Hi everyone, Tiffany and Sam here — your World of Higher Education podcast producers. While Alex is away in Japan, we’re here to introduce this week’s episode.
In this interview, Alex speaks with Steven Mintz, a renowned scholar and postdoctoral researcher, and author of the book, “The Learning-Centered University: Making College a More Developmental, Transformational, and Equitable Experience” In the following conversation, Mintz discusses what makes a learning-centered university, the benefits of active learning over traditional lectures, and the practical challenges faced in implementing these changes. The discussion also delves into alternative scalable learning models, competency-based education, and the importance of holistic student support systems. Steven also reflects on his experience leading digital learning transformations and provides actionable steps for universities aiming to become learning-centered institutions. Have a listen.
The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 3.25 | The Learning Centred University with Steven Mintz
Transcript
Alex Usher: Steve, your book makes a pretty strong case for universities shifting from being to what you’d call teaching-centred to being learning-centred. What does that actually mean? In practice, what is a learning-centred university, and how is it different from a teaching-centred one?
Steven Mintz: If you look at the statistics—even in discussion classes—about 80 percent of classroom time is spent with the instructor transmitting information. And while you can certainly learn from listening to lectures, you can learn a lot more if you’re actually engaged in inquiry, analysis, discussion, and the like. What we’ve done is turn teaching pretty much into a performance, as opposed to focusing on what we’re really interested in—which is learning.
Alex Usher: So, to use a phrase that was popular about a decade ago—more “guide on the side,” less “sage on the stage”?
Steven Mintz: I actually disagree with that statement. I believe a professor needs to be a learning architect—essentially, a learning engineer who figures out what students need to know and develops strategies to help them acquire that knowledge. So, it’s not quite as passive as “guide on the side.” A professor is not just a tutor; a professor is a designer of learning experiences—or at least, that’s what a professor ought to be.
Alex Usher: We’ll come back to how we achieve that in a minute, but—it seemed to me, as I was reading the book, that a lot of what you’re arguing for, implicitly at least, is a lot more resource-intensive than what we’re doing now. You know, we’re talking about smaller classes, personalized instruction, that kind of thing. How do universities manage that? How can they achieve it when budgets are shrinking all the time?
Steven Mintz: Right now, we essentially have two types of classes: lecture classes and discussion classes. But there are other kinds of classes—other kinds of learning experiences—that we know work, and that we haven’t tried as much as we ought to. We know that in creative writing and art, students take studio classes, where they get a lot of input and feedback from peers. That’s scalable. We have experience with game-designed learning. The most famous example is Reacting to the Past, where students take on roles as historical actors. That’s expandable, and we know it works. Field-based learning works. Service-learning works. So let’s not stay wedded to just two models. Let’s think about other ways we can help students learn.
Alex Usher: The great thing about the two types of classes we have now is that they seem easier to scale than what you’re talking about. Doesn’t cost come into it somewhere?
Steven Mintz: Well, let’s think about that for a moment. If we adopt a hybrid approach, where a large part of the class is online and the active learning takes place face-to-face, that’s a scalable model. I’ve created interactive courseware with my students that includes simulations, animations, all kinds of exciting inquiry-based activities, and embedded assessments. But I combine that with active learning in the in-person environment. So in other words, by dividing the delivery, I can double the number of students served.
Alex Usher: Presumably one of the barriers to this—and you’ll know this from your time in administration—is that it requires faculty to really change their approach, right? I mean, they’ve grown up in the kind of system you described, with those two kinds of classes, and many of them have become comfortable teaching that way over the course of their careers.
How do you get faculty to rethink those traditional teaching methods? How do you incentivize them to adopt new approaches?
Steven Mintz: You know, it’s shocking that college professors are the only professionals who aren’t mandated to do professional development. The assumption is that in graduate school, you learned everything you needed to know—and if you didn’t learn it there, you picked it up as an undergraduate by watching others teach. But we know we need to move in a different direction. So the question is: how do we do that?
First of all, there are always individuals who are pace-setters—innovators—and we need to give those people greater leeway to do what they want to do.
Second, we need to figure out how to offer professional development in ways that faculty find welcoming and appealing.
Third, we need to showcase success. We need to reward and incentivize faculty to try new and interesting things.
Many faculty members already have tools at their disposal that could offer real insight. For example, I get a lot of statistical information from my learning management system about student engagement and where students are getting confused. I can use that data to improve my classes. But we’re not doing enough to make it easy for faculty to use those tools.
Alex Usher: One of the learning-centred models that’s often pitched is competency-based education. And it’s interesting—you talk a fair bit about it in your book. It strikes me that CBE is relatively straightforward in fields like nursing. Western Governors University, for example, is well known for its CBE models in nursing and other professional areas. But you don’t tend to see it in fields like English, history, or philosophy.
How do you see competency-based education being integrated into the humanities, social sciences, or even the pure sciences?
Steven Mintz: There are a couple of different ways to think about competency-based education—and one of those ways, I think, is quite misleading.
Many faculty members assume that CBE is synonymous with online or asynchronous education. But that’s not how I see it. I think of it as an approach where you first determine what literacies and skills you want students to acquire, then figure out how to instill and cultivate those skills, and finally, how to assess them to make sure students have actually mastered them.
This shouldn’t be a radical idea. Medical schools have already adopted competency-based education, and that’s largely because many medical students don’t go to lectures anymore.
They’re do-it-yourself learners—they’re among the best students we have in higher education—and they needed a different approach. Medical schools have found that CBE is a big part of the answer. You tell students what they need to know, you tell them the level at which they need to perform—and, amazingly, they do it.
Alex Usher: Well, they do it—but even medicine is a bit more outcome-based than, say, history or philosophy, right? I’m curious about your thoughts on examples like Minerva—the Minerva Project—and the way they’ve been trying to apply competency-based approaches to higher education. Their model involves having evaluators watch classroom recordings and assess whether students are demonstrating things like critical thinking or communication skills during those smaller, active learning phases. What’s your take on what Minerva has done?
Steven Mintz: I’m all in favor of critical thinking, but it’s a pretty abstract term. If I want a student to analyze a work of literature, I can be much more precise than simply saying, “I want them to think critically about the text.” I want them to understand how the author uses language and characterization, what themes are embedded in the work, what symbols are being used, and how the text might be viewed from multiple perspectives. For example, how would a feminist critic read the text? A Marxist critic? A postmodernist? A postcolonialist? These are more precise in my mind—and we can objectively assess whether a student can demonstrate those skills. That’s where “critical thinking” as a term strikes me as overly abstract.
Alex Usher: So it’s really about figuring out how to operationalize concepts like critical thinking—on a discipline-by-discipline basis.
Steven Mintz: Precisely. When I think about my own history students, what do I want them to know? I want them to understand historical methods—how to conduct research. I want them to think like historians. That means seeing processes that unfold over time, and recognizing that everything has a history. I want them to have a command of content—and we all know how to measure that. In other words, let’s be precise about the actual learning objectives we want students to meet, and then figure out the best ways to measure them.
Alex Usher: Steven, you argue that student support structures are really important to a learning-centred university model, and that they need to be redesigned. So, what role does holistic student support play in improving student outcomes? And how is it different from the current student support systems that most institutions have?
Steven Mintz: We have, right now, all kinds of information that can tell us when students are off track. We have all kinds of information that can tell us that some classes have very high rates of Ds and Fs and withdrawals. And we don’t use that information—which strikes me as absurd. Because why not act proactively to help students when they’re off track? Why not act aggressively when they’re confused about a topic? We can measure that.
Now, the key is what are called formative assessments. These are low-stakes, frequent assessments that just try to figure out what a student knows and what they don’t know and these are not high-pressure. In my own class, I have students use their cell phones to respond to certain questions, because it helps me understand where they are. I can then judge whether they’re engaged or disengaged, and what I can do to help them learn better.
Alex Usher: So, technology is often seen as both a solution and a challenge in higher education reform. You know, these days we talk about AI, we talk about adaptive learning, online education—how do each of these things play a role in making learning-centred approaches scalable, while ensuring at the same time that technology doesn’t simply become a, uh, you know, a cost-cutting substitute for quality education?
Steven Mintz: You know, I believe the key to a successful education—to a great education—is a relationship-rich education. Relationships with faculty and relationships with classmates. But that doesn’t mean we can’t use technology. Let me give you a couple of examples that I use, that I developed with a team of students.
One is a simulation: you are Christopher Columbus. You are going to sail to the New World and back using current wind and ocean currents. So for every student, it’s different. And what the students discover is you have to sail along the coast of Africa before you swing west towards Brazil. Then you go up the coast of South America to the Caribbean. And to get back, you have to sail northward along the Atlantic coast to New England. And then you curve over towards England. And then head south along the European coast. For students, it’s Flight Simulator 2025. It’s an opportunity to play a bit with history, and it’s fun.
Another simulation I give my students is—every student gets a number of 18th-century gravestones on Cape Cod. Each student gets different ones, so there’s no cheating possible. And what they do is they figure out how long people lived, whether men lived shorter or longer than women, to what extent children were likely to die, how old people lived—and they also analyze the iconography on the gravestones.
They learn a lot about naming patterns. They learn about life. And they learn about it not through lecture, but by doing.
Alex Usher: Look, you were once in a position to drive large-scale digital learning transformation, right? You were the director of the University of Texas System’s Institute for Transformational Learning—which ultimately was shut down after a few years. But looking back, what lessons did you take from that experience? What does it reveal about the challenges of implementing large-scale academic reform?
Steven Mintz: Well, the first thing you learn, of course, is that it’s very difficult to do top-down. You have to have buy-in at every level. You have to have buy-in from senior leadership at the campuses, you have to have buy-in from faculty members, and the like.
You can provide resources, which can help with buy-in, but mainly you have to find a coalition of the willing. You have to find innovative people who will buy into a project and who want to see it through—who really share your interest in improving student learning and then finding a way to do it.
So let me give you an example. We opened a new university in South Texas, in the lower Rio Grande Valley—which is among the poorest parts of the country and urgently in need of more healthcare professionals. So we designed, in conjunction with the faculty, a competency-based biomedical pathway that we called Middle School to Medical School. In that program, every course was aligned. The English class was the literature of pain and illness. The history class was the history of medicine and public health. The economics class was health economics. The sociology class was the sociology of health. The art history class was representations of the body. In other words, what we were trying to do was produce well-rounded professionals. And everyone had a stake in that—not just the physicists, not just the chemists, not just the biologists, not just the mathematicians. Everyone had a stake in these students’ success. And together, we figured out what a wraparound program ought to look like.
Alex Usher: So, if a university wanted to truly commit to becoming a learning-centred institution, what’s the first step they should take? My second question—my last question—is: how would they know they were on the right track? What metrics, if any, would you use to declare victory? To say, “Yes, now we are a learning-centred institution.” How would you know?
Steven Mintz: Reform requires one of two things. It either requires a sense of urgency, or it requires a sense of opportunity. Now, many campuses these days feel a sense of urgency. We are experiencing what’s called the enrollment cliff. Because of changing demographics, we have fewer college students. And so, institutions—to survive—need to increase their retention and graduation rates. That’s the simplest solution to their economic problems. But other institutions, and many faculty, want to make a name for themselves. And that’s the opportunity they have: by doing something innovative, they can build their reputation. And more power to them, I say. This benefits everyone.
So, how do we know that we’re getting there? It’s easy.
We need to do many more exit surveys of students. We need to do more focus groups with students. And we need to ask them: How’s it going? What’s your level of engagement? Do you feel a sense of belonging on your campus? Do you have rich relationships with your faculty members? And if the answers are yes, then you’re accomplishing your mission. And if the answers are no, then you know you’re not.
Alex Usher: Steven, thanks so much for joining us today.
Steven Mintz: You’re welcome. It’s my pleasure.
Alex Usher: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Sam Pufek and Tiffany MacLennan, and you—our viewers, listeners, and readers—for joining us. If you have any comments or questions about this week’s episode, or suggestions for future episodes, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with us at [email protected]. Please join us on our YouTube channel. Subscribe so you never miss an episode of The World of Higher Education Podcast.
Next week, our guest is going to be Dara Melnyk. She’s currently a consultant and the co-host of Constructor University’s Innovative Universities global webinar series. We’ll be talking about what it is that makes a truly innovative university. Bye for now.
*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service. Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.
This episode is sponsored by Studiosity. Student success, at scale – with an evidence-based ROI of 4.4x return for universities and colleges. Because Studiosity is AI for Learning — not corrections – to develop critical thinking, agency, and retention — empowering educators with learning insight. For future-ready graduates — and for future-ready institutions. Learn more at studiosity.com.
