Student Readiness: Learning to Learn

A Q&A with Melissa Loble, Instructure’s CAO

It’s not a new problem. Over the years, higher education leaders have asked themselves whether students’ academic careers prepare them for the job market and future employment. These concerns about a knowledge gap or a skills gap have taken many forms, often appearing alongside discussions of competency-based learning, learning outcomes, or personalized learning.

Melissa Loble, chief academic officer at Instructure, has worked in higher education for 24 years, teaching online and keenly observing student knowledge gaps or skills gaps, especially through studies she’s conducted or participated in during the past five years. She recommends a focus on ‘readiness’ as a broader concept as we try to understand how to build meaningful education experiences that can form a bridge from the university to the workplace. Here, we ask Loble what readiness is and how to offer students the ability to ‘learn to learn’.

 

Mary Grush: Is there a ‘readiness gap’ experienced by college or university students or graduates entering or just approaching the job market? How would you characterize it? Do students perceive this gap along with industry employers and higher education program leadership?

Melissa Loble: Yes, we do see a readiness gap. And what we mean by readiness is having the skills needed to be successful in today’s working and learning environments, which are changing more rapidly than they have in the past.

For example, a concrete readiness skill would be resilience: the ability, as things change, to learn, adapt, and work through that change.

Another example of readiness would be possessing appropriate technology skills for your job. I wouldn’t necessarily point to specific technology skills, like how to use an Excel spreadsheet if you’re in accounting, but I’d examine, more generally, how to identify, adopt, and understand relevant technologies for the job, and how to apply digital literacy, such as staying safe in the ways you use technology.

A third example would be understanding yourself as a learner — the ability to teach yourself the technical and professional skills needed for your job, along with necessary communications skills and an understanding of the culture of that job.

Those are all examples of readiness.

And yes, students themselves are saying that they feel they’re not ready. They don’t feel there are enough low-stakes opportunities to practice the skills they’re going to be using when they leave higher education and enter the workforce. So students are saying they don’t have enough opportunities to prepare and practice their readiness skills.