Research Project for You?

Future research
Written By Stephen Ehrmann

Research ideas for you: To develop a case history, I began by finding institutions that, at the least, had some evidence of improvements in their quality of learning and equitable access. I usually studied documents and interviewed 5-10 people in order to get a sense of the story leading to their current success. From those materials, I came up with the concepts, findings, and recommendations reported in my book, Pursuing Quality, Access, and Affordability.

Future research: What happens when these concepts and recommendations are applied to institutions that have not yet achieved appreciable gains in quality or access? Do they give people new ways of understanding their current situation and new ideas for what to do next? Or not? For example, from very slender evidence, I’ve guessed that early successes (e.g., in improving retention in the first year) can help build a working coalition that spans several silos and interest groups, and that this coalition makes possible more ambitious steps. I’ve guessed that such coalitions might be essential for addressing organizational foundations and wider world interactions such as faculty rewards, institutional culture, or how the institution markets itself to potential hires.

As I say, these are informed guesses on my part. Are they useful for institutions beginning to intentionally pursue 3fold gains? Looking at the histories of many institutions pursuing 3fold gains, were such coalitions ever present? almost always critical? Perhaps you or a colleague might decide to look into this.

Stephen Ehrmann

Steve Ehrmann has dedicated fifty years to helping academics improve higher learning. He’s done a good fraction of that work on educational uses of technology, online learning, how to evaluate innovations, and improving institutions' capacity to mold their own futures. He’s had many roles, as a researcher, vice provost for teaching & learning, grantmaker, and consultant. He has a Ph.D. in management and higher education from MIT. Dr.Ehrmann has published around 100 articles and books while visiting several hundred colleges and universities in the US and abroad.

Over the last five years, Dr. Ehrmann has studied how selected colleges and universities, big and small, public and private, have been able to improve learning and equity within constraints of affordability. Findings and recommendations are reported in his book, Pursuing Quality, Access, and Affordability: A Field Guide to Improving Higher Education. About this volume, Prof. Adrianna Kezar of USC has called it "one of the most important books in higher education in decades." Carol Geary Schneider has written, "[This book] provides a persuasive, practical, and long-view guide to implementing transformative educational change across an entire institution and ultimately, US higher education as a whole." InsideHigherEd called it a "must-read."

https://3Fold.net
Next

Developing Leaders for Pursuing 3Fold Gains