What Are the Most Pressing Issues in Higher Ed: Four Questions for Eddie Maloney

One of the things I am enjoying most in 2022 is our new “Four Questions” feature, in which we are interviewing practitioners and thought leaders in the graduate and online space. In these interviews, we are learning what is going on “on campus,” what they are focusing on in their jobs, what they see on the horizon for higher education, and also learn a bit about them personally—and all in four questions!

Eddie Maloney is executive director of the Center for New Designs of Learning at Georgetown University, co-author of the widely read Learning Innovation blog on Inside Higher Ed, and the co-chair of RNL’s new Graduate and Online Advisory Panel. Eddie agreed to sit down for the second interview in this series (after we debuted with his frequent collaborator, Josh Kim). Here’s what he had to tell us about the issues of the day and why he thinks higher education’s pendulum is in full swing.

From where you sit, what are the most pressing issues here, institutional be looking at to address in the next couple of years? And how has the pandemic informed and affected that strategy?

Eddie Maloney: The first is addressing issues of equity and access clarified by our remote learning experiences over the last two years. During the pandemic, we’ve learned a lot about our students that we didn’t know before. About where they are, where they come from, what the relationship is between the work that they’re doing at Georgetown and the whole rest of their lives. We now need to be responsive to what we learned. For us at Georgetown, that means investing heavily in inclusive pedagogy as we get back to on-ground in-person education.

A second question that we’re grappling with is understanding the long-term impact of the technologies that we’ve been using throughout the pandemic are on teaching and learning. Mastering this will help us best leverage the full spectrum of modalities—from in-person to hybrid to online—in the future and provide the best experience for our students. We now have more access to and more experience with the full range of instructional modalities. How do we take advantage of these technologies for in-person classes?

A related question is what it means for us to have hybrid students for the first time. Imagining what it could look like to have undergraduate classes that has some online components is a shift in our thinking. We also now have experience with distance or fully online courses. If we understand what we’ve learned over the past couple of years and apply it to what we do, we can ensure that that impacts our distance/online education in the best possible way.

If you look beyond your institution, what do you think American higher education is going to look like in 2025?

Eddie Maloney: Honestly, I don’t imagine higher education will be much different in 2025. I think there will be small gains. I’ve described where we have been in the pandemic and where we are now as part of a pendulum swing. In the pandemic we had to swing really hard to remote learning. We had to think differently about what it meant for us to engage with our students. We had to rethink our whole teaching and learning process. As we started to see the end of the pandemic (or the move to an endemic situation), that pendulum is swinging hard the other way. Everyone seems to wants to get back to that pre-2020 in-person experience.

Right now we’re all investing in ways to (safely) get our students back on campus, making sure we’re giving our students the residential education that they want. My guess (and my hope) is that this will take some time to level off, and by 2025 we will be thinking about all that we’ve been through and how we can take advantage of the best of all the technology and everything else we’ve learned to advance the student experience.

We tend to think about progress as linear, but it really isn’t. It’s more iterative. It is really good to invest in that iteration. It’s one of the reasons why the higher education sector has lasted as long as it has is because it’s evolution is not linear. I think people want this to be that kind of launching pad for a whole set of new things. But if we do this well, it will be thoughtful, it will be engaged, we will meet our students where they need to be, but we’ll also be carrying forward the traditions of the value of higher education.

What do you want to accomplish as part of the RNL Graduate and Online Advisory Board?

Eddie Maloney: I hope we can help colleges and universities think about this new and growing online learning space as something that—more often than not—needs to be done in a partnership that includes both the institution and organizations like RNL, rather than turning over the whole process to other kinds of service industries like OPMs, which just take over the process and don’t afford institutions the opportunity to learn how to do these newly vital functions themselves.

We can help RNL think through how they help institutions consider what the opportunities really are in graduate and online, how and where they should invest in themselves, and where it makes more sense to farm it out and focus on the things that every successful institution will need to master in the coming years. This is really about shoring up core capacities. If RNL can help do that, they are full partners and not just service providers.

Another thing that I think RNL can help institutions with is determining that future balance between classroom and online. It is absolutely true that the majority of students want to be back in the classroom, but there are still 20 to 30 percent of students who likely don’t want to return to the classroom. Institutions need to think through which virtual aspects of instruction should remain. Is sitting for three hours in a lecture hall better than being able to watch a segmented lecture online? Where is the better learning happening?

What what’s your favorite movie of all time and why?

Eddie Maloney: I absolutely do not have an answer. I have like 30 different movies that are my favorite movie of all time, so it’s very hard for me to pick one. This may be because I am a big film person. There are definitely movies that had a big influence on me. Some include Akira Kurosawa’s films like Seven Samurai…Casablanca…Star Wars might have had the greatest influence on me just from where I was when it came out and the paradigm shift that that movie enabled in how we think about science fiction. But I am also a romantic at heart, so if I had to pick one, it might be The Princess Bride.

Be sure to watch out first episode, 4 Questions With Josh Kim of Dartmouth College.