IMS Global: You've served at nearly every administrative level during your career in higher education while maintaining a foothold in the classroom. During that time, what would you say have been some of the most significant changes by which learning occurs?

JVL: The process of education (learning, teaching, whatever we call it) is probably unchanged from the beginning of time. We get someone who knows something, put them together with someone else who wants to know something, and ask them to work together. The result is always the same: the teacher learns something from teaching the student, and the student learns something from working with the teacher.

The important part of this equation is that teaching and learning is always an individualized process, no matter how many students or teachers are involved or how automated the process appears to be. Students only learn what they want to learn, and while we can do many things to improve the student's ability to learn what they want to learn, we can rarely force the student to learn something they don't want to learn. Equally, even when students want to learn the same things, have the same commitment, and work equally hard, they will come away with a different amount or type or quality of learning because they are different people with different backgrounds, expectations about their lives, and preparation for the learning experience.

This truth was well understood when higher education was primarily an elite process for preparing a small fraction of the population, but as we became more and more persuaded that education and especially higher education was at least an opportunity that everyone deserved (if not a right), we shifted to thinking that by increasing the scale we could homogenize the process to produce standardized outcomes from non-standard inputs. It is this shift that has driven much of the conversation about higher education in recent times.

We now want to think that everyone who enters the higher education system can be processed, reminiscent of an industrial model, in a standardized way to produce graduates who have common levels of quality performance. This reflects how we produce movies, cars, computers, and other consumer products, where we have learned how to use statistical quality control to produce uniform high quality. When we search for similar outcomes in higher education we end up attempting the impossible because it is hard to produce standardized human output. At the same time, when we went from elite higher education to mass higher education, we assumed a responsibility to deal with the wide variations in human talent and interest and ability that came to us, and so we have struggled to identify methods of measuring our success, improving our performance, and understanding the failures.

The higher education community and its many constituencies have found this process difficult, in large part because we have been reluctant to recognize that higher education is a name without common meaning and covers a very wide range of institutions, programs, student populations, and the like. Learning within these environments has become highly differentiated in many process ways, even if standardized in its formal structure. So we have distance education, computer based education, adult education, part time learners, residential colleges, vocational education, pre-professional education, and an almost endless continuum of institutional types and delivery mechanisms to produce what goes under the deceptively uniform label of higher education.