"Why we need learning engineers" in the Chronicle of Higher Education

A few months ago, I was talking with several people at a conference about my usual obsession with evidence-based work in learning.  Part of my point was that there seemed to be a missing profession across education that is present elsewhere:  an engineering complement to the science already available.  An editor from the Chronicle of Higher Education was nice enough to suggest publishing the ideas in an op-ed, and so I did. 

As I point out, there's quite a bit of science about learning to draw on.  What's missing within a world of very hard-working professionals and subject-matter experts are folks with training in using learning science to make practical decisions about learning at scale, similar to how chemical engineers use modern chemistry to make practical decisions at scale, within economic, regulatory, and safety boundaries. (You can argue our medical profession has evolved to be a kind of engineering wing for human biological sciences.)

The key thing is that the natural world behaves the way it does whether we know the evidence about it or not. It's a shame not take into account our best possible understanding of what really goes on, when we're trying to build/do things at scale. 

We're working hard at Kaplan to get more and more of our work tied in with what's known about learning - working hard at becoming a "learning engineering" education organization.