Una destinatio, viae diversae.

(SILENT) What if Amazon had only one size box?

The small liberal arts college was designed to provide a rectangular education - 4 years deep and 2 semesters wide - to rectangular students - students who arrive, well-prepared, at age 18, from families who can pay their way, and who then graduate promptly at 22.

The content, too, was built around these students. The degree often just a ticket punched on the way to professional or graduate school, college just a four year interlude before a pre-ordained adulthood. Liberal arts colleges could focus on "cultivation" and eschew anything deemed pragmatic or vocational, celebrating arts and sciences for their own sake, rather than for the careers to which they might lead.

That "cultivation" component of a liberal arts education remains central to what we do, but the rigidity of the 4x2x15 system and our legacy allergy to the pragmatic constrain our viability and market share.

"Shatter the semester" is premised on the idea that there is a lot of inefficiency built into the assumption of 4 years, 2 semesters, 4 courses, 15 weeks. We leave money on the table when students want to study at Mills, but not full time, or not for a degree, or when students whose life does not fit the 4x2x15 model drop out or never see it as an option in the first place.

The idea is simple: rethink the assumption that a proper 21st century liberal arts education has to come packaged in 15 week long boxes over 4 years of full time fall and spring learning.

The objective is to create infrastructure - rules, policies, incentives, and expectations - that will make it easy to offer courses in different sizes and shapes, and degrees and credentials to be pursued at different paces and rhythms.

Faculty could offer modules that last only 7 or 5 or 3 weeks or even just a few intensive weekends. We might offer programs that would be off-site except for a summer or winter "bootcamp." Instructors can create "reusable pedagogy," reprising daytime instruction as a short evening course for a different audience. A student might start gently with just 3 courses and then pick up a 4th at mid-term, or a struggling student could lessen her load to 3 at mid-semester. A broader range of liberal arts ideas could be structured into a first year or during the short time a transfer student has at Mills. Programs could offer wider arrays of electives within fixed numbers of credits.

Mills is already partly adapted to the non-rectangular student. We have "resumers," requirements adjusted for transfers, variable credit courses, reduced loads, in absentia graduation, and fledgling January and summer terms. But all of these are treated as exceptions that trigger special forms, approval by committees, breaks in routine, bending rules, and extra work. This creates a disincentive to try, and makes it expensive when we do.

Instead, we can bake our exception handling expertise into our core pedagogical and business models.

The argument against a non-semester grid is the coordination problems it creates. We can use the the conversion to credit hours to build infrastructure that makes courses and degrees of variable rhythms and durations easy to do; we can become THE school that creatively solves these problems.

"Shatter the semester" transforms exceptions into virtues to foster innovative curriculum design that can plug into an expanded business model. And we can start right away - existing rules permit us to do a lot. Let's take our motto seriously and create many paths to one destination.


These core assumptions about whom we are educating far enough off the mark that a basic change to the fundamental scheduling unit of the semester is called for. This change will facilitate innovation toward better serving the needs of students we actually teach, making the degree more accessible, and allowing us to capture revenue currently left on the table from people who do not fit the standard degree-seeking student shape.

"Shatter the semester" means overcoming the idea that all learning comes in 15 week long boxes and that an education is best accomplished in 4 years of full time fall and spring learning.

It should be simple to offer 7, 5, or even 3 week modules, intensive weekend workshops for full and non-full-time students, evening offerings that reprise daytime classes, 3 year BAs, and 6 year BAs. Students should be able to take time off without losing student status; we should be specialists in "degree completion" for students with peculiar transcripts; we should be fully prepared to be the premier bachelor's destination when free community college becomes a reality.


Thoughts

Develop infrastructure that would permit offering "second showings" for credit in evening/weekend program for community residents and local professionals.
Build deliberate capacity for other than 4 year degree completion and obtain the necessary regulatory exceptions where needed.
Fully commit to degree completion for students who have obtained an associate degree.
Build the infrastructure necessary to track and coordinate facility usage and student and teacher scheduling of non-semester length courses.

We question
Is 4 course load right for all
Does 30 weeks of school in a 52 week year make sense
Should every subject be studied for 15 weeks
All "majors" don't have to be built out of semester long offerings
Sometimes a student does not have time for a pre-requisite
Does every student need every part of most course
Are the components of all our courses as sequential and cumulative as we think?

The tyranny of semester long offerings reduces variety and limits pedagogical creativity

The biography these students were preparing for When the goal of education is basically cultivation in general and deep expertise in something, the curriculum can be structured in terms of a set of 30 to 40 semester long lecture courses and seminars.

Knowledge needed to solve contemporary problems and to be a well-informed citizen does not respect disciplinary boundaries.

By sticking with a "delivery technology" designed for those rectangular, well-prepared, 18 year olds from families that can pay we leave money on the table and we make education more expensive and less accessible to people who do not look like that.

We leave money on the table because people in our community who would be willing to pay us to take (neighbors, local professionals, students finishing up degrees in absentia at other institutions, etc.). We leave money on the table because we do not have an easy way to repackage parts of our course offerings in alternate forms like weekend workshops, short evening courses, etc.).

We cost ourselves money because deploying ourselves only in semester-sized pieces is inefficient. Our programs often need different sorts of instruction but if the extra course comes only in semester-length we have to hire someone external to teach it.

When we faculty have circumstances that limit our availability we have the choice to work under stress or take a leave of absence. A more flexible system would allow me to teach a heavier load one semester and take a reduced load the next.

By thinking of our majors only in terms of 10 to 15 semester-length courses we reduce the variety of things students are exposed to and we impose an arbitrary size limit to how much of each subject.

In the liberal arts context, much of the pedagogical value of a "course" lies in its coherence, its beginning, and its end. How much of a given topic it covers is often less important that the depth with which it covers what it covers and the ways in which that content is situated in connection with other knowledge.

Our Goal

Design a structure that allow us to do what we do across a range of durations, rhythms, and intensities. We want to be able to deliver disciplined long term programs, short targeted sequences, just-in-time improvisational pedagogy. We want a system that can serve the well-prepared and highly motivated student who could earn a degree in three years as well as the ill-prepared student whose life situation is better fitted to stretching the degree out over five or six years.

Our current business model is based on maximizing the number of semesters a student pays us tuition. Our bottom line depends not so much on enrollment as on "tuition-semesters." We have rules about what and how many credits transfer in and what does not, how much time you must spend at Mills, the maximum number of credits that can be taken at once.

Baby Steps

  1. ask instructors to structure syllabi in terms of 2, 3, 4, or 5 conceivably separate modules (even if one would be required for the next)
  2. pairs of instructors who can teach same course can split that course and each offer a half semester module course
  3. instruct registrar system to identify easy ways to accommodate registration for such modules
    • note that current rules require 3.5 units for full time status - this system would support that by allowing the dropping of a module from a 4 unit load without dropping below the minimum
    • use this as opportunity to practice evolving toward organizational culture based on "figuring out how to do something" rather than identifying the reasons it would be difficult or impossible or did not work last time

Less Baby Steps

Take advantage of conversion to semester hour system to carve out framework for modules of variable sizes. If the most generic course is 15 weeks at 3 hours per week yielding 3 units, define 5 week courses at 3 hours to be 1 unit, 15 times 4 hours is 4 units so 7.5 weeks times 4 units is 2 units. 7 weeks at 3 hours is 21/45 * 3 = 1.5. So a student could have a semester with 4 sets of two 1.5 unit courses to make 12 hours3+3+4+4
3+3+3+3+3
3+

Mission

  1. make a Mills education more accessible, affordable, and effective
  2. build infrastructure that allows faculty to teach more students more effectively less onerously
  3. increase revenue

Threats

  1. competition is moving fast and can move faster than we can
  2. the lean-ness of competition may not be matchable due to legacy constraints
  3. the market for liberal arts may shrink to size easily served by better endowed peers
  4. change may be poorly designed or poorly implemented allowing transaction and transformation costs to overwhelm benefits
  5. even in the best of circumstances, the numbers might just not work
  6. note that data are collected on six year completion rates - find out how to prevent a more flexible system from making us look worse to outside entities

Research

  1. What rule sets govern part-time status? Federal and state financial aid. Loan repayment. Disability laws. US News and similar ratings? WASC.
  2. What professions require continuing education (CE) credits? What are the local and greater Bay Area populations of these?
  3. Is there a sequence of three or four "courses" that East Bay NGOs could benefit from?
  4. What sorts of training might local philanthropies pay us to provide to whom?

As children of the middle and upper classes, these students arrived fueled with enough cultural capital to major in art history, Italian, mathematics, or sociology with no risk to their trajectory toward lives still higher up the social ladder.

Snapshot Version

We say "one destination, many paths," but in one sense we do not live it. For the most part, all learning at Mills is doled out in semester long courses and the normative path to a degree is 4 years of 2 semesters of 4 courses. A lot of inefficiency is built into that structure.

"Shatter the semester" is an effort to create the infrastructure - rules, policies, incentives, and expectations - that will make it easy to offer instruction in different size and shape courses and to allow degrees and credentials to be pursued at different paces and rhythms. It would make it easy for faculty to offer modules that lasted only 7 or 5 or even 3 weeks or even just a few intensive weekends. We could offer a program that would be offsite except for a summer and winter "bootcamp." An internship might stretch from the middle of the fall to the middle of the spring. Instructors can create "reusable pedagogy," reprising, for example, a section of a full semester course as a short evening course for a different audience. A student might start gently with just 3 courses and then pick up a 4th at mid-term or a student with a challenging personal situation might opt to take 3 during the second half of the semester. Reduced loads for disability accommodation would be easier to construct. Discovery that a course was simply not one's cup of tea could be less consequential. Exposure to a broader range of liberal arts ideas would be easier to structure into a first year or during the short time a transfer student has at Mills.

Much of the creative curricular structuring that shattering the semester will facilitate is technically possible under existing regulations but it is always an exception which creates the incentive not to try and makes it clerically expensive when we do. This initiative will take the lessons we learn from exception handling and make them the default with the goal of unleash innovative curriculum design by our faculty allowing it to plug into an expanded business model.

Another

Inefficiency is built into the assumption that education happens in 4 years of 2 semesters of 4 courses each 15 weeks long.

"Shatter the semester" is an effort to create the infrastructure - rules, policies, incentives, and expectations - that will make it easy to offer courses in different sizes and shapes and to allow degrees and credentials to be pursued at different paces and rhythms. It would make it easy for faculty to offer modules that lasted only 7 or 5 or even 3 weeks or even just a few intensive weekends. We could offer a program that would be off-site except for a summer and winter "bootcamp." An internship might stretch from the middle of the fall to the middle of the spring. Instructors can create "reusable pedagogy," reprising, for example, a section of a full semester course as a short evening course for a different audience. A student might start gently with just 3 courses and then pick up a 4th at mid-term or a student with a challenging personal situation might opt to take 3 during the second half of the semester. Reduced loads for disability accommodation would be easier to construct. Discovery that a course was simply not one's cup of tea could be less consequential. Exposure to a broader range of liberal arts ideas would be easier to structure into a first year or during the short time a transfer student has at Mills. Shattering the semester is one step toward more, better, and easier education.

Much of the creative curricular structuring that shattering the semester will facilitate is technically possible under existing regulations, but always as an exception. This creates the incentive not to try, and makes it clerically expensive when we do. This initiative uses lessons from handling exceptions to unleash innovative curriculum design that can plug into an expanded business model.