The Value of Getting out of the Classroom
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with the chief executive officer of BMNT, Pete Newell, to discuss his vision for the future of the Hacking 4 university programs. He described the implications for both students and educators as we move forward with continued growth and application of the H4 and Lean Launchpad pedagogy. I encourage you to listen to this discussion with Pete to learn more about the shared vision we have for H4 programs.
Pete also recently penned an article for Defense One that highlights the out of classroom approach that makes the H4 experience so impactful for our students, educators, industry and government partners, and on academia itself. In his article, Pete demonstrates one of the most (if not the most) important features of the H4 pedagogical approach: “get out of the building” and talk to people in and around the problem domain. In Pete’s own words, we need to look towards what his vast experience demonstrated:
”We’ve learned that getting out and talking to those most affected by your work is revelatory, and leads to further, more niched discussions with unforeseen users. During my time with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, our best insights came from dismounted soldiers. They knew what it felt like to run out of battery power midway through a mission, and they told us what they needed in no uncertain terms. These conversations, if patiently pursued, eventually reveal the vital clue to solving the problem.”
The quick lesson here is that students need to get out of the classroom and experience the problem domain intimately with as many people in the ecosystem as possible. As Pete also mentioned in his article:
“Within your organization, you have to know your problem and understand it inside and out. What, exactly, are you trying to solve? Reports and documents will not give you the insight afforded by getting out of the building and talking to people.”
This is one of the reasons we emphasize the “100 interview” threshold: students need to spend a great deal of time investigating the problem. H4 is not structured as a traditional academic paradigm. Students need to interact with as many beneficiaries within the problem domain to conduct comprehensive and deep discovery around the problem. This opportunity to grow their network and learn about a problem in an intimate way mimics the expectations students will encounter as entrepreneurs or as an entry level employee.
I have been uniquely positioned to see how this framework has positively impacted students, and have experienced their change in expectations and mindsets. But one thing has remained constant, and that is both the need and the desire of students to get out of classroom to immerse themselves in a real problem, developing tangible skills, techniques, and capabilities very few other courses offer. Get out of the classroom, grow your abilities to become empathetic and capable problem solvers.
Part of what makes the out of classroom experience of H4 is that these opportunities result in very real “pivots” in the problem space. In H4, pivots are critical junctures in the process in which students gather information from beneficiaries to the point where they realize there is a different direction to go in their problem domain. During the Fall 2022 semester during my Hacking for Homeland Security course, a student team working with the Transportation Security Administration was presented with a problem related to foreign language travelers experiencing difficulties in traversing the security process. One of their key pivots after dozens of discovery sessions is that the language barrier that non-English speakers experience in security is also felt across a spectrum of travelers. The National Technical Institute for the Deaf at the Rochester Institute of Technology is perhaps the most innovative college at the University; the student team explored how those in this community were impacted by airline travel, and quickly realized that more than just non-native English speakers could be positively impacted by their work. The empathetic learning opportunity offered to the student team helped them make a meaningful pivot that would positively impact a much broader community than they started with.
Last semester, I was able to send several students to meet with their sponsors, to get hands-on experience with their problem and solution domains, and to interact in meaningful ways with those individuals. These experiences proved to be pivotal in how the students perceived their work, the impact understanding the problem could have, as well as insights into where they can make impacts post-course and post-graduation. Building empathy, finding passion, and formulating deep insights into a problem domain not only serve the purpose of informing the problem sponsor, but to establish a process in which students feel empowered to make positive changes. One conversation that happens in passing during a site visit can change the trajectory of the process, and facilitates the understanding of “why” getting out of the classroom is so important. Why 100 interviews? Because the problem domain is increasingly broad as students discover the interconnected nature of their work, and the realities of complex interconnected systems, people, and processes.
Hacking for Diplomacy [Student Team] at Rochester Institute of Technology
As a best practice, the importance of getting out of the classroom demonstrates the type of learning university students are actively seeking but often not finding on campus. As I was doing my daily Inside Higher Ed browsing, a news item struck me. College students are bored. The article demonstrates the incredible opportunity at our fingertips as educators. The author, Johanna Alonso, made a very pivotal point in her work:
“Students cited one clear way professors could make them more interested in the material: by relating it more closely to their future careers. One-fourth of the students surveyed suggested that lessons with real-world applications, including those grounded in experiential learning, would improve their engagement.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, Beth McMurtrie at the Chronicle of Higher Education also recently published an article on student apathy in the classroom, and the implications we have to expect will impact our process in the classroom. Beth closes out her insightful piece with the following:
“Higher education is at a decisive moment. Will it continue down the path of credentialism and skill building, or will it embrace a more expansive view, one that engages an increasingly diverse, skeptical, scared — but also hopeful — generation?”
Isn’t this exactly what we experience in the classroom as educators? Students are expecting to be engaged in something that matters, prepares them for the future, and contributes to a body of knowledge. H4 accurately represents the tremendous opportunity educators and institutions have available to them. It gets students out of the classroom to experience the world around them, become engaged and excited about the work they do, and learn how their foundational theoretical education applies in the real world. This is the power of the H4 model. This is the power of students getting out of their comfort zones in the classroom to experience the world around them while working towards understanding the ecosystem around a problem, and what could be done to make an impact in that domain and beyond.
About the author:
Dr. James Santa is the Director of Curriculum at the Common Mission Project and adjunct teaching faculty within the Management Information Systems department at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) Saunders College of Business, the Department of Computing Security within the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, and the Albert J. Simone Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.