starters. But look, in a crowded educational market, with lots of alternatives within a few stops of one another, why not let one institution try some radical experimentation with how calendars and degrees work? Lord knows the sector is not blessed with enthusiasm for experiments, so anyone willing to try something different needs to be applauded.
Since this document is a Strategic Vision and not a Strategic Plan, this measure is still a little light on details, which are meant to be worked out over time. But with the Vision having received unanimous backing at General Faculties Council, the long march to bringing the theme to life has begun in a very positive fashion. MacEwan seems to be starting its second 50 years on a high note (not just in academics but in sports, with its women’s soccer team having won the university’s first-ever national title in any sport). I look forward to following this initiative over the next few years.
Tweet this post
Taking power over degrees away from programs implies centralized decision-making and eroding one of the last preserves of faculty self-governance. It’s therefore wrong in principle, regardless of what sort of programs it produces.
At the university where I work, we operate under bicameral governance, a common enough structure. I think of it as co-centralized decision-making where administrators keep an eye on the big picture of sustainable business operations and faculty bring the subject matter expertise (an over-simplification, granted). I would be interested to know where you have seen faculty self-governance.
Yes, the bicameral structure is fairly common, though I would note that even senates tend to be dominated by administrators. How many times do senates vote out proposals coming from the administration? A senate committee creating degrees might tend to be little more than an instrument of the administration.
By “faculty self-governance” I mean the principle that faculty members (as opposed to “faculties” — the homonym is confusing) ought to make curricular decisions, at least. It’s a principle, not a description, though there are instances of faculty forcing the ouster of Lawrence Summers from Harvard, ruining the life’s work of the vice-chancellor of Oxford, etc. In any case, what tends towards it is good, and what detracts from it is bad.
It certainly strikes me as more likely to be achieved by a system where no central body dictates degrees. Certainly in my own institution, changes to curriculum are always proposed by faculties, and then approved (or sent back) by a senate committee, then passed on to the full senate. I don’t recall what role the board has, but it shouldn’t be allowed anything beyond a pro forma one of making sure that there’s enough budget. It’s important to guard these powers — though they may only be customary — against administrative incursion, and certainly against advisers making up degrees on the fly.
I did, by the way, fight the effort of some deans to downstream curricular change to each faculty, on the grounds that it’s much easier for deans to over-awe their underlings than to impress a body drawn from across the institution. My own program was saved from a very bad proposal by a computer scientist on the senate curriculum committee, for which I’m grateful to him. Similarly, I shouldn’t want all control centralized, because senate committees can be captured by higher administration. A system of checks and balances might not be able to guarantee faculty self-governance, but it renders it more likely. Presumably, we have a bicameral structure so that no one body has too much power, and nobody can operate like a CEO or commissar.
As a former provost with 9 years experience the obsession of faculty members with curriculum design drove me crazy! The proliferation of credentials (majors, joint majors, minors, certificates, diplomas etc etc) is purely the result of professors who believe that all problems can be solved with new curriculum. Not enough majors? – offer another route; not prepared for grad school? – create an honours program; complaints from employers about lack of skills? – create a certificate. Most routes through an undergraduate degree have become so complicated that we now hire large numbers of non-academic staff to explain it to students. I have sat through hundreds (thousands?) of hours in committees and Senates listening to professors discuss credit hours, prerequisites, overlap, collaboration, cross-listing etc but no one talks about what students are expected to learn. It’s all about what we will teach and the order in which we will teach it (OK – Engineering excepted because of CEAB requirements to focus on outcomes). We need dramatic simplification of curriculum, and more attention to what students are learning and what they are capable of doing.
I suspect the curricular churn you describe has more to do with faculty trying to show that they’re innovative than anything else. On my own campus, one of the few ways to show “educational leadership” is to create or re-create a program.
Tracking “what students are learning and what they are capable of doing” would just add another side to the Rubik’s cube of programs in the form of learning outcomes. (Does my metaphor even make sense? Probably not: maybe “another strand to the gordian knot of undergraduate advising.”)
Besides, learning outcomes implicitly marginalise everything which isn’t easily measured, doesn’t have clear expression as job-skills, etc.