Lately I’ve been studying Agile Programming. One idea new to me is the concept of “technology debt.” The gist is this: if developers choose to release a version of software with fewer features or more bugs than planned and desired, they accumulate a debt that must be repaid in the future (adding the features “someday,” diagnosing and removing the bugs “someday”). In the meantime, the developers pay interest on that debt via higher software maintenance costs, extra effort to work around bugs, and lower customer satisfaction. This choice is sometimes the right choice, but it has a long-term cost.
Does this model help me understand a college student’s motivation? When a student skips class, homework, or a test, there appears to be a debt to be repaid – missed concepts must be learned later, often simultaneously with future concepts. Interest on the debt may appear as lower capacity to learn, as fewer common ideas to build upon, and as more difficulty in comprehension. Future learning is harder, busier, and more costly!
Perhaps a student charges a fun evening with friends to a learning “credit card.” A student who misses one homework assignment is quite likely to miss more of them, building higher and higher learning debt as weeks go by. Bankruptcy could be part of this model, too, both class-wise (course failure) and system-wide (flunking out / expulsion).
As an instructor, like a bank, I’m bothered by too much debt or too rapid debt accumulation. It’s risky; I hate to see students falter, and failure on a student’s part feels a bit like failure on my part too. Sometimes I am willing, like some financial institutions, to refinance this debt. As an example, I occasionally work with a student who misses a major project or exam, seeking a creative way to pay off the debt, providing an alternate means for him to deliver sufficient evidence of learning (i.e., a different competency-based path). Like a banker, I’m not open to this level of disruption and chaos in all situations; I must verify creditworthiness in a student.
Would this model work well while advising a student who is slipping behind? Would she relate to this concept – and would it help her turn around? Would sharing with all students early in a semester help a few of them build the resilience needed to succeed?
Center for Teaching and Learning
Jeff,
I think metaphors are excellent ways to make learning more tangible for students, and I have used Excel in the past to help students understand “time debt” of different learning paths. With “learning debt,” I think a related concept is helping students to understand the reasons why we learn things in a certain order. Courses designed well with activities and assessments that build upon each other to develop complexity of learning fit this model better than courses that appear to students to be endless chunks of unrelated information. Helping students reflect on their learning growth through portfolios or other means to make their own learning growth over time more explicit is another aspect towards creating this capacity. Perhaps there is even another element to your idea, where we make the connections with and for students of how there are different elements of learning that have different payoff rates for their future. Grammar and mechanics may be similar to saving your change on a daily basis while spending time in a cultural event may be like buying a stock that will pay off later. Perhaps different disciplines have recommended models for “learning portfolios?”