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By Olina Banerji Jun 16, 2023 Jeff Maggioncalda, the CEO of Coursera, can’t hide his excitement about AI. He has ChatGPT on his phone and his iPad, and our 45-minute conversation is peppered with references to Coursera’s newest personal learning assistant, “Coach.” The interview culminates with an on-the-spot demonstration. “Coach is going to be both reactive and proactive for learners. It’s going to be a thinking and writing partner in multiple languages,” he says, typing questions into the chatbot on his iPad. In response, Coach throws up explanations, summarizes lessons, links videos and suggests further courses for the learner to check out. Maggioncalda calls Coach a “hands-on, interactive” tool, one that lets learners set their own pace with the material. And it’s not the only high-tech strategy that Coursera employs to shepherd users through courses. The company also uses a customizable assignments generator that it acquired, for an undisclosed amount, from a Bulgarian startup in 2019. Being one of the first, and largest, online learning platforms in the world, Coursera has gained some insights from its 124 million-strong user base about what it really takes to help people succeed in its digital classes. “We’ve noticed that the earlier we introduce these assignments into a course, the retention rates improve,” Maggioncalda says. Still, completion rates among people who have paid for a Coursera course hover around 50 percent, according to figures shared by the company. Coursera’s tinkering with engagement tools points to a stark hypothesis about what may be hurtling toward the American higher education system. The next decade could belong to the nontraditional, online learner — but only if the companies and universities that offer remote courses figure out how to ferry such students across the river of distraction and land them safely on the far shore equipped with skills and credentials. Demand is out there. It comes from people like Lyndsay Stueve, who works as a full-time global vendor operations expert while raising four kids who are in middle and high school. Stueve started her online learning journey four years ago — first in community college, and then at the University of Florida. She’s now completing an online MBA from Western Governors University (WGU). Stueve’s been an online learner throughout. Stueve says she needs the flexibility and choice of an online setting. “I like that WGU doesn’t force us into a semester system, with three to four classes every semester. Online, I can choose to go from one class to another, without any time constraint,” she explains. But learning online remains a hard nut to crack. Evidence that it works has often been contradictory or disappointing. Today’s online courses are evolved cousins of the early MOOC, or massive open online course. Earlier experiments did not prove as transformative as some advocates hoped, with few students completing the classes they started. There are some clear changes in the way online courses are being structured now. Insight about this comes from institutions like the University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC), a fully online college that has been operational for more than 20 years, which makes it fertile ground to understand how adults really learn online. Every minute that we have with an adult learner is a minute they aren’t spending on another priority. — Greg Fowler “The adult learner doesn’t care about what 18-year-old, residential students care about. Every minute that we have with an adult learner is a minute they aren’t spending on another priority,” says Greg Fowler, the president of UMGC. Fowler says this realization pushes his team to carefully pick out what to put in each 20-minute video lesson, and how to reinforce that learning quickly. “We definitely know that we have to make these courses shorter,” agrees Rene Kizilcec, director of the Future of Learning Lab at Cornell University, who’s studied online student behavior closely. Yet how adults really learn online is difficult to pinpoint, because they are so heterogeneous, says Kizilcec. Different priorities and expectations make one-size-fits-all programming impossible. What is clear, however, is that adult learners bring high expectations to online learning. So for this segment of higher education to grow, companies and colleges will have to figure out how to meet those standards. Adult learners aren’t shy about pushing back on course structures that don’t work for them, Fowler says. “We can’t approach this simply as an authoritarian relationship, where the instructor has the power, and the students just do what the instructor says,” he says. “We get lots of students who raise their hand and say, ‘I don't think I’m getting what I came here for.’” Goldilocks Problems Chirag Garg, a researcher with IBM, lives in San Francisco and wants to transition to an AI role in a few months. In fact, his company is going to demand new skills from him, so Garg looked for a course that would teach him all the fundamentals of artificial intelligence while being flexible with his work schedule. He landed on Stanford’s “AI Principles and Techniques” online course, and he’s three weeks in. “I like how the course topics are sequenced. I’ve done courses before where there wasn’t much of a structure, and I wasn’t motivated to finish them,” says Garg. He also wasn’t paying for those, while such courses at Stanford run at over $1,500 a pop. The kind of structure that Garg likes isn’t easy to create online. The first thing that platforms or universities have to do is subvert the linear semester system, and design shorter learning periods instead. “What I’ve observed is that a lot of universities who put the semester system online abandoned it after a while. That’s a crucial change,” says Kizilcec. I’ve done courses before where there wasn’t much of a structure, and I wasn’t motivated to finish them. — Chirag Garg The self-paced nature of these courses is a better fit for adult learners who might have to deal with issues like sickness or job loss. But with self-paced courses, warns Kizilcec, the fear is that the pendulum may swing too much in the other direction — toward no accountability. It’s a dance that Sourabh Bajaj is familiar with. He’s one-third of the founding trio behind CoRise, a tech upskilling platform that works largely with companies to get their employees up to speed on their technical capabilities. Bajaj is convinced that the flexibility of an online course has to come with some riders. Most online courses have some form of demerits built into them if learners miss too many lectures, or turn in assignments late. CoRise, though, actually makes learners pencil live lectures into their calendars. “It creates a cadence. Adults possibly struggle more than younger students to figure out when to study. If you get the option, you’re always going to punt on studying,” Bajaj says. CoRise claims to have an 80 percent completion rate across its courses, and Bajaj boils it down to a tight eight to 10 hours a week of watching videos and doing assignments. “It’s hard to balance a hyper-structured environment with just the right amount of personalization,” Bajaj says. When it comes to personalization, CoRise is experimenting with both human intervention and AI bots. “Some reminders, information, nudges can be automated,” Bajaj says. “But some problems escalate, where people have to come in and motivate learners. We check in with them at different points to figure out how they are feeling.” For Garg, the Stanford student, a human helper doesn’t always seem necessary. He says he often turns to ChatGPT with his doubts, and they are solved on the spot, cutting short the long time it can take to receive feedback in an online course. Yet for support with more complex assignments, Garg wants a professor to step in. “It’s too much to type into a chatbot. With a human being, I can just screenshot my question,” he says. Humans in the Loop Adults come into the education system at different points in their lives, with different needs. Some are trying higher ed for the first time, while others tried college before but didn’t complete it, and still others have advanced degrees but want training in a specific skill or subject. Online courses have to cater to all that. Yet there are some insights that cut across this diversity, Kizilcec explains. “One intervention that we tried had some of the best short-term effects on engagement. We asked people to find a study buddy, and get them to hold them accountable for their progress. They tell their buddy, ‘I'm going to do this course. Check in with me every week.’ We asked people to do that and plan ahead. We saw that they had more engagement in the course at the beginning,” Kizilcec says. The study buddy or cohort system means some part of the course has to be synchronous — people logging in at the same time — in largely asynchronous courses. Stanford’s online courses are trying to work around this issue, and faculty have turned their Zoom office hours into a group coaching session. “There is a live discussion amongst learners about how they can apply what they learned in their course to their daily lives. Hearing classmates can validate their own experiences,” says Jennifer Gardner, director of online executive education courses at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Dakota Lillie, a current online student with Stanford, thinks the peer connections — fostered through discussions and Slack channels — are a major appeal of the program. “It’s been designed in a way where you can participate [with others] when you want. I like the competition with other students,” Lillie says. In contrast, Stueve, at WGU, shudders at the thought of doing another remotely planned group project or discussion. “I’ve been in experiences where I’ve had to pick up the slack in a group project. I don’t really log onto the Slack channels because I don’t need an external accountability partner,” Stueve says . What Stueve does rely on though, is a personal mentor, who can keep her in sight of her goals. At UMGC, Fowler says this kind of support network is something the university is actively building. There is some “peer mentoring,” but a large part of the experience is also delivered by what Fowler calls “success coaches” who reach out if a remote student is struggling in a course. “A coach can see that a student got the same question wrong four times in one lecture. And the student may not reach out, but the coach will help them get over it,” Fowler says. Without this kind of intervention, online students can simply disappear from courses and institutions, Fowler adds, putting them at risk of becoming another one of the 40 million Americans who have “some college and no degree.” Lifelong Learners Innovations in adult learning currently defy clear patterns. Small tweaks — like better feedback systems, study buddies, guides — have indicated a direction, but scaling these services could mean universities and platforms are either shelling out or charging students higher tuition. (Of course, retaining more students can also pay off for programs in the long run.) Yet if companies and colleges figure out how to help adult students learn, then these institutions may be able to better focus on what adult students learn. And that’s important in a world where evolving technology makes it essential for people to continually refresh their knowledge and skills. “We talk a lot about the future of work but not enough about how learning will happen,” Kizilcec says. “There’s going to be a lot of work interspersed with learning.” In addition to tinkering with how a course is structured, CoRise has also been putting work into what’s actually being taught. For adult learners, course content should be tightly linked to what is motivating students to enroll, Bajaj says. In many cases, that’s the desire to land a better job, or to gain skills for work. For that reason, CoRise has moved away from relying on knowledge “taxonomies” and toward making content explicitly relevant to online learners, who may not have time for or interest in studying every possible topic. Bajaj takes the example of a machine learning (ML) course. “Computer vision isn’t relevant for most companies. Very few companies have image data. But every ML course still has computer vision and it wastes precious learner time. We’re trying to change that,” Bajaj says. Three months into a ML engineer job, you don’t need to know everything, he adds, so getting the relevant skills from an online course is important. Recognizing micro-skills or issuing microcredentials is another way that course providers are trying to meet adult learners where they are in order to take them where they’re trying to go. Fowler says UMGC is now trying to figure out how existing skills in learners can be “tagged” in a workplace, and if they can be awarded credit for that. “People are going to need more skills just to keep working. We’re trying to figure out how they can do that without taking time off to do a course,” he says. Indeed, the learners of the future may zigzig between work and school in a way that might completely transform how online courses are designed. Kizilcec believes that the path to being a nontraditional learner — potentially a majority of students in the future — needs to start earlier. “We need to think about how lifelong learners are created at [the] college or high school level. You can’t expect the traditional, residential college to take care of that,” says Kizilcec. The year of the MOOC may be long over. But the institutions trying to teach new-age learners online are just getting started. Olina Banerji is a writer and reporter covering edtech, educational innovation, clean energy and health care.
Via Charles Tiayon, Mar AG
In 2025, higher education shifted from expansion to impact, with institutions now judged on graduate readiness and research relevance. This structural reinvention was driven by AI's integration, the erosion of the degree as the sole competence marker, and a global reality demanding adaptable, outcome-driven learning. Universities are now continuous talent-development platforms, prioritizing skills and lifelong learning for relevance.
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The integration of AI in higher education is explored and considered in relation teaching and learning. Meet the AI avatar professor
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What students considering entering the AI field should keep in mind when pursuing a college degree.
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Meet Luma - Your Friendly AI Note-Taking Companion. Physical notes to digital in seconds. Luma AI generates templates, sorts your notes, organizes by tags, and helps you build better habits. Share instantly with one click. Focus mode for distraction-free meetings.
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Americans will observe October 13 differently this year, some as Columbus Day, others as Indigenous Peoples Day, and many as a regular workday. While it remains a federal holiday, only some states give employees a paid day off., US Buzz, Times Now
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At this point the Zoom call has almost come to define learning and working in the age of COVID-19. But a few months ago, people began realizing tha
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Why the "two sides" narrative doesn't work.
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The Internet is an infinite world of information and linkages; fuels the economy, boosts world culture and promotes democracy. But it is also the nest of digital assassins who lie in wait unnoticed and wait for their time to throw verbal, visual and technological bombs to damage reputations — and sign up others via social media to attain their evil motives more quickly. That’s the hideous reality of online life, as described by Richard Torrenzano and Mark Davis in their book Digital Assassination: Protecting Your Reputation, Brand or Business Against Online Attacks. The tome paints an accurate representation — one that brands, businesspeople, public figures and celebrities alike must take seriously if they want to thrive in today’s digital age, as “this power of the new digital assassin to destroy is as powerful asYouTube but as old as civilization,” the authors declare.
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One of the hottest developments in education technology is schools banning technology.
After successive years of remote or hybrid learning, you might imagine tech-weary educators would be going after laptops and Zoom. But they are focused on cellphones, driven by three major concerns: students’ mental health, ability to stay engaged and learn during class, and struggles to focus for long stretches of time without task switching.
There’s an irony here. These bans are proliferating even as there are more useful, engaging, and instructionally sound mobile-learning applications than ever before. That suggests that cellphone bans, while useful in many school settings, shouldn’t be universal. We risk barring teachers, schools, and districts from productively using these apps to drive learning gains.
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AI and digital tools are reshaping higher ed. Can they bridge the cost-value gap? Explore new insights today!
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As digital learning becomes the norm and AI accelerates, identity fraud will only get more sophisticated and schools must protect students.
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"Students are not just undermining their ability to learn, but to someday lead."
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via websites, games, and apps
College-for-all is collapsing as skills-based hiring reshapes opportunity. Employers, not universities, now define the future of work.
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One grant will facilitate the adoption of underrepresented languages in new technologies; the other will train students in research methods related to conducting field work in those languages. "The two-year BCS grant provides $268,000 in funding to create automatic speech recognition systems that can transcribe oral data from Mauritian Creole, spoken predominantly in communities on the island off the west African coast and Guadeloupean and Martiniquan Creole, two languages spoken on islands in the Caribbean. These tools would replace the time-consuming task of manual transcription, which is largely responsible for their omission from many current devices. “I call these ‘critical languages’ because we’re talking about data and resources that are absent from what’s being used and developed in all kinds of AI technologies. We have data on European languages, but not for these underrepresented languages. Developing widely accessible tools like speech recognition requires training data from the target language,” says Henri, an expert in contemporary creole linguistics. “For a vast number of the world’s languages, this essential data simply doesn’t exist.” The OISE grant, a $686,700 project, is an expanded version of a two-year grant Henri previously received. Like its predecessor, the current five-year project is designed specifically for students to gain international research experience. The earlier grant had students working in Guadeloupe, but the current grant will involve five different countries (Guadeloupe, Martinique, Haiti, Mauritius, and Seychelles) and will train both undergraduate and graduate students from across the U.S. The students will learn how to conduct linguistic fieldwork and will receive instruction on how best to write for publication and conference presentations. Each year, six U.S. students will conduct research in one of the five countries. Beginning in the summer of 2026, Henri will accompany students to Mauritius, where they’ll spend five weeks with an international team of mentors immersed in the local language. Each student will have an individualized research topic and will be trained in traditional documentary methods and modern computational approaches to create appropriate protocols to collect data related to that topic from native speakers. As part of the experience, students will participate in the UB Creolist Workshop. Developed by Henri when she arrived at UB in 2020, the workshop brings together scholars from across the U.S. with students to discuss new research in creole linguistics. “Projects like this provide valuable data while at the same time provide students with experience that can encourage them to continue working with these important underrepresented languages,” says Henri. “My first experience was super successful recruiting students from around the U.S. who later applied to UB.” It is all work for Henri that is driven by a personal passion. She’s one of those speakers — her native language is Mauritian creole. “These languages have been and still remain the object of prejudice. People don’t think of them as legitimate languages, a sentiment sometimes expressed by native speakers,” she says. “My goal has always been to demonstrate that these are complete and complex languages, worthy of serious study. Ultimately, they offer a unique window into human cognition. “These projects can help change the negative perception and raise awareness to the importance of creole languages.” Media Contact Information
Bert Gambini
News Content Manager
Humanities, Economics, Social Sciences, Social Work, Libraries
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https://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2025/11/henri-inclusive-language.html
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A new app called Sway is being tested on university campuses to facilitate constructive conversations on difficult topics.
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" "University students (N = 208) were trained on argumentation strategies and studied a dual-position argumentative text on a controversial topic using one of three learning methods: notetaking, correct teaching, or misteaching." Ref: Wong, S. S. H. (2025).. Journal of Educational Psychology, 117(7), 1013–1038. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000934
This story was published by a Voices of Change fellow. Learn more about the fellowship here.I was a kid who thrived on the positive reinforcement o
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Multiculturalism is a threat to our freedom, not a benign model for mutual respect. It is concerned with one culture, the West, and particularly with America, which it wants to alter dramatically. Constitutional republicanism as we know it can exist only through the active participation of one united people working within the confines of the nation-state. Our current experiment with multiculturalism is dangerous because the sharing of a common culture and a common language creates the trust quotient necessary for our republic to succeed. The U.S. must end separatism and reembrace patriotic assimilation in order to protect its national identity and create real social solidarity.
KEY POINTS
Some liberals are beginning to understand that one of their most cherished goals, social solidarity, can be accomplished only in a republic that is not riven by internal division.
The Founders understood that their new country was a land of immigrants which therefore needed assimilation into one polity.
Patriotic assimilation worked here precisely because in America, the bonds were to the creed contained in the founding documents and adherence to the American virtues and national culture.
Even if we closed the immigration door tomorrow, we still need to end the separatism that passes for multiculturalism.
Nation-states have proved to be the best vehicles for the protection of individual liberties.
Freedom is an unalienable right granted to us by our Creator, but it is national governments that respect or violate these gifts.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mike Gonzalez
Senior Fellow
The Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy
2016 has been the year of national identity, not just in America, but throughout the industrialized West. Political entrepreneurs who have recognized the salience of this issue have experienced success—on the right and the left and on both sides of the Atlantic. In fact, many of our most insightful public intellectuals, from Samuel Huntington on the right to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., on the center-left to Eric Hobsbawm on the Marxist left, predicted that we would be at this point—that right around now, our debates would be centered around identity and its symbols.
You do not have to be a nationalist to want to address this issue. I do not consider myself a nationalist. I have always thought of myself as a patriot, though, one who deeply believes in the exceptionalism of this country and in its goodness. Charles De Gaulle said patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism is when hate for people other than your own comes first. Put me in the first category: America’s national interest should always come first in any calculation.
In addressing this issue, it would help, I think, if we broke up our conversation into three important areas.
The first is to ask the question: What are the main threats to America’s national identity and to the concept of the nation-state in general? I will argue that one of the main threats is the current promotion of subnational group identities or identity politics in general—multiculturalism, diversity, and so forth.
Number two, does it really matter if we’re evolving on these issues? Yes, it does. America’s unprecedented levels of liberty and prosperity are linked to traditional American ways, virtues, and habits. This country is based on the belief that individuals, not groups, are endowed by their Creator with rights and that the government exists to guarantee those rights for individuals, not groups. And multiculturalism at home has an international counterpart in transnationalism. Liberals believe that our problems today are too large for us to solve them at the national level, so we must cede sovereignty to multilateral institutions.
Finally, number three, there are solutions to these problems. They are not acts of God. The solutions may not be easy, but they are certainly preferable to the alternatives. They are also easier to implement than the programs that liberal elites have rammed down our throats for decades. Yes, they will require political will, articulating winning arguments, and the fortitude necessary to withstand blowback from those we cannot convince. This may not be as hard as it sounds, however. Many liberals are getting it: They are beginning to understand that one of their most cherished goals, social solidarity, can only be accomplished in a republic that is not riven by internal division.
The Multiculturalist Threat
First, I should define what I mean by multiculturalism. One reason it is sometimes hard to describe multiculturalism is that its proponents offer nothing but anodyne blandishments when they’re asked to define it. It is nothing, they say, but simply respect for other cultures and letting others do as they please. It is about tolerance.
For those who do believe that this is what multiculturalism is, I gladly tell you that I have no problem with this multiculturalism. I was born in Cuba, of Spanish grandparents, and raised there, in Europe, and in New York. I married a Scot who was born and raised in Edinburgh, of Northern Irish Protestant parents. Two of our children were born in Belgium, where we lived for close to six years, and one of them was baptized in Hong Kong, where we lived for eight years. I also speak three languages and can read two additional ones.
I say these things not because I’m in love with my bio, but to make clear that if anyone were to deserve the title of multiculturalist, it would be me. However, it is a title that I reject, and for good reasons.
Multiculturalism has nothing to do with liking Victor Hugo, Mongolian throat singing, Szechuan cuisine, or Mayan history. In fact, multiculturalism has nothing to do with knowing anything about other cultures. Some of the most culturally ignorant people I know are multiculturalists. And it is not about tolerance.
Multiculturalism as a social model is concerned with one culture and one culture only, the West, especially America and its heritage, because it wants to destroy or at least alter it and replace it with something else. The multiculturalism I am concerned with is the blueprint for replacing the American narrative with a counter-narrative that is animated by values of the left such as state control over our lives, dependence on government to apportion participation in society, and thinking of people as groups rather than as individuals and their families.
Critical Theory
This blueprint builds—consciously or not—on the work of Marxist European thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse, Georg Lukacs, and Antonio Gramsci, whose “Critical Theory” has greatly influenced American progressives. Their idea was that because revolutions did not occur fast enough, it was better to take over societies from within existing institutions. As Antonio Gramsci wrote: “In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via the infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”[1]
Another step was to undermine society’s narrative by casting doubt on its legitimacy and replacing it with a counterhegemony. My colleague and friend John Fonte has done wonderful work in explaining this.[2] One of the main goals of politics, according to Critical Theory, is to “delegitimize” the norms and ideas that gave us the American project. The goal is to transfer power from the dominant group to the “oppressed” groups.
The third and most important element—the one that added the “multi” to the cultural—was splitting society into adversarial groups. Conveniently, Critical Theory holds that society is divided along racial, ethnic, and sexual lines. There is a “dominant” group (white males), and there are “marginalized” groups (ethnic, racial, linguistic, and sexual minorities).
Ethnicity
The proletariat could not be relied upon to carry out revolution, especially in highly mobile America, where economic status is fluid. Ethnicity is much stickier, especially when you have the long arm of the Census Bureau instructing 300 million people to identify themselves as one of the five groups in the ethno-racial pentagon of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, and non-Latino whites.
These are synthetically made groups that correspond to none of the markers usually associated with real ethnicity—culture, race, language, history, and so on. Yet the powers that be in the government and culture are constantly trying to conjure up bonds of affection to these groups.
Commands to fall in line with your ethnic group are much more emotionally laden than those that depend on class. And ethnicity is really sticky if you give individuals in four of those groups economic incentives to always tick their box.
How was this all done? The contours of the new approach were designed in the decade of the 1970s. We progressively asked people to categorize themselves into these five synthetic groups in order to give those with “a history of discrimination” protected class status.
In 1977, the Office of Management and Budget issued Directive 15, which mandated the classifications we have to this day. Later, other identity groups based on sex and sexual orientation were progressively added to the mix. And that was that.
There were no clandestine Monday night meetings, no conspiracy really—just people in the bureaucracy and the foundations acting on a vague consensus. Many had good intentions. If you read what they wrote at the time, they wanted to get help to what they saw as communities in need and dismissed worries that their actions could split the country.
The Ford Foundation, one of the leading actors in this play, believed that the advances of the civil rights movement would not last unless the constituency was expanded beyond the originally intended beneficiaries, African-Americans, so Ford invested itself into expanding the franchise. It provided the seed money to create both La Raza and MALDEF,[3] and it funded a groundbreaking UCLA study that set out to reclassify people of Mexican origin as people of color.
This is how and why adversarial groups have been built. Gramsci’s observation in Prison Notebooks that “[t]he marginalized groups of history include not only the economically oppressed, but also women [and] racial minorities” influenced the thinking of many. Gramsci and his friends took Marxism out of the hands of boring economists and gave it to a much more interesting and creative class, conceiving Cultural Marxism. But make no mistake: Cultural Marxism serves the same ends as economic Marxism.
Of course, even if many of the bureaucrats who designed the groups system may not have been conscious Gramscians, Cultural Marxism is the conscious inspiration of those in the commanding heights of the culture—the academy, the entertainment industry, and the media—who celebrate multiculturalism and denigrate America from the Founding on down. Cultural Marxism begat cultural studies.
And let us not forget the key role played in the promotion of the budding Chicano movement by the very leftist President of Mexico in the early 1970s, Luis Echevarria, a subject I touch upon in an essay I wrote this summer for National Affairs.[4] He and his people sought to divide the loyalties of Mexican Americans by saying things like “Chicanos should not look to Wall Street or Washington to find their identity. Our destiny is to the south with a people like us.” The Chicano movement was a nice complement to Echevarria’s pro–Third World policies.
Post-industrialization, too, has lulled us into accepting the premise that we can sever our traditional affection for the nation, the church, and the family. It was not for nothing that Vox last week published a piece with the headline “How Godless Capitalism Made America Multicultural.”[5]
Which brings us to our second point: Why does it matter?
Why Multiculturalism Matters
Multiculturalism matters because what is at stake is nothing less than our sovereignty, self-determination, political unity, and ability to hold our leaders accountable—in other words, our very freedoms. It may be a truism and a tautology, but it is worth repeating that constitutional republicanism as we know it can only exist through the active participation of one united people working within the confines of the nation-state. It is the finite unit at which people have debates and come together to agree on principles.
The sharing of a common culture and language creates the trust quotient that is necessary to succeed. Francis Fukuyama wrote an entire book on how high-trust nations enjoy enormous economic and cultural advantages due to lower transaction costs. Robert Putnam at Harvard and many others have written about what happens when neighborhoods diversify: Individuals volunteer less, mistrust more—hunker in.
Volunteerism is a crucial component of America’s identity. I can vouch for this after living in seven or eight countries as a foreign correspondent. America’s identity is rooted in a unique culture that includes an exceptional attachment to volunteerism, constitutional government, and deriving satisfaction from a hard day’s labor—virtues intricately linked to America’s abundant freedom and prosperity.
Sharing a common culture and language permits and encourages the economic competition needed to improve our standard of living because it allows it to transpire as harmoniously as possible within the boundaries of social cooperation. We knew this already in the 19th century, when someone who spent a lot of time thinking about these matters, the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, stated that:
Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist.[6]
In fact, multinational states have many problems. Even when they are free and prosperous, like Canada and Belgium, they have difficulty staying together. They frequently require a strong hand, and when that hand is withdrawn, we see separatism erupt, usually accompanied by mayhem and bloodletting. Rarely, if ever, are such states free.
In the modern era, Josip Broz Tito, Saddam Hussein, and Mikhail Gorbachev held together the multinational states of Yugoslavia, Iraq, and the Soviet Union through force. The withdrawal of that force led to the disintegration of their states. This should remind us why our current experiment with multiculturalism is so dangerous. We are playing with powerful, volatile forces that we do not fully understand. As the liberal intellectual Arthur Schlesinger put it, “Countries break up when they fail to give ethnically diverse peoples compelling reasons to see themselves as part of the same nation.”[7]
Even short of dismemberment, multiculturalism poses a clear and present danger in the age of international terrorism because it makes life easier for radical recruiters. We all need to be part of something bigger than ourselves, especially young men. If we no longer imbue our people with patriotic fellow feeling, someone else will come along with another message.
Even short of that, academics who study the subject of ethnic and linguistic fractionalization within a society concur that the more fractionalized a country is, the more it will suffer negative consequences in quality of government, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita growth, tax compliance, and one more thing that suffers in fractionalized countries: share of transfers over GDP. As one paper put it, “It seems that governments have a much more difficult task achieving consensus for redistribution to the needy in a fractionalized society.”[8]
In other words, social solidarity suffers in a highly fractionalized state, and this is important as we move on to our final point: solutions. Social solidarity is something that concerns both conservatives and liberals. By stating the problem in this way, we hope to forge the coalitions that we need. We conservatives acting alone will not be able to implement solutions.
Solutions
There are people who think that this is a problem too enormous to solve, that the horses are out of the barn. In the Vox op-ed I referenced moments ago, the editors highlighted the following statement: “American national identity has already changed, and there’s no going back.”[9] I beg to differ, and I hope you do too.
The electoral and societal revolts we have seen on both sides of the Atlantic in the past 15 months are an indication that the people have intuited what has happened and do not like it. Politicians can only follow. The American public, sensing at the all-important gut level the link between America’s identity and its exceptionalism—between volunteerism and liberty and between hard work and prosperity—again and again tell pollsters they do not want the country to change.
Conservative intellectuals have been writing about this for years—authors such as John Fonte and Peter Berkowitz. But liberals have added their voices, too, including Jonathan Haidt at NYU and his colleague Jonathan Zimmerman. In the U.K., we also have Trevor Phillips and Kenan Malik. These are the people I call latter-day Patrick Moynihans, Nathan Glazers, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jrs. They understand that solidarity and redistribution—paradoxically the best reason for creating these groups in the first place—become politically untenable without social cohesion.
America has had the secret formula for being able to take in millions of immigrants and at the same time have a unified national culture. It is called patriotic assimilation—the marriage of patriotism and assimilation.
We have been a land of immigrants since the 1600s, when German Pietists began to stream into Pennsylvania. Millions of immigrants have come here from Ireland, Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe, Albania, the Levant, Armenia, and they all became Americans.
Only America can truly do this because only America is a creedal nation created by far-thinking men after “reflection and choice,” in the words of the Federalist Papers.[10] Then, for reasons I have already discussed, we abandoned the formula. But the model is still there—and it is the truly inclusive one.
The Founders understood that their new country was a land of immigrants which therefore needed assimilation into one polity. Washington was the first to speak about assimilation, to use the word in that context, and Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, and all the others agreed: Constitutional republics require an active citizenry. It is why Noah Webster put in place an educational system that would nurture Americans.
Lincoln, too, agreed, saying in 1858 that when immigrants internalized the creed that “all men are created equal,” they “have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration [of Independence], and so they are.”[11] This always reminds me of something similar Paul says in Galatians. It is through belief, Paul says, that “there is neither Jew nor Greek… [I]f ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.”
This is why Justice Clarence Thomas argued in his dissent from the Fisher case that the Constitution “abhors classifications based on race,” and that “does not change in the face of a ‘faddish theor[y]’ that racial discrimination may produce ‘educational benefits.’”[12] Patriotic assimilation worked precisely because here in America, the bonds were to the creed of the founding documents and adherence to the American virtues and national culture I have described.
What We Can Do
Let me end with five things we can do to protect and strengthen America’s national identity.
End separatism. First and foremost, let us stop encouraging separatism on the basis of what Berkowitz calls “an incoherent multiculturalism that denigrates identification with the nation-state while celebrating every other kind of partial identity.”[13] Concentrating on this is key.
If we conservatives internalize the division of the country and believe that we have a nation splintered into immutable sections, we are lost. Unfortunately, this is what we are doing and why our only two responses so far are to either do “minority outreach” or go all out to get as many white votes as possible. Neither of these options will do, for even if they succeed in the short term, we are dooming the republic in the long term. The only acceptable response is E Pluribus Unum. Even if we closed the immigration door tomorrow, we would still need to end the separatism that passes for multiculturalism.
End affirmative action. To do that, one of the first things we need to do is end affirmative action. Racial preferences only serve to preserve groups by bribing individuals to tick the box.
Return to the ethos of assimilation. Assimilation did not mean then, nor has it ever meant, abandoning the pride that comes from knowing your familiar roots, or the taste for grandma’s cooking, or maintaining your ancestral religion. It does mean America is our only country.
Teach patriotism. But before we try to Americanize newcomers, we must re-Americanize the natives. The very successful counter-hegemony campaign has left us with what Berkowitz rightly calls “a crippling loss of self-knowledge.”[14] Just as with individuals, if we erase a nation’s memory, the nation will not know where it came from and where it is going. Historic purposes will be wiped out. Let’s drive Howard Zinn and others of his ilk out of our schools. Patriotism must be taught; it’s not something that comes in our DNA.
Protect individual liberty. Finally, America’s historic purposes will only be served if we refuse to let our leaders tie us like Gulliver at Lilliput. Transnationalism is the real scam, not the Founding. Nation-states have proven to be the best vehicles for the protection of individual liberties. Freedom is an unalienable right granted to us by our Creator, but it is national governments that respect or violate these gifts from God. Florida and Wyoming are free because the United States is free, just as Guangzhou and Guangxi are unfree because China is unfree. As Jeremy Rabkin puts it, “Your freedom still depends on where you live.”[15]
Multiculturalism is a threat to our freedom. It is not a benign model for mutual respect. This matters to our liberty. And just as the problems we are seeing today are man-made, they can be man-unmade.
—Mike Gonzalez is a Senior Fellow in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy, of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, at The Heritage Foundation. This lecture was delivered at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr., Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship and is published with the kind permission of the Kirby Center.
Via Charles Tiayon
To normalize their ideas, extremists attempt to take a position previously considered radical and make it palatable enough for the public to get behind. By gaining even a small foothold, they can expand the outer edge of extremism while simultaneously moving toward the center. Our intense polarization makes that possible. McAleer is the author of "The Cure For Hate – A Former White Supremacist's Journey From Violent Extremism To Radical Compassion." He co-founded Life After Hate and is a founding partner of the Builders Movement. When I was a white supremacist who had infiltrated the Canadian military reserves, an officer who had spent two tours of Northern Ireland embedded in a British unit told me that the Irish Republican Army had only 75 active personnel who pulled triggers and planted bombs. Behind those combatants were 3,500 people who offered them safe houses and storage for their ammunition. Bolstering them was a much broader community of people who endorsed their efforts. Ultimately, decades of sectarian violence were perpetrated by a small group of people on each side; but it was the broader public's support that gave extremists permission to carry out their carnage. Britain’s recent riots, instigated by anti-immigration protesters in cities across England following the stabbing deaths of three young girls, illustrate this point clearly. A violent eruption only spreads like wildfire when an environment of public support enables it to escalate. In the days when I was driven by an extremist agenda, our movement recognized the need and opportunity to increase broad-based support among the North American middle. To normalize extremist ideas, we attempted to take a position previously considered radical and make it palatable enough for the public to get behind. If we could repackage a concept that only 1 percent of people supported in a way that 5 percent would accept, we could expand our outer edge of extremism while simultaneously moving where the center lies. We paid close attention to public discourse in the middle, searching for signals of our efforts taking hold. Thankfully, we failed; but the lesson remains: Language of intolerance and dehumanization in the center ultimately enables radical extremism at the outer edges.
In the aftermath of the Oct, 7, 2023 attack on Israel, I participated in conversations with people on all sides of the conflict. Often, I was shocked by the extraordinary comments made by very reasonable people. When this happened, I would interrupt my company and ask them to repeat themselves while listening closely to their own words — to the gross generalizations, dehumanizing rhetoric and support for extreme acts of violence. Even having gone through the process of radicalization and deradicalization myself, I remain shocked by how quickly sentiment can turn; how extremist ideas rapidly become normalized; and how many people can quickly be swayed to justify hate.
In the current polarized political climate, I see this process occurring. Each side views the other through a binary lens and assumes moral superiority for their stances. To varying degrees, all of us have become influenced by a narrative of existential, all-or-nothing partisan crisis. Depending on which American friends and colleagues I speak to about the upcoming elections, the underlying assumption is that everyone will be doomed to either concentration camps or civil war.
Endorsements for extremism don't have to be outright calls to arms; they're usually far more casual. When celebrities and musicians display the severed heads of their political opponents and joke about how the shooter shouldn't miss his target next time, they give their support to radical elements. When we reduce entire swaths of the population to names like "criminal," "rapist," "weird" or "extremist," terms which stigmatize and dehumanize the "other," we tacitly condone ideas that lie outside of political norms. These notions inform an increased sense that "the ends justify the means" and widen our windows of acceptance for radical means. When we equate politicians with Hitler, for example, should we be surprised when an assassination attempt is made? The most extremist members of society, those bent on exclusion, hatred and suffering, are ready and waiting to seize upon our words to accomplish their destructive agendas. Almost universally, violent conflicts worldwide begin with slurs to denounce another group, painting them in a derogatory light. Through the gradual process of dehumanization through rhetoric, exclusion and microaggressions, each group frames "the enemy" as an existential threat to their value system, religion, way of life, privilege, culture and so on. Lazy language that defaults to stereotypes, generalizations and name-calling creates just enough fuel to light a fire in the outer fringes. With enough tacit support from the center, a spark can give way to an inferno with enough power to sustain itself. It is essential that the majority of people in the center maintain our values and humanity. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, "Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster." We cannot lend our voices to the cause of extremism, even if we are doing so unintentionally. How we choose to show up, particularly on divisive issues, recalibrates the norms. It sends a signal to those around us that we demand better from ourselves; that we will not stoop to carelessness, fear and judgment to comfort ourselves or win favor in challenging times. When we choose our words intentionally, we help guide others to do the same. With curiosity and courage, we can halt the slide. Over this past year, I have traveled extensively throughout the United States, screening the film “The Cure For Hate – Bearing Witness To Auschwitz,” and implementing an accompanying curriculum that helps high school students explore the process of othering, dehumanization and polarization (then and now). We have gone from the bluest town in the bluest county in the bluest state — Battleboro, Vt. — to the reddest town in the reddest county in the reddest state — Rigby, Idaho. On the surface, these places seem to be worlds apart; but, when I talk with the parents of our student participants, they all express similar concerns for their children. They long for their kids to grow up safe and healthy; they want them to have access to a promising future. They have different ideas on how to reach these goals, but they start from a common place. When we adopt a mindset of "us vs. them," we ignore this space where progress toward those shared goals can happen. When we break the pattern, that's when we all stand a chance.
Via Charles Tiayon
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"By Olina Banerji Jun 16, 2023 Jeff Maggioncalda, the CEO of Coursera, can’t hide his excitement about AI. He has ChatGPT on his phone and his iPad, and our 45-minute conversation is peppered with references to Coursera’s newest personal learning assistant, “Coach.” The interview culminates with an on-the-spot demonstration. “Coach is going to be both reactive and proactive for learners. It’s going to be a thinking and writing partner in multiple languages,” he says, typing questions into the chatbot on his iPad. In response, Coach throws up explanations, summarizes lessons, links videos and suggests further courses for the learner to check out.
Maggioncalda calls Coach a “hands-on, interactive” tool, one that lets learners set their own pace with the material. And it’s not the only high-tech strategy that Coursera employs to shepherd users through courses. The company also uses a customizable assignments generator that it acquired, for an undisclosed amount, from a Bulgarian startup in 2019.
Being one of the first, and largest, online learning platforms in the world, Coursera has gained some insights from its 124 million-strong user base about what it really takes to help people succeed in its digital classes. “We’ve noticed that the earlier we introduce these assignments into a course, the retention rates improve,” Maggioncalda says.
Still, completion rates among people who have paid for a Coursera course hover around 50 percent, according to figures shared by the company.
Coursera’s tinkering with engagement tools points to a stark hypothesis about what may be hurtling toward the American higher education system. The next decade could belong to the nontraditional, online learner — but only if the companies and universities that offer remote courses figure out how to ferry such students across the river of distraction and land them safely on the far shore equipped with skills and credentials.
Demand is out there. It comes from people like Lyndsay Stueve, who works as a full-time global vendor operations expert while raising four kids who are in middle and high school. Stueve started her online learning journey four years ago — first in community college, and then at the University of Florida. She’s now completing an online MBA from Western Governors University (WGU). Stueve’s been an online learner throughout.
Stueve says she needs the flexibility and choice of an online setting. “I like that WGU doesn’t force us into a semester system, with three to four classes every semester. Online, I can choose to go from one class to another, without any time constraint,” she explains.
But learning online remains a hard nut to crack. Evidence that it works has often been contradictory or disappointing. Today’s online courses are evolved cousins of the early MOOC, or massive open online course. Earlier experiments did not prove as transformative as some advocates hoped, with few students completing the classes they started.
There are some clear changes in the way online courses are being structured now. Insight about this comes from institutions like the University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC), a fully online college that has been operational for more than 20 years, which makes it fertile ground to understand how adults really learn online.
— Greg Fowler
“The adult learner doesn’t care about what 18-year-old, residential students care about. Every minute that we have with an adult learner is a minute they aren’t spending on another priority,” says Greg Fowler, the president of UMGC. Fowler says this realization pushes his team to carefully pick out what to put in each 20-minute video lesson, and how to reinforce that learning quickly.
“We definitely know that we have to make these courses shorter,” agrees Rene Kizilcec, director of the Future of Learning Lab at Cornell University, who’s studied online student behavior closely.
Yet how adults really learn online is difficult to pinpoint, because they are so heterogeneous, says Kizilcec. Different priorities and expectations make one-size-fits-all programming impossible.
What is clear, however, is that adult learners bring high expectations to online learning. So for this segment of higher education to grow, companies and colleges will have to figure out how to meet those standards.
Adult learners aren’t shy about pushing back on course structures that don’t work for them, Fowler says.
“We can’t approach this simply as an authoritarian relationship, where the instructor has the power, and the students just do what the instructor says,” he says. “We get lots of students who raise their hand and say, ‘I don't think I’m getting what I came here for.’”
Goldilocks Problems
Chirag Garg, a researcher with IBM, lives in San Francisco and wants to transition to an AI role in a few months. In fact, his company is going to demand new skills from him, so Garg looked for a course that would teach him all the fundamentals of artificial intelligence while being flexible with his work schedule. He landed on Stanford’s “AI Principles and Techniques” online course, and he’s three weeks in.
“I like how the course topics are sequenced. I’ve done courses before where there wasn’t much of a structure, and I wasn’t motivated to finish them,” says Garg. He also wasn’t paying for those, while such courses at Stanford run at over $1,500 a pop.
The kind of structure that Garg likes isn’t easy to create online.
The first thing that platforms or universities have to do is subvert the linear semester system, and design shorter learning periods instead. “What I’ve observed is that a lot of universities who put the semester system online abandoned it after a while. That’s a crucial change,” says Kizilcec.
— Chirag Garg
The self-paced nature of these courses is a better fit for adult learners who might have to deal with issues like sickness or job loss. But with self-paced courses, warns Kizilcec, the fear is that the pendulum may swing too much in the other direction — toward no accountability.
It’s a dance that Sourabh Bajaj is familiar with. He’s one-third of the founding trio behind CoRise, a tech upskilling platform that works largely with companies to get their employees up to speed on their technical capabilities. Bajaj is convinced that the flexibility of an online course has to come with some riders. Most online courses have some form of demerits built into them if learners miss too many lectures, or turn in assignments late. CoRise, though, actually makes learners pencil live lectures into their calendars.
“It creates a cadence. Adults possibly struggle more than younger students to figure out when to study. If you get the option, you’re always going to punt on studying,” Bajaj says.
CoRise claims to have an 80 percent completion rate across its courses, and Bajaj boils it down to a tight eight to 10 hours a week of watching videos and doing assignments.
“It’s hard to balance a hyper-structured environment with just the right amount of personalization,” Bajaj says.
When it comes to personalization, CoRise is experimenting with both human intervention and AI bots. “Some reminders, information, nudges can be automated,” Bajaj says. “But some problems escalate, where people have to come in and motivate learners. We check in with them at different points to figure out how they are feeling.”
For Garg, the Stanford student, a human helper doesn’t always seem necessary. He says he often turns to ChatGPT with his doubts, and they are solved on the spot, cutting short the long time it can take to receive feedback in an online course.
Yet for support with more complex assignments, Garg wants a professor to step in.
“It’s too much to type into a chatbot. With a human being, I can just screenshot my question,” he says.
Humans in the Loop
Adults come into the education system at different points in their lives, with different needs. Some are trying higher ed for the first time, while others tried college before but didn’t complete it, and still others have advanced degrees but want training in a specific skill or subject. Online courses have to cater to all that.
Yet there are some insights that cut across this diversity, Kizilcec explains.
“One intervention that we tried had some of the best short-term effects on engagement. We asked people to find a study buddy, and get them to hold them accountable for their progress. They tell their buddy, ‘I'm going to do this course. Check in with me every week.’ We asked people to do that and plan ahead. We saw that they had more engagement in the course at the beginning,” Kizilcec says.
The study buddy or cohort system means some part of the course has to be synchronous — people logging in at the same time — in largely asynchronous courses. Stanford’s online courses are trying to work around this issue, and faculty have turned their Zoom office hours into a group coaching session.
“There is a live discussion amongst learners about how they can apply what they learned in their course to their daily lives. Hearing classmates can validate their own experiences,” says Jennifer Gardner, director of online executive education courses at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Dakota Lillie, a current online student with Stanford, thinks the peer connections — fostered through discussions and Slack channels — are a major appeal of the program. “It’s been designed in a way where you can participate [with others] when you want. I like the competition with other students,” Lillie says.
In contrast, Stueve, at WGU, shudders at the thought of doing another remotely planned group project or discussion. “I’ve been in experiences where I’ve had to pick up the slack in a group project. I don’t really log onto the Slack channels because I don’t need an external accountability partner,” Stueve says .
What Stueve does rely on though, is a personal mentor, who can keep her in sight of her goals.
At UMGC, Fowler says this kind of support network is something the university is actively building. There is some “peer mentoring,” but a large part of the experience is also delivered by what Fowler calls “success coaches” who reach out if a remote student is struggling in a course.
“A coach can see that a student got the same question wrong four times in one lecture. And the student may not reach out, but the coach will help them get over it,” Fowler says.
Without this kind of intervention, online students can simply disappear from courses and institutions, Fowler adds, putting them at risk of becoming another one of the 40 million Americans who have “some college and no degree.”
Lifelong Learners
Innovations in adult learning currently defy clear patterns. Small tweaks — like better feedback systems, study buddies, guides — have indicated a direction, but scaling these services could mean universities and platforms are either shelling out or charging students higher tuition. (Of course, retaining more students can also pay off for programs in the long run.)
Yet if companies and colleges figure out how to help adult students learn, then these institutions may be able to better focus on what adult students learn. And that’s important in a world where evolving technology makes it essential for people to continually refresh their knowledge and skills.
“We talk a lot about the future of work but not enough about how learning will happen,” Kizilcec says. “There’s going to be a lot of work interspersed with learning.”
In addition to tinkering with how a course is structured, CoRise has also been putting work into what’s actually being taught. For adult learners, course content should be tightly linked to what is motivating students to enroll, Bajaj says. In many cases, that’s the desire to land a better job, or to gain skills for work. For that reason, CoRise has moved away from relying on knowledge “taxonomies” and toward making content explicitly relevant to online learners, who may not have time for or interest in studying every possible topic.
Bajaj takes the example of a machine learning (ML) course. “Computer vision isn’t relevant for most companies. Very few companies have image data. But every ML course still has computer vision and it wastes precious learner time. We’re trying to change that,” Bajaj says. Three months into a ML engineer job, you don’t need to know everything, he adds, so getting the relevant skills from an online course is important.
Recognizing micro-skills or issuing microcredentials is another way that course providers are trying to meet adult learners where they are in order to take them where they’re trying to go. Fowler says UMGC is now trying to figure out how existing skills in learners can be “tagged” in a workplace, and if they can be awarded credit for that.
“People are going to need more skills just to keep working. We’re trying to figure out how they can do that without taking time off to do a course,” he says.
Indeed, the learners of the future may zigzig between work and school in a way that might completely transform how online courses are designed. Kizilcec believes that the path to being a nontraditional learner — potentially a majority of students in the future — needs to start earlier.
“We need to think about how lifelong learners are created at [the] college or high school level. You can’t expect the traditional, residential college to take care of that,” says Kizilcec.
The year of the MOOC may be long over. But the institutions trying to teach new-age learners online are just getting started.
Olina Banerji is a writer and reporter covering edtech, educational innovation, clean energy and health care."
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