With undergraduate science degrees now requiring up to 5-6 years of on-campus time to complete, how can a nontraditional student with a job and family ever achieve a bachelor’s degree and get ahead at work? Professor Jennifer C. Bobenko suggests it’s time for a paradigm shift she’s calls Multistream Education. Jennifer, a professor of biochemistry and chair of IRB at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, thinks nontraditional students should be able to graduate in just a few years, and she knows how to get it done. In this thought provoking episode, she shares her vision for Multistream Education as a partnership between traditional degree-granting universities, MOOCs, industry, and virtual lab providers like Labster.
Memorable moments:
[00:04:21] What I would like is for higher education to be reimagined so that we can provide a mechanism to allow nontraditional students to earn college credits or degrees in an unconventional way in the sciences.
[00:11:01] We could engage industry, so engage the nontraditional student's employer to determine what their general role is at work, and then they could help us determine if badging would be appropriate.
[00:14:02] We know the traditional science education consists of what is typically thought of as being four years, although now we're pushing to five or six years and it's an on campus experience with laboratories of three-plus hours per class. And this is how most of us have been groomed to think. It doesn't mean it's the only way.
[00:21:53] Serving as a professor at an HBCU, I see many first-generation college students and I wonder what their life would be like if they weren't a first-generation college student. Meaning, what if their parents had had access to education? What if their parents had had access to education that was affordable and amenable to what they were doing at that stage in their life?
Episode 5 Transcript: https://drive.google.com/file/d/183WGli9FjVPF7CUKpC_pjVkloUpqwTaF/view?usp=sharing
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