The Learning Centred University with Steven Mintz

Sam Pufek: Hi everyone. Tiffany and Sam here, your World of Higher Education podcast producers. While Alex is away in Japan, we're here to introduce this week's episode. In this interview, Alex speaks with Steven Mintz, a renowned scholar and postdoctoral researcher, an author of the book, the Learning Centered University Making College, A More Developmental, transformational, and Equitable Experience.
In the following conversation, Mintz discusses what makes a learning centered university, the benefits of active learning over traditional lectures and the practical challenges faced in implementing these changes. The discussion also delves into alternative scalable learning models, competency-based education, and the importance of holistic student support systems.
Steven also reflects on his experience leading digital learning transformations and provides actionable steps for universities aiming to become learning centered institutions. Have a listen.
Alex Usher: Steve, your book makes a pretty strong case for universities switching from being I guess what you would call teaching centred to being learning centred. What does that mean exactly? What in practice is a learning centred university and how is it different from a teaching centred one?
Steven Mintz: If you look at statistics, even in discussion classes, about 80 percent of the classroom time is spent by an instructor transmitting information. And while you can certainly learn from listening to lectures, you can learn a lot more if you're actually engaged in inquiry, analysis, discussion, and the like. But what we've done is we've turned teaching pretty much into performance. As opposed to what we're really interested in, which is learning.
Alex Usher: So, uh, to use a phrase that was used a lot about a decade ago, more guide on the side, less sage on the stage.
Steven Mintz: I actually disagree with that statement. I believe a professor needs to be a learning architect. That is, a learning engineer who figures out what students need to know and strategies for helping them acquire that. So it's not quite as passive as the guide on the side. A professor is not just a tutor. A professor is a designer of learning experiences, at least that's what a professor ought to be.
Alex Usher: Right. Well, come back to how we achieve that in a minute, but I, a lot of the, it seemed to me as I was reading the book that a lot of what you were arguing for implicitly is a lot more resource intensive than what we're doing now. You know, we're looking at smaller classes, personalized instruction, that kind of thing. How do universities manage that, how can they achieve that when budgets are shrinking all the time?
Steven Mintz: We essentially have two kinds of classes right now. We have lecture classes, and we have discussion classes, but there are other kind of classes, other kind of learning experiences, that we know work, and that we have not tried as much as we ought to. We know that in creative writing and art, students take studio classes, where they get a lot of input and reaction from peers. That's scalable.
We have experience with game designed learning. The most famous example is called Reacting to the Past, where students take on roles of historical actors. That's expandable, and we know that it works. Field based learning works. Service learning works. Let's not remain wedded to two models and not think about other ways that we can help students learn.
Alex Usher: But all those, I mean, there's a great thing about about the, know, the, the 2 types discussions that we have now is that it seems to me they're easier to scale than what you're talking about. I mean, doesn't the cost come into this somewhere.
Steven Mintz: Well, let's think about that for a moment. If we adopt a hybrid approach, in which a large part of the class is online, and then active learning takes place face to face, that's a scalable model. I've created interactive courseware with my students that includes simulations and animations, all kinds of exciting inquiry based activities and embedded assessments. But I combine that with active learning in the face to face environment. So, in other words, by dividing the approach, I can double the number of students served.
Alex Usher: That's interesting. Okay. I mean, presumably one of the barriers to this and, and, and you'll have known this from your time in administration is that it requires faculty to really change The their approach, right? I mean, they've grown up in a system like the one you've described with those two sets of classes, and that's what they're, have, many of them will have become comfortable teaching over a career. How do you get faculty to rethink those traditional teaching methods? How do you incentivize, faculty to undertake you know, new, new approaches to these things?
Steven Mintz: You know, it is shocking that college professors are the only professionals who are not mandated to do professional development. The assumption is that in graduate school you learn everything that you need to know. And that if you didn't learn it there, you learned it as an undergraduate watching people perform.
And we know that we need to move in a different direction. So how to do it is the question. Well, first of all, there are always individuals who are the pace setters, who are the innovators, and we need to give those people greater leeway so they can do what they want. Also, we need to figure out how to provide professional development training in a way that is welcoming by professors.
Third, we need to showcase success. We need to reward and incentivize faculty to do interesting things. Many faculty members have tools at their command that they could use that could provide a lot of insight. To take one example, I have a lot of statistical information based on my learning management system about student engagement and when my students are confused. I can use that information to improve my classes. But we're not working with faculty to make it easy for them to do that.
Alex Usher: Got it. Um, I mean, one of the types of, of learning centered models that are, that's often pitched is competency based education. And it's interesting, you talk a fair bit about it in your book, and it strikes me that CBE is, it's relatively straightforward in fields like nursing, right? So, you know, Western Governors University is famously, they've got CBE models for nursing and other professional areas, but you don't tend to see it in areas like English, history, philosophy.
How do you see competency based education being integrated into the humanities, social sciences, and even into the pure sciences?
Steven Mintz: There's a couple of different ways to think about competency based education. And one of those ways, I think, is quite misleading. Many faculty members assume that competency based education is online education, asynchronous education. They don't think of it as I do. Which is an education in which you determine what are the literacies and skills that you want your students to acquire and how do you instill those skills? How do you cultivate those skills? And finally, how do you assess those skills to make sure students have mastered them? Now, this should not be a secret. Medical schools now have adopted competency based education because many graduate, excuse me, many medical students won't go to lectures anymore. They're do it yourself learners. They're the best students that we have in higher education and they needed a different approach. And the medical schools have determined that CBE is a big part of the answer. You tell students what they need to know, you tell them at what level they need to be able to perform, and a amazingly they do it.
Alex Usher: Well, they do it. But even medicine is a little bit more output outcome based than say, history or philosophy. Right? I'm I'm sort of curious about what you think about, you know, examples like Minerva, right? So the Minerva project and the way they've been trying to do competency based approaches to higher education, which is really to have evaluators watch tape of classrooms to sort of say, well, is that critical thinking?
Is that, you know, communication? Like, what, what, what skills are people actually demonstrating in those smaller active learning phases? What's your take on what Minerva has done?
Steven Mintz: I favor critical thinking, but it's a pretty abstract term. If I want a student to analyze a work of literature, I can be much more precise than to say I want them to think critically about the text.
Alex Usher: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
Steven Mintz: I want them to understand how the author is making use of language, characterization, what are the themes that are embedded? What is the use of symbols? And how could you view the text from multiple point of view? For example, how would a feminist critic read the text? How would a Marxist critic read the text? How would a post modernist read the text? How would a post colonialist read the text? These are more precise in my mind, and we can objectively analyze whether the student can demonstrate those skills. Where critical thinking strikes me is, again, excessively abstract.
Alex Usher: So it's more about figuring out how to operationalize things like critical thinking in, you know, on a discipline by discipline basis.
Steven Mintz: Precisely. When I think about my own history students, what do I want them to know? I want them to know history methods. That is, how to conduct research. I want them to think like a historian. And that means seeing processes that work themselves out over time and recognizing that everything has a history.
I want them to have command of content, and we all know how to measure that. In other words, let's be precise about what are the actual learning objectives that we want, and figure out how best to measure them.
Alex Usher: We're going to take a short break. We'll be right back.
Advertisement: Student success at scale with a proven ROI of 4. 4 times return for universities and colleges. Studiosity's AI for Learning is designed specifically for post secondary students to develop real skills, critical thinking, agency, belonging, and retention, to empower educators with reporting and insights into learning progress, and to build human connection, made possible with Studiosity's strictly help not answers Formative feedback and integrated humans in the loop design In partnership with post secondary institutions in Canada and around the world, Studiosity is for future ready graduates and future ready institutions. With over 200 post secondary partners and more than 2 million student users, Studiosity is grounded in an academically driven evidence base, leading the way to increasing life chances for students everywhere. Learn more about the world's leading ethical AI student support at studiosity.com.
And we're back. Stephen, you argue. That student support structures are are really important to a learning centered university model and that they need to be redesigned. What role does holistic student support play in improving student outcomes? And how is it different from the current student support systems that most institutions have?
Steven Mintz: We have, right now, all kinds of information that can tell us when students are off track. We have all kinds of information right now that can tell us that some classes have very high rates of Ds and Fs and withdrawal. And we don't use that information, which strikes me as absurd! Because why not act proactively to help students when they're off track? Why not act aggressively when they're confused about a topic? We can measure that. Now, the key is what are called formative assessments. These are low stakes, frequent assessments that just try to figure out what a student knows and what they don't know. And these are not high pressure. In my own class, I have students use their cell phones to respond to certain questions because it helps me understand where they are. I can then judge whether they're engaged or disengaged and what I can do to help them learn better.
Alex Usher: Technology is often seen as both a solution and a challenge in in higher education reform you know in... you're right, these days we talk about AI, we talk about adaptive learning, online education. How do each of these things play a role in making learning centered approaches scalable while ensuring at the same time that technology doesn't simply become a, you know, a cost cutting substitute for quality education?
Steven Mintz: You know, I believe the key to a successful education, to a great education, is a relationship rich education. Relationships with faculty and relationships with classmates. But that doesn't mean we can't use technology. Let me give you a couple of examples that I use that I developed with a team of students.
One is a simulation. You are Christopher Columbus. You are going to sail to the New World and back using current wind, and ocean currents. So for every student, it's different. And what the students discover is you have to sail along the coast of Africa before you swing west towards Brazil. Then you go up the coast of South America to the Caribbean. And to get back, you have to sail northward along the Atlantic coast to New England. And then you curve over towards England. And then head south along the European coast. For students, it's flight simulator 2025. It's an opportunity to play a bit with history and it's fun. Another simulation that I give my students is every student gets a number of 18th century gravestones on Cape Cod. Each student gets different ones, so there's no cheating possible. And what they do is they figure out how long people lived, whether men lived shorter or longer than women, to what extent children were likely to die, how old people lived, and they also analyze the iconography on the gravestones. They learn a lot about naming patterns. They learn about Life. And they learn about it, not through lecture, but by doing.
Alex Usher: Got it. Look, you were once in a position to drive large scale digital learning transformation, right? You were the Director, I believe, of the University of Texas Systems Institute for Transformational Learning, which ultimately was shut down after a few years. But, but looking back, what lessons did you take from that experience? What does it reveal about the challenges of implementing large scale academic reform?
Steven Mintz: Well, the first thing you learn, of course, it's very difficult to do top down. You have to have buy in at every level. You have to buy, have buy in from senior leadership at the campuses. You have to have buy in from faculty members and the like. You can provide resources which can help buy buy-in, but mainly you have to find a coalition of the willing you have to find Innovative people who will buy into a project and who want to see it through. Who really share your interest in improving student learning and then finding a way to do it.
So let me give you an example. We opened a new university in South Texas in the lower Rio Grande Valley, which is among the poorest parts of the country and is urgently in need of more health care professionals. So we designed, in conjunction with the faculty, a competency based biomedical pathway that we called Middle School to Medical School.
And in that program, every course was aligned. So the English class was the literature of pain and illness. The history class was the history of medicine and public health. The economics class was health economics. The sociology class was the sociology of health. The art history class was representations of the body.
In other words, what we were trying to do was to produce well rounded professionals. And everyone had a stake in that. Not just the physicists, not just the chemists, not just the biologists, not just the mathematicians. Everyone had a stake in these students success. And together we figured out what a wraparound program ought to look like.
Alex Usher: So, if a university wanted to truly commit to becoming a learning centered institution, what's the first step they should take? I guess that's my first question. My second question, my last question is how would they know they were on the right track? What metrics, if any, would you use to say, you know, to declare victory? Uh To say yes, now we are a learning centered institution. How would you know?
Steven Mintz: Reform requires one of two things. It either requires a sense of urgency, or, it requires a sense of opportunity. Now, many campuses these days feel a sense of urgency. We are experiencing what's called the enrollment cliff. Because of changing demographics, we have fewer college students. And so institutions, to survive, need to increase their retention and graduation rates. That's the simplest solution to their economic problems. But other institutions and many faculty want to make a name for themselves, and that's the opportunity that they have, that by doing something innovative, they can make their reputation and more power to them, I say. This is in everyone's benefit.
So, how do we know that we're getting there? It's easy. We need to do many more exit surveys of students. We need to do more focus groups of students. And we need to ask them, How's it going? How is your level of engagement? Do you feel a sense of belonging on your campus? Do you have rich relationships with your faculty members? And if the answers are yes, you're accomplishing your mission. And if the answers are no, then you know you're not.
Alex Usher: Stephen, thanks so much for joining us today.
Steven Mintz: You're welcome. It's my pleasure.
Alex Usher: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Sam Pufek and Tiffany McLennan, and you, our viewers, listeners, and readers for joining us. If you have any comments or questions about this week's episode or suggestions for future episodes, please don't hesitate to get in contact with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. Please, join us on our YouTube channel. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Never miss an episode of the World of Higher Education podcast. Next week, our guest is going to be Dara Melnick. She's at Boston consulting group, and she's also the co-host of Constructor University's Innovative Universities Global Webinar Series. We'll be talking about what it is that makes our truly innovative university. Bye for now.