Higher Listenings
A lively look at the trends and people shaping the future of higher education, featuring thought leaders from across the industry. Brought to you by Top Hat.
Higher Listenings
The End of Reading or a New Beginning?
Many students arriving at college seem to be less able and less willing to read. It’s left faculty frustrated and anxious, with some wondering, are we witnessing the end of reading? According to Donna Battista, a 20 year veteran of higher education publishing, where there's a crisis, there’s also opportunity—to rethink and reimagine what we ask students to consume. With new tools, a pragmatic approach, and an eye to affordability, we might just be able to reclaim a love of reading after all.
Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/higherlistenings
Higher Listenings is brought to you by Top Hat
Subscribe, leave a comment or review, and help us share stories of the people shaping the future of higher education.
I had a wonderful moment this summer. It wasn't a beautiful sunset or anything like that. It was when my 17-year-old who only ever read for school, and grudgingly at that suddenly decided to plunge into the Stand by Stephen King. A phase perhaps Not so, because a few weeks later he consumed the Road by Cormac McCarthy. As someone who's always loved reading, I was elated, though my kid might be something of an anomaly.
Speaker 2:These days, reading in college, or the lack thereof, has become a deep source of concern. Faculty will attest that even pop quizzes and syllabus statements, just shy of death threats, don't seem to move the needle, and it's led some to wonder are we witnessing the end of reading? Or, as Donna Battista suggests, what if this is a new beginning? What if, instead of asking students to read in every circumstance, we could help them reclaim a love of reading by asking them to read in the right circumstances? With more than 20 years in higher ed publishing, donna's a pretty good handle on the challenges and, more importantly, the opportunities facing educators. So give those peepers a rest and warm up your ears. Welcome to Higher Listenings. It's great to have you with us.
Speaker 3:It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:A recent article by Beth McMurtry in the Chronicle of Higher Education, titled Is this the End of Reading has caused something of a stir. The conclusion seemed to be that the answer is perhaps, maybe quite likely Now. The piece gives voice to a litany of concerns, and this is by no means exhaustive. But students are coming to college less able and less willing to read. Then you've got smartphone dopamine, addiction, with fewer young people reading for pleasure and, interestingly, the sense among many faculty that today's students view higher education as a means to an end rather than a place to explore and perhaps grow as a person. So that was a lot, I know. But let me ask you this, donna do you agree we've got a major generational problem at play, or is there something else going on here?
Speaker 3:Well, that was a lot but far be it for me to not complain about generational problems. Right, that's kind of our job as older people to do that. But for the reading issue in particular, I think back to when I was in college, which was 30 some years ago, and I was an English student. So I loved to read and I was a pretty good student, and I promise you that neither I nor any of my, but we had to, because back then that was the only way you were going to find the content that you needed for your course to think of as more of a generational shift than a generational problem, meaning that students have gotten very, very adept at finding the information that they need in order to do the learning that they need to do. I think about my nieces and nephews and their ability to find out how to do anything from, I don't know, putting in hair extensions to changing a carburetor.
Speaker 3:They'll find it online and learn how to do it in seven seconds. So I think that, while reading textbooks certainly is something that students are doing less and less of, I think one of the reasons for that is because of the preponderance of information that is available to them in different ways, in different modalities to get the information they need to do the learning.
Speaker 2:So that's a really great point. And I want to turn to Brad, because I know Brad is the co-host of Higher Listenings, but I kind of want to put you in the hot seat because you taught for many years. So is this a new problem in your estimation, brad, or is it just a different sort of generation, a different shift, as Donna just said?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, first let me say welcome, donna. I'm excited to have this conversation with you. I think everything Donna said is exactly right and I love this idea of reframing this as a shift. But I also think there is something importantly different about young students in particular, in the ways that you've said, I think there is a loss of reading capability that is important for us to acknowledge. Yes, they can find their information differently, but if they were tasked with reading, if their life depended on deep, extended reading, many students would struggle very profoundly with that in a way that they didn't in our generation. So I do think there is an important loss that we should acknowledge here. Whether that concerns us and how we cope with it in higher ed is another set of questions.
Speaker 2:The thing that strikes me is when you see articles suggesting that we're witnessing the end of reading, it feels a bit like we're staring into the abyss. Yet graduation rates are largely unchanged. Right, and I don't want to minimize this, but if this was such a huge issue, wouldn't you expect to see more students failing courses en masse?
Speaker 1:I guess my reaction to that is it suggests that reading isn't essential for success in the course. I think for a long time reading has not been well integrated into the design of a course in a way that makes it critical for students to do that reading in order to be successful In the way that Donna mentioned in answer to the first question. I think reading was necessary in a way that it isn't now.
Speaker 3:Reading was necessary in a way that it isn't now. Yeah, I agree. I mean, what's the tool that we should be using to deliver the result that we want? And I think what the results that you just mentioned, eric, indicate is maybe reading isn't the right tool for every result that we're trying to achieve. Certainly, these very clever, if not capable, students have figured out other ways to get the learning that they need and, frankly, I think that that is impressive. Okay, I understand. Yes, we don't want to also give up these capabilities around the ability to critically engage with long form narrative and understand meaning from it, but perhaps we could shift that to where that was the goal, right, because if it's not the goal and the goal is learning the materials, then why not give people the tools they need to learn the materials that best suit them?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think one thing you're poking at, donna, is this the need meets content kind of idea, like give students the content they need and the form they need, or let them find it in whatever form suits them for the need they have.
Speaker 1:And I think that's an important challenge that students are presenting faculty have. And I think that's an important challenge that students are presenting faculty with. Today, I think faculty are feeling this absence of reading as a kind of inability or a loss. I think, as much as anything, it's a challenge to the demand to read, like why should I do that? Why should I read when I can find it a different way or when I don't need to read it in order to be successful in this course? They're much more consumer-oriented in their pursuit of learning and I think they've been trained to treat reading as purely instrumental. I need to do just the amount of reading I need to do in order to find the answer to this question on this test as an example, and so I think their whole orientation to reading is off relative to what faculty think it should be.
Speaker 3:I do think instructors sometimes look at the lack of reading as a lack of engagement, when you could argue it's the exact opposite. Right, students are curating their own learning, which is really an impressive thing that they're doing. They're saying this is not the way I'm going to learn the material, but I am going to take it upon myself to go find information. Now, of course, faculty are concerned that the information that they are consuming is not curated by them, and then not necessarily the right information. So that is a risk. A risk, however, that comes with other skill development, like how do you determine if the information that you're finding from these sources is credible information? So, while there are some challenges, I think there are also so many benefits that we could also be spending some time thinking about.
Speaker 2:I started this feeling a little bit of doom and gloom. You know, thinking about people, not reading. But it's a different way of looking at it and I've certainly seen that in my own experience. In my own household I had a 10-year-old kid who became a pretty good magician in a matter of weeks because of watching YouTube videos. And I remember actually trying to do magic tricks myself as a kid because I got a book and I couldn't make sense of the diagrams. But if I could have watched a video and someone could have shown me those things, I think maybe I wouldn't be in higher education anymore. I could be in Las Vegas doing magic tricks.
Speaker 3:I mean think about what could have happened.
Speaker 2:But you're both raising an important point. There's a question here like what do we actually mean by reading, and so what should we be really talking about here in the context of this conversation?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that that's a really good question and I think that's one of the reasons this is such a hard conversation to have, because everybody comes from a different perspective of what they mean by reading. So, certainly the English courses that I was in, required reading, part of the skill you were developing was, you know, critical reading and analysis. And then there's the. Well, you know, I'm taking an anatomy and physiology course and there is a very large textbook and are we worried that students aren't reading that textbook, or are we worried that students aren't engaging with the material, or are we worried that students aren't prepared for whatever activities we're asking them to engage in? And I think that we have to unpack what it is that people are really worried about in very specific settings and they have different solutions. It's not just one thing.
Speaker 2:Well, it's funny You're jogging something for me because I'm doing a course, Donna Mine's, on occult mysticism, which I won't go on too long about this. But it does involve reading some pretty esoteric material, the kind of stuff where you read a page and the only question that comes to mind for me, at any rate, at the end is what the heck was that all about? But what I found helpful is the guidance the instructor has given us. He said read the chapter through once and don't worry if you don't get it right away. Then let it sit for a few days and let your subconscious ruminate this is an occult mysticism course, right and then come back to it and read it again before diving into the homework questions. And I found that really helpful that he laid this path out for us. But he's also normalized the struggle that basically everyone encounters when we confront these texts. Do you think we're doing enough to guide students on how to approach their readings?
Speaker 1:I think one step forward that's really essential is for instructors to take a little time to think about what is the content that I need for students to consume independently of class and for what purpose, and then make that clear to them.
Speaker 1:When I taught Descartes, I was struck by my students utterly being confounded by his meditations, and so I spent time in class actually reading with them and getting them to understand this is the game he's playing. This is what this text is meant to do to you as a reader, and how you, as a reader, should be interacting with it. That's just one small example of taking time to help students understand what they should be doing with, whatever the form the content takes If it's text, if it's a textbook, if it's a novel, if it's video, anything you want them to consume. As an educator, you need to help them understand how to consume it, like what is the nature of that engagement with that content and what do I do with it once I engage with it that way, like what's its purpose? Otherwise, they're just like their eyeballs are passing over something, but they have no idea what they're supposed to do with it.
Speaker 3:That's such an important point.
Speaker 3:And then the opposite end of that spectrum from Descartes is going back to that anatomy and physiology example.
Speaker 3:Again, that is a course in which there is just a lot of memorization and content coming at students and the textbook author isn't trying to get at something other than deliver this information. I actually had my own personal experience with this recently when I was reading some chapters for a certified personal training certification that I'm trying to get and I was really struggling because what I was reading had a lot of unfamiliar words that I didn't know how to pronounce, know how to pronounce, and I couldn't figure out how to learn and remember those words just by reading them and I actually had to go out and find different resources that gave me pronunciation and all of these things so I could better understand it right. So again it's what is it that you need to do in order to engage with this material and what is the best way for you to do it? And having, as Brad said, an opportunity to have that conversation with your students, I think could go really a long way.
Speaker 2:So I came across an example from Dr Jennifer Romack. She's a professor at California State University and she tells her students that the purpose of class time isn't about covering readings. Rather, it's using the content to tackle issues and problems, to write and reflect on what they're learning, how it applies to their lives, that sort of thing. And she holds students accountable by allocating something like 25% of their grades to these activities. So, in a roundabout way, isn't part of the solution designing a course that students can't do well without reading?
Speaker 3:It depends on the course I think this goes back to the earlier point like the right tool for the right job. It sounds like her course. That's one of the goals of the course right, to develop these kinds of skills. But that's not the goal for a lot of courses. And you know I'm a big believer if you want to be a great thinker and a great writer, you have to read. But that's for some courses. The development of those skills are necessary in your college career, not in every course.
Speaker 1:Donna, I think you're leveraging a very strong distinction between textbooks as a particular form of course material versus other forms of course material. Can you say more about that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, thanks. I do have particular feelings about this. I've been in this industry for a very long time, basically since I went to college. I've never been off a college campus, either because of my own academic career or through work, and I've developed a lot of textbooks during the course of that time and I've developed a lot of digital materials as well. And one thing that I will say about textbooks is that model was developed at a time in which it was the only way to get the information for the course right. It was either textbook or in class, and it hasn't really changed.
Speaker 3:We act as if all the information that a student would need for a particular course needs to be included between these two covers and you have 1200 page textbooks that are incredibly dense with all of the concepts, all of the examples, all of the assessments, everything in one place. And when the world opened up through the internet and other modes of explanation became available, that textbook model didn't really change. Even when it moved to a digital experience, a lot of that idea that all the information had to be in the textbook stayed the same. So for students, the reading experience is so unilateral, it's just they just have to consume it and they can't engage with it, and that engagement is something that they have gotten used to in all other aspects of their life right, liking, commenting, asking questions, responding to each other and textbooks haven't really allowed them to do that, so they found other sources to engage with the learning material, create their own learning material so they can teach each other about the material. And again, I think this is another area where how students have developed their own ways of learning has really surpassed what we were doing, you know, maybe akin to study groups, but in a much more constant kind of way. They're engaging in every bit of content and developing their own content and sharing their own content content and developing their own content and sharing their own content.
Speaker 3:I think this idea that that kind of learning experience, which is this traditional textbook learning experience, is still the primary way of delivering content is, frankly, a little archaic and I think, brad, going back to your point, of course, design textbook design also has to follow this.
Speaker 3:So what is the information that needs to be delivered? Whether that is a digital or print kind of textbook experience, and then what is the information that can be sourced from other means, whether that's AI, helping students find examples that make the content relevant to them, or a way to offer a different explanation if the explanation provided for a particular concept wasn't resonating with the student. There's so many more ways to give students that kind of personalized learning experience and also to say to students hey, you got that concept, you don't need to read anymore, you can move on and focus on the things that you're struggling with. And I think that's one of the things that we in the industry really need to start focusing on is providing the materials in a way that's going to meet the students' needs for a particular course. There's just so many other ways of providing that content and information that's going to meet students where they are.
Speaker 1:There's also, I think, a clear value proposition for educators. Right, the textbook serves an organizing function. It's efficient as well. When you first started talking about the traditional textbook needs to be reconceived, my first thought was oh goodness, I'm going to have to invest even more of my time as an educator curating resources for students. But I wonder what is the value for educators of textbooks and how do we preserve that in this new model that?
Speaker 3:you're starting to speak to. I do still think that having a textbook as that kind of organizing principle and providing the supplemental resources around it is still really important. So many of our faculty today are adjunct faculty and they don't have a lot of time or resources to put towards setting up a brand new course every time that it's assigned to them setting up a brand new course every time that it's assigned to them so they do rely on publisher ed tech provided materials to help support the organization of their course. So I do think that that is still an opportunity, you know, providing very well curated, peer reviewed core content, peer-reviewed core content and apparatus in terms of the tools around it for students to get the information from other credible sources when they need more, when I need a new video, when I need a different explanation, maybe when I need a translation. Having that all in one place. That, as a faculty member, I can still have a lot of confidence that these materials are going to deliver on my learning outcomes, but also meeting students where they are today.
Speaker 2:Well, I was just thinking to the power of that, especially if I'm getting a rubric as a student around. Here's the concept, here's what it's important for you to know or to be able to do as a result of that, and here's options around how you want to explore and understand and gain that knowledge, whether that's through watching a video or reading text or listening to audio, perhaps asking AI something. So it's a very different way of thinking about this.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think it's really exciting, right? I mean to be able, as a student, to say, okay, 50% of this I got, I got, I don't need to spend any more time on, but I am struggling with this other part of the work and I need more help there and that's where I'm going to spend my time. So now I'm an A&P student who's planning to be a nurse and I'm in Michigan. I can start asking for examples about, like, the aging population in Michigan and what are some of the particular issues associated with that, and see how these things are really relevant to my future career in a way you couldn't do if you read a static textbook. I think that's what makes this really interesting and really an opportunity to engage with students at a different level than what a 1,200-page static textbook would allow you to do. Everybody gets the same information the same way, regardless of whether they need it or not, and it is potentially inclusive, but it is not representative of my personal experience.
Speaker 2:We'll be right back. If you're enjoying the show, you can do us a favor by subscribing to Hire Listenings on Apple, spotify or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. You can also write us a review. We'd love to hear your thoughts or invite a friend. And last, most important of all, thanks for listening Back to the show most important of all, thanks for listening Back to the show.
Speaker 1:You've both mentioned AI, so I want to go in that direction just briefly here, at least Setting aside the concern about the potential for AI to generate misinformation. How does that factor in? At this moment, there's a lot of what I would characterize as sort of magical thinking, or maybe aspirational thinking, that AI is going to somehow revolutionize or completely undermine the textbook industry by enabling this auto-generation, so students can just generate their learning content. So, going to your example, the student who needs to focus in this particular area as a nursing student can just ask AI and get a learning course. Or faculty can just ask AI to produce their course material for them. It will be perfectly suited to their course. Where do you come down on this at this point? How do you see AI influencing this conversation as we move forward?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, first off, I'm really excited about the opportunities that AI has created for individualized learning, and we still have to recognize that right now, ai is generating this content from the information that it's finding on the web. If we're talking about generating a whole new learning experience, a textbook replacement, it's going to create worse copies of what's already out there. So I do believe that there is opportunity, as I said earlier, to say, no, look, this is the core, it's been vetted, it's been peer reviewed. So once we have that core information that we feel confident about, that's where I think we can start engaging with AI. I need more examples. Faculty work really hard to generate good examples, but there's a limit to how much they can do, and students sometimes that's just what they need more and more examples. That's where I think we can start harnessing the power of AI. But at this point today, I think the idea of AI generating the entire learning solution is probably not going to happen, at least in a way that we can feel confident with.
Speaker 1:I do think another reason that students aren't reading that we haven't talked about yet is the fact that they simply refuse to purchase the textbook. In my work, I routinely surveyed faculty and students about their textbook behaviors, and students reported in very large numbers not purchasing textbooks, because both it was expensive $300 for a single textbook right and that textbook wasn't in any meaningful way integrated in the course.
Speaker 1:They could get an A without it or, more disturbingly, they would acknowledge and accept this was gonna harm their grade, but they simply couldn't afford it. They were making difficult choices between that or being able to eat for the week. So there's real bite to this issue of affordability. It seems like the OER conversation is really bubbling up right now in a way that is replicating what happened 25 years ago, where we are first on the scene. Basically, the question here is are you optimistic that OER is going to help us pull more students into reading?
Speaker 3:No, I am not Listen. If faculty are seeing that their students are not reading, then they shouldn't easily assign a zero dollar textbook and get the same exact result, which is students aren't reading it right. So I think it solves the affordability side of the equation, but it certainly doesn't solve the reading and engagement side of the question. I think that the thing that OER is doing is creating this pressure in the industry to start to really think about what value is being delivered in the materials that they are distributing which is good, which is great. We should be thinking about that and we should be getting that pressure, and we should be using the resources that are associated with these large publishers to be rethinking the entire textbook model and not just the business model of how we deliver them. But free isn't going to solve the problems that Eric posed at the beginning. It's just going to make the thing that they don't use cheaper.
Speaker 2:So okay. So on that point, we've got a lot of new tools at our disposal these days. I mean, you've got podcasting and audio. You've got presentations. Obviously, video is super powerful as a learning tool. You've got text blogs the sky's the limit. So how do you see content working in an ideal world? Do you have a sense of what that vision could be for the future?
Speaker 3:One of the things that faculty could still use help with is this curation right. There is a ton of great learning materials available, but who has the time to review every single one of them and make sure they deliver what they're hoping they're going to deliver? It's just. It is a really big ask for an individual faculty member to do that, and I think that is where people in the publishing industry can start thinking about how can we support that experience? What are the tools that we can develop and provide to institutions to help them curate learning experiences that are going to meet their learning outcomes, meet students' learning experiences be affordable. All of those things learning experiences be affordable, all of those things. To me, that feels like the person who gets there first is going to start winning in this area.
Speaker 1:I was routinely frustrated by the limits of a traditional textbook. I wanted students to read this, but not that. I didn't like the way this particular area of philosophy was treated and I substituted my own lecture notes for it that sort of thing. So clearly. Customizability is one of the features that the future ought to hold in store for us. As educators, we should be able to fully customize right. That seems to me something that was enabled a long time ago, but not really in the industry until, frankly, top Hat came along or OER came along, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, when I got here from coming from a very traditional publishing company and I learned that the Top Hat enabled that kind of customization, I was blown away because I could build a textbook that got you 70% of the way there. But I'm not going to ever meet everybody's exact needs in their course. And by and large, faculty have said I'm going to accept 70% because I'm not going to just build it all on my own. And now they don't have to. Right Now there are a lot of tools available to them in which they can say I'm going to take the beginnings from this and then I'm going to develop it to meet my specific students' needs and my course needs. Develop it to meet my specific students' needs and my course needs. Again, the next level of that would be and then what other materials can they bring into the course to create that more curated experience? So there's more like really excited about where we are today with that and there's more work to be done here.
Speaker 2:So I'm going to make a blanket statement, but I think we're all from the cereal box reading generation, right? So when we were sitting at the breakfast table and we had nothing to do no smartphones we read the back of the cereal box. That's how I actually learned about nutrition.
Speaker 1:I'm just going to throw that out there, so it was helpful.
Speaker 2:And I remember too. If I ever complained about being bored, the refrain from my mother was remember too. If I ever complained about being bored, the refrain from my mother was well, pick up a book, which I did, and it was good counsel, because I've been a lifelong reader and it's been an immense source of pleasure in my life. And I know Brad, apparently, I think is a member of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club, so I know that you enjoy reading for pleasure as well. I do indeed. I do indeed, eric, but we do it for our jobs, for research, and I think most educators would count themselves in the same camp. So it's something that we value. It's a part of who we are really. It's wrapped up in our identity in many ways. So, to borrow one last time from my occult mysticism course, I wonder if the path forward doesn't require some element of letting go as hard as that might be for many of us to the things that lit us up and that we loved and we still like and enjoy in our lives.
Speaker 1:I feel that that lament I do. I do love reading and I can't imagine life without it. I read fiction, nonfiction, I read all the time and I do feel this is where I come close to maybe the damn kids get off my lawn kind of attitude. It's like what is wrong with you that you don't have this passion and take seriously the loss of the skill. But then I have to remind myself. I taught Plato and Socrates laments the emergence of writing as something that will destroy the mind of the youth. They will no longer remember or think because they've externalized this in some way. So you know, in the consumption pattern that feeds thinking, the way it needs to be unfolding for the current generation in this current environment. I'm still struggling there, Eric, I have to confess, because I think, boy, if you don't eventually learn how to read really effectively, you lose the ability to read a novel and live multiple lives and understand and empathize. So I want to be okay with it, but it's really hard.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I agree. I don't know if we could focus our efforts around reading where reading made sense right, where we were teaching people how to engage in what reading looks like, when you have to read or when you should be reading, and when you can focus your efforts on how do you engage in reading a novel? How do you engage in reading Descartes? How do you do that and not force it where it's not the right tool for the job to be done? Could we then reclaim the joy of reading and let this other part of it go, and there we could focus on what are the other ways that they could curate learning or consume content in a way that could help deliver on those learning goals? I'm kind of hopeful that if we stop trying to say you have to read in every circumstance, maybe we could reclaim the love of reading in the right circumstances.
Speaker 1:Love it. I love the optimism. I do.
Speaker 3:Also, I will say as much as I agree about the development of empathy through reading novels and learning about new worlds. I don't know if there's been a generation of more empathetic people than this latest generation as well. They are learning a lot about different groups and different cultures and different individuals and all those things. They're just learning it from different places now.
Speaker 2:That's a really great point to end off, donna, a point of optimism and hope, and maybe a counterweight to is this the end of reading which we started with earlier? So thank you so much for joining us and for sharing all of your insights with us.
Speaker 3:Thanks Eric, Thanks Brad, this was fun.
Speaker 1:Really enjoyed it. Donna, Take care.
Speaker 2:Higher Listenings is brought to you by Top Hat, the leader in student engagement solutions for higher education. When it comes to curating captivating learning experiences, we could all use a helping hand. Right With Top Hat, you can create dynamic presentations by incorporating polls, quizzes and discussions to make your time with students more engaging. But it doesn't end there. Design your own interactive readings and assignments that include multimedia, video, knowledge checks, discussion prompts. The sky's the limit, or simply choose from our catalog of fully customizable Top Hat e-techs and make them your own. The really neat part is how we're putting some AI magic up your sleeve. Top Hat Ace, our AI-powered teaching and learning assistant, makes it easy to create assessment questions with the click of a button, all based on the context of your course content. Plus, ace gives student learning a boost with personalized AI-powered study support they can access anytime, anyplace. Learn more at tophatcom slash podcast today.