Roswell Daily Record
Heart surgeon uses medicine as ministry
FEATURE
AP Photo
In this May 24 file photo, student Raul Ramos goes through his online homework during a session of a massive online class in Madrid. Recent financial pressures and new technologies are opening cracks in traditional, age-old structures of higher education.
From recession’s wake, education innovation rises SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (AP) — Hundreds of investment bankers, venture capitalists and geeky tech entrepreneurs gathered near the pool of the Phoenician, a luxury resort outside Phoenix. The occasion? A high-profile gathering of education innovators, and as guests sipped cocktails, the mood was upbeat. Major innovations — forged by the struggles of the Great Recession and fostered by technology — are coming to higher education. Investment dollars are flooding in — a record-smashing 168 venture capital deals in the U.S. alone last year, according to the springtime conference’s host, GSV Advisors. The computing power of “the cloud” and “big data” are unleashing new software. Public officials, desperate to cut costs and measure results, are open to change. And everyone, it seems, is talking about MOOCs, the “Massive Open Online Courses” offered by elite universities and enrolling millions worldwide. As with so many innovations — from the light bulb to the Internet — the technology is emerging mostly in the United States, fueled by American capital. But as with those past innovations, the impact will be global. In this case, it may prove even more consequential in developing countries, where mass higher education is new and the changes could be built into emerging systems. One source of this spring-like moment is the wintry depths of the financial crisis that struck five years ago, pushing higher education as never before to become more efficient. Another is simply the arrival of a generation demanding that higher education, at long last, embrace the technologies that have already transformed other sectors of the economy. “The consumer, after five years on a tablet and five years on an iPhone, is just sick of being told, ‘you can’t do that,” said Brandon Dobell, a partner at William Blair & Co., an investment bank and research firm based in Chicago. “I can do everything else on my phone, my tablet, why can’t I learn as well?” But while technology is at the center of this wave of innovation, many argue it is merely the pathway to something even bigger. Cracks are opening in the traditional, age-old structures of higher education. Terms like “credit hour” and even the definition of what it means to be a college are in flux. Higher education is becoming “unbundled.” Individual classes and degrees are losing their connections to single institutions, in much the same way iTunes has unbundled songs from whole albums, and the Internet is unbundling television shows and networks from bulky cable packages. Technology isn’t just changing traditional higher education. It’s helping break it down across two broad dimensions: distance and time. But that doesn’t necessarily mean, as some contend, the traditional university is dead. ———— At his desk at a telecom company in Lagos, Nigeria, Ugochukwu Nehemiah used to take his full one-hour lunch break. Now, he devours his meal, then watches his downloaded MOOCs. He’s already finished courses in business, energy and sustainability, and disruptive innovation, taught by institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Maryland. Nehemiah needs a master’s to advance at work, but cannot afford the United Kingdom program where he’s been admitted. The MOOC learning doesn’t translate into a widely recognized credential. But the teaching is free, not available locally, and helps him even without a credential. “It’s a form of self-development,” said Nehemiah, a father of two. “The way I would speak when I have meetings to attend,” he added, “would be much different than the way I had spoken if I had not taken this course.” When non-profit edX offered its first MOOC in “Circuits and Electronics” in 2012, 154,000 students from more than 160 countries signed up (though only 8,000 lasted to the final). Now edX has
more than a million unique users in about 60 courses. For-profit rival Coursera has exploded with 4.1million students, 406 courses and 83 partner institutions. From radio to television to the Internet, technology has always promised to revolutionize higher education. So far, it’s enabled good teachers to lecture to thousands of even millions of students. But truly teach them, with individualized interaction and feedback? It’s not clear the MOOCs can do that, either, and only 10 percent who sign up for a course are completing it. But with their more advanced interactivity, they are arguably the most sophisticated effort yet to solve the central the problem of college access and affordability: the difficulty of “scaling up” learning. “This is virgin territory in terms of having tens or hundreds of thousands of people engaged in the same educational experience simultaneously in a way you can capture what you’re doing,” said Kevin Carey, director of the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation. “We’ve never had that. The assumption is we’ll learn lots of things and that will lead to better classes the future.” The MOOCs are just one part of this new landscape. Sal Khan, a charismatic former hedgefund adviser, discovered his knack for explaining things while tutoring his young cousins in algebra in 2004. In 2006, he uploaded his first YouTube video and two years later founded Khan Academy. Today, Mountain View, Calif.-based Khan has 6 million unique users a month from 216 countries, who watch the 4,000plus videos available on Khan Academy’s website. These are not full courses, but connected series of free, bite-sized lessons — about 10 minutes each — taught by Khan and others in everything from math to art history. Khan talks excitedly not just of shaking up education across distance, but time. He says students can learn what they need, when they need it, without having to take and pay for an entire course. “Whether we’re talking basic literacy or quantum physics, it’s the ability to cater to one person’s needs,” Khan said. ——— Some at cutting-edge traditional universities are also rethinking notions of academic time. One morning last spring, not far from the innovation conference, at Arizona State University, a handful of students worked through problems in a developmental math course that looks little like the traditional model. There’s no lecturer; software takes students through the material at their own speed, adjusting to their errors. An instructor is available to answer questions — a model that’s proven cheaper and more effective than the traditional class. Yet what matters most is what isn’t here: Most students have mastered the material and moved on to other classes. “We’ve organized higher education into this factory model where we bring a group of students in post-high school and march them through more or less in lockstep,” said Richard Demillo, director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “People that don’t conform are rejected from the factory and people that make it through are stamped with a degree.” ASU has broken up the traditional model of two-semesters-per-year into six parts. Some classes have accelerated versions that run essentially at doublespeed: six or 7.5 weeks. So students who quickly finish a flexible-time class don’t have to wait before starting a new one. They can move more quickly and cheaply toward their degree. “We began to say, ‘What are all these sacred cows about time?”’ said ASU President Michael Crow, who has transformed ASU into a laboratory of innovation. “What we’re looking for is intensification by freeing up the clock.” More than a century ago, the Carnegie Foundation invented the “credit hour,” the basic unit of academic time, measuring hours spent in class but not necessarily what students learned.
Sunday, August 4, 2013
DALLAS (AP) — At 83, Carl Smith found himself facing quadruple-bypass surgery and the real possibility that he might not survive. Within hours on this spring morning, Dr. Mark Pool would temporarily bring Smith’s heart to a stop in an attempt to circumvent its blocked passages. And to help his patient confront the uncertainty, Pool did something unusual in his profession: He prayed with him. The power of healing: Medicine and religion have both had their day, and they haven’t always been able to coexist. But as today’s medical treatment becomes more holistic, doctors are increasingly taking spirituality into account. The Dallas Morning News reports that studies show a majority of patients want their spirituality recognized, and most med schools now have classes related to the topic. In general, the new thinking asks doctors to note their patients’ spiritual leanings and open doors to expression, especially when life is at risk. Pool, a highly regarded heart and lung surgeon at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, is fervent about his Baptist faith. For about a year, he’s routinely asked patients if they’d like
him to pray with them presurgery — a gesture he says is always appreciated but one that exceeds advocates’ suggested bounds. “A physician should be open to a patient’s spirituality but shouldn’t push religion on patients,” says Nathan Carlin, assistant professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. “That’s confusing personal and professional roles.” An inherent power differential divides doctors and patients, says Christina Puchalski, director of George Washington University’s Institute for Spirituality and Health and co-editor of the recently published Oxford Textbook of Spirituality in Healthcare. “They’re coming to us for something other than prayer,” Puchalski says. “If I, as a patient, perceive (a surgeon) as having my life in his hands, and he asks me to pray and I say no, he may not treat me well. And that’s putting undue pressure on the patient.” As the saying goes, there are no atheists in foxholes: The idea that your fate is out of your hands offers fertile ground for re-examination. “The moment somebody tells you that you have cancer,” says Methodist Dallas Medical Center’s Rohan
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Jeyarajah, a gastrointestinal surgeon who prays with patients, “you’re going to believe in something.” But the situation, he says, requires caution: “We have to be careful about being in a position of perceived authority and not overstepping that bound. This is like a teacherstudent relationship. There’s a chance you could be inappropriate.” Pool pushes forward, eager to share the belief that drives him without making people feel awkward or flouting that power imbalance. “I don’t want to exploit their situation,” he says. “At the same time, I want to give them the opportunity to explore the faith that I know.” You could say Pool comes from a religious background. His father, his grandfather, his father-in-law, his brother-in-law: all ministers. The family joke was that he started going to church nine months before he was born. By age 6, he was well versed in Bible basics, but then something odd happened. One day at a prayer meeting, Pool says, he was touched by — well, not quite a vision, but an awareness. “I had already understood that Jesus came to save the world,” he says. “That was nice. But then I understood: Jesus came to save me. And that changed everything.”
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