The Formation by Design Project is a learner-centered and evidence-centered approach to reinventing our institutions around whole person development and doing so in ways that are thoroughly responsive to the emerging learning ecosystem that characterizes this moment in history—the increasingly data-rich environment that, while enabling personalization and customization of learning, at the same time risks de-centering and dis-empowering learners. The Project engages internal and external stakeholders in a process of defining, designing, and measuring formation of the individual within the context of higher education.
Learning—and especially “learner-centered”—analytics hold much promise as a mechanism for integrating qualitative and quantitative measures of formation, as well as visualizing and feeding meaningful data back to stakeholder groups at every level of the educational ecosystem. Formation by Design recognizes that practices of engagement and interaction with formational learner analytics must be developed at three layers for continuous improvement—at the student level, the faculty/designers/program directors level, and at the institutional level.
Of primary importance in this work are the dual goals of empowering students to be in control of their own learning analytics and elevating evidence of the process of integrative, deep learning to higher echelons of institutional decision-making. Providing robust and multiple sources of learning analytics along the whole arc of learning will help achieve the ultimate goal of informing educational designs to best support formation of all of our students.
The second Formation by Design Symposium welcomed international leaders, faculty, and designers in higher education to Georgetown University from June 15 to 17 in 2015, discussing ways to put ‘whole student’ formation at the center of curricular and co-curricular endeavors.
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The Formation by Design Project is pleased to release its 2014-2015 Progress Report.
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The project aims to articulate a vision that puts formation at the heart of higher education as a value to be designed for and measured using the new power of learning analytics.
Through gatherings and virtual meetings, the project will establish a collaborative network with a shared research agenda of understanding formational learning.
The project undertakes the task of understanding the changing skillset of liberal education, and designing measures and practices that explore and elevate the visibility of data and evidence to form a picture of the whole learner and the whole educational context.
Randy Bass is Vice Provost for Education and Professor of English at Georgetown University. He is the Founding Executive Director of Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), where he continues as a Senior Scholar for Pedagogical Research.
Catherine Armour is Director of Education and Academic Affairs at Georgetown University. She was previously Provost at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC. Her work is focused on program development, academic innovation and curricular design.
Brandi Durkac is the Director of Advancement and Regional Development in the Office of Advancement and works closely with Vice Provost Randy Bass on the Georgetown Learning Initiatives and other university projects related to learning and innovation.
Mindy McWilliams is the Assistant Director for Assessment in the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown. She works with faculty to assess the impact of teaching with technology on student learning, teaching to the whole person, and aspects of students’ general education experience.
Dan Bernstein is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Kansas. From 1999 to 2003 Bernstein directed a five-university project on peer review of teaching materials, and his recent writing has focused on electronic course portfolios centered on student work.
Bret Eynon is a historian by training, studying social movements in the context of political and personal transformation. He is currently based at LaGuardia where he directs the Making Connections National Resource Center on Inquiry, Reflection, and Integrative Education.
Ruth Deakin Crick is Professor of Learning Analytics and Educational Leadership at the University of Technology Sydney. She works in Improvement Science at the interface of research, practice, policy and enterprise. She is one of the originators of the Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory.
Simon Buckingham Shum is Professor of Learning Informatics at the University of Technology Sydney, where he is Director of the Connected Intelligence Centre (CIC). He researches, teaches and consults on learning analytics, social learning media, collective intelligence and dialogue/argument visualization.
Alex Ambrose is Associate Director of the Notre Dame E-Portfolio Engagement Project (nDEEP), and an Academic Advisor and Co-Director of the Balfour Hesburgh Scholars Program in the First Year of Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
Laura Gambino is Professor of Assessment and Information Technology at Guttman Community College. She is also the Project Research Coordinator for the national Connect to Learning (C2L) ePortfolio project.
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All Future(s) work is funded solely by philanthropy. Learn more about why our partners are supporting educational innovation at Georgetown.
