Deron Durflinger's List: Competency Based Learning

• Russell L. Ackoff is one of the pioneers in management education. With an undergraduate degree in architecture and a PhD in philosophy, Ackoff is one of the founders of operations research and systems thinking, linking science and business. Influential in management thinking for the entire second half of the 20th century, Ackoff has published 22 books and over 200 articles in journals and books, on a myriad of topics. His illustrious academic career has played out primarily at Case Institute of Technology and The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Such is the breadth and reach of his intellectual contribution that the Ackoff Center for Advanced Systems Approaches at the University of Pennsylvania was established as part of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Ackoff has consulted with more than 350 corporations and 75 governmental agencies in the United States and abroad. All have benefited greatly from his “out of the box” thinking and point of view
• First of all, they’re not modeled on how people are evaluated in the real world. People are evaluated by what they can do with what they know.
• tests are taken in isolation whereas in the real world if I ask you to solve a problem to which you don’t know the solution, I expect you to get all the damn help you can find.
• t’s your ability to use resources that is important in the real world, not what you can remember to spit back on a test.
• hirdly, if you’re really committed to learning when you get an examination back and you made errors, there is an opportunity to learn
• ought to take the examination again a week later to see if you’ve learned what the right answers are.
• n our system of examinations you learn that the thing to do is to give teachers the answer they want
• niversities were created in the twelfth century. They haven’t changed very much in the last nine centuries because they’re subsidized and because of a tenure system that is antithetical to change.
• eaching is the focus, not learning
• So sitting around talking about what they ought to learn in school is nonsense. What they ought to learn is how to learn.
• hey got the damn thing backwards again; being taught is a lousy way to learn
• f you give the students the job of teaching the computer how to do something, then they can learn.
• Using a computer as a resource in learning is okay,
• orporations, in aggregate, are now spending a third more than all the universities and colleges in the United States are spending on educatio
• People learn more effectively when they are focused on real problems.
• he positive thing about executive development programs is that students/executives come from different companies and learn from each other more than from the so-called teachers. That’s what they remember. They form associations and keep in touch with each other. Ask participants what they got out of these programs and they rarely respond that it had anything to do with the content of the program.
• eality consists of complex sets of interacting problems, not isolated problems. So when we deal with a problem we’re already dealing with an abstraction — and now somebody comes along and deprives you of the information needed to formulate the problem. This converts the problem into an exercise.
• he most important thing in the real world is being able to differentiate between what’s relevant and what isn’t.
• Get students out into the real world where they have to formulate the problems and sort through a myriad of relevant and irrelevant information to do so. They need to be thrown into a mess and asked to work their way out of it.
• A mess is a system of problems. That means you have to understand what a system is. A system is a whole which is defined by its function in a larger system. It consists of essential parts, each of which can affect the functioning of the whole, but none of which has an independent effect on the whole. When you take a system apart it loses all of its essential properties and so do its parts
• n management education we act as though reality is divided into disciplines and this is absolutely false. There is no such thing as a marketing problem or a financial problem or a production problem. These are points of view, not kinds of problems. You can look at problems from many different points of view.
• n my experience, over 90 percent of the problems management confronts are better solved someplace other than where they are identified
• Because that is all a faculty member knows
• Our teaching does not match the real world and because of this, we are doing our students a disservice.
• But in team teaching, do we still have people teaching their disciplines or do we have a true integration of the disciplines?
• We need to stop talking about marketing and production and finance and personnel as separate things.
• With analysis you’re always breaking things up into parts and looking at the parts separately. In synthesis you’re always trying to put things together into a whole. We need to teach synthesis, not (just) analysis
• he way to learn about a corporation is to design one
• way to learn accounting is not to take a course in accounting but to design an accounting system for a corporation
• And the interactions become apparent when you design.
• One thing August learned very early is every vice president in his committee must be a general manager of the corporation and they have to think of the whole.
• learned more architecture designing a house than I did in five years of architecture school.
• Management education ought to begin with the creation of a corporation.
• Pick a product. Have students design the new company and they’ll learn more about production, marketing, finance and so on than they will by reading textbooks.
• t’s transferable to other products because what they are learning is how to design and what a corporation i
• he removal of all constraints. All creativity begins with the breaking of an assumption that you normally make and exploring the consequences of doing so. That’s all it is.
• chools kill creativity because they teach students to give answers that are expected and an answer that is expected can’t be creative.
• I think that kids coming out of high school need to learn something general and become interested in learning things other than business, and this can be a great adventure
• o I think an undergraduate program should be broadening, specialization should come at the graduate level.
• hat’s why you need a general education – because you never know what opportunities might come about.
• nd I’m talking here about what it is, not what it should be – is to provide faculty members with the quality of work life that they want. Teaching is the price they pay and like any price, they try to minimize it. You can’t understand a university if you think it’s about education. It’s about providing the faculty with a chance to do what they want to do. Unfortunately, I think this definition helps you better understand the behavior you see in a university than the traditional definition that focuses on education.
• It was so damn boring that after the first couple of meetings I started keeping records on the topics discussed. And in two years I found that the word student only came up once.
• t was about the faculty, it was not about education.
• Wharton depends at least as much on the quality of its students as on the quality of its faculty
• he best reputation does not necessarily mean the best quality, it means it generates the most desirable job offers
• eiterate that to think creatively about learning, every single aspect of the educational process ought to be questioned and systematically denied and the consequences explored. When considering how to improve learning, get rid of curriculum, get rid of courses, get rid of examinations, get rid of accreditation, get rid of degrees — and what would education look like? Compare the potential of this with what we currently have, from the point of view of stimulating effective learning.
• Reformation is keeping the current system and modifying its behavior, with modest change. But given the potential we are not now realizing, I would argue for creative transformation that focuses more effectively on learning.

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• 1. Collaborative.
• Watch for: (1) Department of Education working to establish a one-stop shop for teacher networks. (2) Commonly accepted guidelines for using YouTube, Facebook, and other social media in schools.
• Tech-Powered.
• Watch for: The explosive growth of high-tech companies and venture capitalists investing ever-more capital in the education market.
• 3. Blended.

• Watch for: Schools using blended learning to save costs on books and supplements.

   

   
• What these trends mean
• • Teachers’ and students’ relationships are changing, as they learn from each other.
   
  • Teachers roles are shifting from owners of information to facilitators and guides to learning.
   
  • Educators are finding different ways of using class time.
   
  • Introverted students are finding ways to participate in class discussions online.
   
  • Different approaches to teaching are being used in the same class.
   
  • Students are getting a global perspective.

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