In an article, “The Learning College:  Both Learner and Learning Centered,” Terry O’Banion says that 

It is not enough to make students feel good about the environment on the campus or the services they receive.  It is not enough to impress students with the dazzling performance of great lecturers.  It is not enough to provide all the latest in information technology.  If we cannot document expanded or improved learning—however defined and however measured—we cannot say with any assurance that learning has occurred.  And it is much more likely that we will be able to document learning when we place high value on learning-centered policies, programs, and practices and when we employ personnel who know how to create learning outcomes, learning options, and learning-centered activities. 

One premise is that students, generally speaking, are not experiencing the kind of learning that the university hopes they are, that employers require, that the society needs, and that eventually those students will wish they had gained during their college years. 

Another premise is that the present organizational operation produces the students it does because it is not fully learning-centered, but remains somewhat stuck in a teaching and professor-centered delivery of content with very inadequate, even distorting, means of assessing what kinds of learning are occurring, including any higher-order thinking.  Thus, other that getting grades and credits, do we genuinely know if our students are learning in significant and enduring ways beyond absorption/memorization of content?  Based upon the present approach and reward system, authentic assessment of integrated, contextual competency is a hit and miss thing, depending upon those teachers who have risked learning about how people learn and if their own students are learning what they have assumed and wanted them to learn. 

A third premise is that the time for tinkering is past and is too incomplete an approach to result in a transformed organization and academic culture.  Higher education, nationally and internationally, is in the beginnings of a paradigm shift from teaching to learning.  Teaching-centered colleges will continue doing what they do and will continue producing graduates not well enough equipped for their projected careers and for making the greatest contributions to their societies.  And they will not be as prepared as possible for life-long learning that will improve the quality and scope of their personal lives. 

As by-products of such a focus on learning, issues of student and faculty retention are addressed (not by addressing this or that symptom, but by a systemic, organizational shift).  And the goal of an engaged university becomes much more genuine when the external engagements with the region, government agencies and private business, is matched by the internal engagement of all employees in the learning process itself.  In other words, when students are fully engaged in the Learning University, that university acquires its soul.  It is not just about its buildings, expanded numbers of students, new programs, but about its very spiritual essence, the learning experiences and outcomes of and by its students.   

The present time may be a compellingly opportune time (kairos) for colleges and universities for such a transformation of teaching, learning, scholarship, thinking, and organizational attitudes.  The best path to become a community that attracts good students, faculty, administrators and staff because of its dynamic, way-making, path-finding approach to teaching and learning, is for it to make a conscious, concerted and persevering commitment to become a Learning University.  Beyond institutional jargon and pedagogical shibboleths, including the very words like “engaged,” “active,” and even “learning-centered,” to make a real beginning (as Plato said) is to have done half the work.  A paradoxical vision quest:                                         

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.                                                      
(T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets) 

It would make for a good story to see the familiar and habitual as strange and to risk what needs to be risked in order for the story to unfold.