President John Hennessy delivers ACE’s Atwell Lecture

PRESIDENT JOHN HENNESSY recently gave the 2015 Robert H. Atwell Lecture at the annual meeting of the American Council of Education (ACE) in Washington, D.C. He addressed hundreds of college presidents on the issue of information technology and the future of teaching and learning.

Since 1997, ACE’s annual meeting has opened with the Atwell Lecture, named by the ACE board of directors for the former ACE president who served from 1984 to 1996.

The president addressed such issues as massive online open courses (MOOCs), the vital, continuing role faculty play in instruction and the critical importance of high-value credentialing in higher education.

“My talk begins,” Hennessy said, “not from the assumption that something is deeply broken in American higher education, because it is not. American higher education is the envy of the world. That doesn’t mean we can’t do better, and that is what I want to focus on: how can we do better.”

The president predicted that, over the next 20 years, technological advances will make possible, for instance, customized courses with adaptive depth and speed in tune with individual students, as well as readily available automated quizzes and tutorial materials. He also predicted the enhancement of hybrid learning environments, which will provide more time for professors to pursue individual mentoring and assistance.

“My goal,” he said, “is to create an education that is affordable, accessible, adaptable and enhances student learning, but we will get there only with the intense collaboration and cooperation of our many faculty who touch the lives of our students every single day. With them, we can transform and make higher education in the United States even better than it is today.”

His talk was covered by Inside Higher Education here.