Old School, New School, No School: Re-Calibrating Higher Education

While “old school” lectures, assignments and specialized silos of academic pursuits support legacy structures, emerging ecosystems are rapidly spawning new fields of study and careers that didn’t exist a decade ago. Simply pasting cloud-based interfaces onto existing courses or handing out mobile devices will not by itself do justice to the transformational processes at play. An experiential, interdisciplinary and entrepreneurial approach is called for. Such college environments augment each student’s journey and serve as platforms for their prosperity—to coach and guide, challenge and inspire while providing access to expertise and opportunity that would be unknown otherwise.

Whether they start as freshmen or transfer in after gaining real-world experience, today's students invent new, professional versions of themselves through the practices they put in place in college and refine thereafter. Regardless of what is assigned in class, students succeed when they create roles for themselves to play with their peers. By doing so, they discover fresh possibilities and colleagues with whom to actualize their dreams. Colleges can better prepare students for the accelerating changes taking place in the economy, the environment and in society by recognizing and honoring the ways students learn, how they mentor each other, and how they adapt themselves to the challenges they face. These processes have not been well-defined or deeply explored, until now.

Old School, New School, No School guides those college administrators, faculty, counselors, and parents who seek to prepare students for the accelerating changes taking place in the world around them. The book promotes practical methods for networks of students to engage in hands-on, interdisciplinary experiences on campus, online, and in the community, including:

- Examples of proficient, resilient and versatile “new school” students who have put into play the communications, problem-solving and critical thinking skills demanded by 21st Century employers, relationships and societies.

- Methods that integrate real-world projects, meetups, jams, hackathons, and agile development processes into curricular activities, enabling undergraduates with a wide variety of skill sets to find their voice, pitch ideas, recruit talent and embark on shared journeys.

- Suggestions for additional research, with pointers to contextual evidence and links to articles and video resources that support adoption of “new school” approaches.

Ultimately, the book offers a pragmatic perspective for those charged with preparing students to live and work through change. As stated in the foreword by John Seely Brown: "We need to prepare our students to thrive in a whitewater world—to be able to view the constant changes and new kinds of entanglements as opportunities for learning."