Universities do two things. Help learn about knowledge and help create new knowledge. One can drive students to the leading edge and expose opportunities for them to be creative, the conventional learning pathway. The more successful a university is in this, the more prominent they become, which leads to more students believing in this traditional way of learning and knowledge creation and flocking to such conventional universities.

Unconventional learning pathways are themselves fine as far as helping to learn about knowledge, and the help is non-traditional, mostly self-help. But, how successul is this pathway about creating knowledge? I doubt that the creation of new knowledge naturally follows in unconventional pathways. It could be done, no doubt, but it is not geared for it yet. 

The very word "University", an insitution about learning at the highest level, demands that new knowledge be created through a follow up research. If universities don't see themselves as beacons of rigorous knowledge creation and confine themselves to 'just learning', then they should rename themselves to some sort of higher (not the highest) learning institutes and give up the identity of being a University.  

@Vive - yes, I agree, that does accord with my idea of a university too, at least when combined with the practical application of that knowledge to help the community. 

Technically, the word 'university' derives from "universitas magistrorum et scholarium" which means 'community/society of teachers and scholars' and says little about the level or expectations of what that community actually does apart from to learn and to teach. But I agree that, at least since von Humboldt (notwithstanding the awkward and counter-productive Canadian distinction between comprehensive and other universities), an acknowledged role of that community is the generation of new knowledge.

But I don't think there is any contradiction at all between performing that role and accepting, supporting, or actually providing unconventional pathways to get there. Quite the opposite, in fact: we should positively encourage it, if for no other reason than that it drives innovation and creativity. I'm pretty sure that most of us professional academics use self-teaching (or non-formal methods like attending conferences) most of the time when we need to learn stuff that moves our research forward. I don't see why we shouldn't encourage students to do the same.

For instance, if they want to do a project that demands Ruby on Rails (which we don't teach), I reckon it's a perfectly legitimate path for a student to take a bootcamp. Similarly, if our courses bore or intimidate them, or don't use the tools they wish to use, I think it should be absolutely acceptable for them to achieve the same outcomes in different ways, without penalty. It would be great if we could participate and help out ourselves. It would be good if we were not so deeply bound to providing a standardized teaching curriculum that, by its very nature (professional societies are about setting norms, not reaching heights), cannot be on the leading edge of the field, and that admits little variation and creativity.  It would be brilliant if our students were more engaged in solving real problems rather than implementing (and for the most part copying and pasting from the web) yet another solution in Java to the Towers of Hanoi. 

I'm not suggesting that we should scrap everything we do now and make it a complete free-for-all: it doesn't have to signal a drop in standards at all. But, if we were to provide bit of structure, a bit of support, maybe a few basic foundation topics (optionally replaceable with equivalents), some rigorous criteria of the right kind, and some means of assessing achievement, we could make a more open, embracing, problem-oriented and competence-based approach work far better than what we do now, with far greater student satisfaction and engagement, and far more relevant, useful skills for all concerned.

Jon,

Thanks for sharing this article, as well as the commentary about the gaps and assumptions in the reporting.

This is how I frequently feel when I read a great deal of educational research.

And I look forward to reading Todd Rose's book. Thanks for the recommendation.

Thanks Gerald - it's a book that keeps on giving! I think you'll like it. Spells things out very clearly with some wonderful examples. I may be a little biased in its favour: though he takes a different (and I think more rigorously grounded) path to get there, Rose's thoughts on educational reform are remarkably like my own.

I will let  you knowwhat I think.

In the meantime, I also shared your post (and the article) with the Educational Psychology class I am currently teaching. As you can probably imagine, I have had them spending a lot of time with Self Determination Theory. 

I tried Firefox 57 and the experience for me was the exact opposite. Typical of a corporation programming elite controlling the world. Non of my past extensions worked (0 backward compatibility), the speed did not improve, and I lost access to my Adobe Acrobat XI plugin. But hey great advertising by Mozilla, and trying to stop the automatic updating was a displeasure, in particular updating plugins in FF 56.02 seemed to auto-update the entire web browser.  Fortunately I have backups, otherwise I would be forced to buy a whole new computer system just to use Firefox 57 on my 7 year old MAC.

PS. The only positive was that Google docs worked better in FF 57; I am glad someone else had a better experience, but I will be frozen at FF 56.02 and use Chrome/Safari for Google docs...

Thanks for bringin up the topic Jon. Signal is "almost there" when it comes privacy and security. The Briar project aims to solve that problem by implementing a fully descentralized system. A security audit report of its implementation and code was released not too long ago. Unfortunately the iOS implementation is still a work in progress.

Jon,

I appreciate your sharing this article. And, I agree, the results are completely consistent with other related research (and Self Determination Theory).

I wanted to add that there is also this Catch-22 in the mix potentially as well. Students who are extrinsically motivated tend to dislike a course that does not exactly fit their ideas of how a course should be organized, thereby idisincentivizing instructors who are seeking more rigor or depth or an innovative design. For me, It is all part of how you say:

We - the educators and, above all, the educational system - are the cause of cheating, as much as we are the victims of it. And we are the ones that should fix it.

Very true - it's horribly self-reinforcing. Our educational systems tend to teach people how not to learn and, like drug pushers, to make students into grade addicts, ideally having grades mainlined via a process that demands least thought and effort to get the purest possible hit (cheating is a high-risk self-destructive shortcut, but it's totally understandable how and why it happens).

To be fair, it's the whole system, not just educational institutions, that creates the addiction, and students themselves are part of that as well as employers, professional bodies, families, etc, etc.  It's a big, wicked, deeply entangled, complex problem to solve. We can patch things up locally but the problem is inherent in the design. I think that mandatory decoupling of grades and learning would go a long way towards fixing things, not because it is the answer in itself, but because the rest of the house of cards sits on top of that.

I completely agree that the whole system is the problem. I find myself mostly doing the work of trying to patch a system that is inherently flawed if not completely broken.

Separating grades and learning would make a big difference.

It's from Malaysia. I wonder if it could be a direct translation gone wrong? I see that it's submitted through this computer gaming conference in Jakarta, which is associated with 'IEEE Indonesian Section', whose submission criteria says that "Non-presented papers will be pulled from submission to IEEE Xplore." These papers must slip through the cracks. I wouldn't be surprised if the conference paper peer reviewers didn't review the non-presented papers and forwarded them directly to IEEE Xplore (managed in the USA), expecting them to review them (or not really caring, since it's not being presented in their conference).

Even [formerly] trusted big publishers like Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, and Sage have accepted papers with no peer review (at least, they did a few years ago). I wrote about John Bohannon's experiment to get publishers to accept his purposefully and glaringly flawed paper in Science (04 Oct 2013, Vol. 342, Issue 6154, pp. 60-65, DOI 10.1126/science.342.6154.60): Who's Afraid of Peer Review?

Vigilence, that is the price we have to pay for the proliferation of scientific resources and industry. (Yep, I'm quoting The Drumhead... again.) Informed skepticism is a skill that does not appear to be keeping pace with technology.

The sad part is that my 16 year old granddaughter (BC school system) still comes home with the conversation and related paperwork from her classes