Bror's Blog

What to learn from a learning grant process

I am just back from helping review science and math grant applications for the Institute of Education Sciences within the Department of Education. It’s making me think:  this seems a great process, with great potential – what's in the way of big impacts?

The process really is careful, with terrific ideas in the pipeline, and gives all of us guidance in how to pursue scaling of innovation in education.  I think we may be expecting too much from the ecosystem of faculty researchers to be the only pull at the end of the pipeline – to expect them to be the drivers of the most complex scaled up research that nails interventions down at scale. 

Where are the buyers in all this?

Change.edu, by Andy Rosen, charts the higher ed landscape and the course forward

Andy Rosen, CEO of Kaplan (and full disclosure, my boss), has just published his take on the American higher education system, Change.edu: Rebooting to the new talent economy. In addition to reinforcing the need for a variety of players, he makes a strong argument for why even more, and better, solutions to building skills at scale are needed – and, in many cases, solutions may be at hand, if we let them develop within the right kinds of frameworks tied to success for students.

Jobs' passing: Who will bring our 1984 moment to learning?

Steve Jobs passing and the outflow of feelings says this is more than a mere corporate titan's death. In the flood of remembrances, we can see how different he was from many technology-industry peers.

Although he never turned his relentless design sensibility on the building of full learning environments, there are lessons we can take away for what a “Jobs-like” focus in learning would be like.

Surprise, surprise, it might not look like almost anything that's around yet – but could be.

Chat with Maastricht University's Jeroen van Merrienboer and Erik Diessen

On September 28, we invited Jeroen van Merienboer and Erik Driessen from the Maastricht University Graduate School of Health Professions Education in the Netherlands for a chat with our own health education learning leaders across Kaplan.

In addition to making tangible the wide array of health-related learning Kaplan is involved in, we could see how much there is to apply to health-related learning environments than has been applied anywhere to date.  Our colleagues at Maastricht University have been busily engaged in wide ranging explorations of how to empirically improve health-care learning – and we think all of us working in health-related learning can benefit.