Archive for the 'The Future of Higher Education' Category

The most important job of a university teacher is designing the learning environment

Published on January 8, 2010 in Assessment & Grading, Teaching and Learning, The Future of Higher Education and What is Education?. 4 Comments Tags: ELI2010.

What does a teacher at the university level do? This is a question I’ve pondered for some time, as I’ve been following changes in higher education, for example, the growth in the for-profit sector, and the growth in on-line learning. There seems to be a growing trend for instructors to be assigned to teach courses they didn’t design; rather, the instructors are simply plugged into a course, given a syllabus and told which text to use. They may not even create the exams. This trend, which I find disturbing, is part of the process of commodifying teaching. The role of the instructor seems to be limited to presenting content, and often but not always, doing the grading. While I can see some advantages to this trend (for example, cost efficiencies, tighter rein on what is taught which is important for prerequisite courses) I wonder what it does to learning. My fear is that it reinforces the transactional notion of education as a collection of facts to be transferred to the student. This transfer is then stamped with the certification of a grade, credits earned, a degree, etc. But is it education?

When I was a new teacher, I saw my role as the provider of course content (through lectures), and the examiner to see how much content was assimilated by each student. I was supposed to be the content expert, even when I taught courses for the first time, or on subjects I had never studied! In graduate school when I was asked to teach a course whose subject I had no experience with, I was told: “You’ve studied microeconomics. This is just applied micro.” And I did it. In my first year as a full time faculty member, I was assigned to teach two courses on subjects I had never studied. That’s just part of what happens at a small liberal arts college, but it’s not ideal.

I now have a broader conception of (good) teaching. The most important job of the teacher is designing the learning environment for a course. Learning occurs when students interact with and make meaning of the course materials, as they interact with the instructor and other students. How, and to what extent, that interaction will occur is an integral part of the learning environment design process. When a student interacts with the course materials, he or she is confronted with new ideas and new ways of thinking. The instructor provides expert guidance about how to understand the new ideas and ways of thinking. Other students can similarly catalyze the learning process for their peers by asking questions the student didn’t think of (or verbalizing questions they were reluctant to ask), and by presenting new insights or by providing a more accessible explanation than the instructor did. A course lacking quality instructor interaction is merely self-study; there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not a university course and the learning process will be hampered.

Suppose you were plugged in to teach a course that you didn’t design. Suppose you believe that students learn best by writing about the subject, that writing requires students to think more deeply about the subject than simply reading the text does. Suppose that since writing is an integral part of your teaching, your practice is to give essay exams. Now suppose that the course you are assigned to teach emphasizes content coverage over content mastery. The administration wouldn’t articulate it that way, but that would be the reality for the average student. They simply say that you as instructor need to cover the content. And the content would be assessed by giving a common, departmentally designed multiple-choice exam. Would the teaching be different from if you had designed the course? Would the learning be different? I suspect that students who are brighter, or who learn more quickly would earn better grades in the course you didn’t design. But would the course be teaching students or merely sorting them? I’m trying (really!) to keep my biases out of this parable, but I do believe that ownership of the course design matters, that it has an impact on learning.

When an instructor designs a course, he or she is making decisions explicitly or implicitly about a number of dimensions which define the learning environment. These dimensions include:

To what extent will the instructor tell, coach or model for students?

How much of course ‘content’ will be pure content (i.e. facts or findings in the discipline) vs. knowledge creation or research?

Discovery: Are students expected to discover insights or will insights be provided to them by the instructor or text?

Meaning Making: Are students expected to make meaning or will they be told meaning?

Authenticity: How much of the course work is mere school work vs. real? (The difference is the extent to which people outside the course care about the results.)

Degree of Interaction: What degree of interaction is expected between students and faculty, between students and other students?

What is the source of the course materials: Professor vs. Text (secondary sources) vs. Readings/Literature (primary sources) vs. Student Creation? Also, who selects the course materials? (e.g. Professor chooses the text (or Dept chooses the text) or students find their own information.)

How will class time be used? Lecture from the text or instructor’s knowledge vs. Discussion vs. Demonstration/Laboratory/Learning by Doing vs. Student presentation of content (not for the sake of learning presentation skills but to instruct others.)

To what extent will out of class work be structured or unstructured?

Were any of these dimensions things you haven’t explicitly considered before? What other dimensions can you suggest?

The answers to all of these questions about course design should be based on the course objectives (nominal and actual). Course objectives might include:

Exposure to a subject/ability to be successful through the end of the course (i.e. to learn/remember enough to achieve a certain grade on a final exam, but without any real expectation of retaining or transferring to other contexts). Few teachers would articulate their goals this way, but many teach and assess this way, especially in general education courses.

Introduction to particular skills such as writing, speaking, computing, music performance, artistic performance.

Practice in and ability to demonstrate disciplinary analysis (e.g. thinking like an economist, analyzing a problem like an economist would)

After designing the learning environment, the next most important job of the teacher is to be a learning guide, that is, to facilitate each student’s learning process as an individual journey. This requires building (or at least being open to) a professional relationship with each student. The final responsibility for this journey is with the student, but he or she needs to believe that that teacher is willing, even eager to guide them. The teacher is, after all, on their own intellectual journey albeit further along than one’s students. Am I suggesting that the teacher meet regularly, face-to-face with each student? No. Rather, the teacher needs to make students believe that he or she welcomes and values the opportunity to discuss course material with them. Sometimes this interaction occurs face-to-face before or after class or during office hours. Sometimes it may be a phone conversation, or an email exchange or an IM chat. Most often, though, it occurs in class sessions when the teacher lectures or leads discussion, and when he or she responds to student questions. The critical factors are showing one’s own interest in and enthusiasm for the subject, and showing respect for what students have to say, even when it may reveal misunderstanding. Fundamentally, a good teacher is one who makes students believe that his or her goal is to help them get from where they are intellectually to as far as they can go over the course of the term.

How many students see university education this way? I suspect that students see ‘school’ as an aggregate thing. A degree is a series of courses. A course is a series of lectures (say), which a student is supposed to tune into, and learn at least some of it. The student sees themselves as part of a whole (the class), or buying into a whole (the ‘standard curriculum for the course’ or perhaps the teacher’s knowledge of the subject), rather than engaging in their own unique journey in which they create their own understanding of he material. School is like a ski lift. Hop on, ride a while, hop off. Students connect for as much as they can or want to, and they learn accordingly. Their success is defined by their relationship to the whole (did they ride the ski far enough up the mountain?), not their progress in their own learning (making their own way by hiking up the mountain).

Do faculty perceive their responsibility as teaching students or teaching courses? Are we taking steps to move closer to or further away from the idea of a personal educational journey when we commodify university courses? As long as a course lasts a full term, I think it’s the latter. If we could decompose courses as they currently exist into smaller modular pieces that could be combined in different ways, maybe then commodification of the modules would make sense.

Anyone planning to attend this year’s Education Learning Initiative annual meetings can hear more about these ideas at the session I’ll be presenting. I hope to see you there!

The Ideal Candidate

Published on February 8, 2009 in The Future of Higher Education and UMW Teaching Center. 4 Comments

Our job search closed last week with 26 applicants. The pool looks strong. It is encouraging to see that outsiders view UMW as a place where exciting work is being done vis a vis teaching and learning.

The next step for the search committee will be to review the candidates and select a short list to invite to campus. Before we make each of our choices, I think it important that we (the search committee) have a discussion about what we are looking for, what our values are. Think of it as calibrating our thinking before we make our choices. I have been on search committees where this was not done, and in some cases I had no sense of why people made the choices they did, which made the whole process less satisfactory than it could be. I believe strongly in working for consensus, rather than voting. We are, after all, supposed to be on the same team. The selection process shouldn’t be about winning or losing, but rather finding the best possible candidate. While consensus isn’t always possible, it is always worth working for.

Here is my thinking based on the position description. I ask only that my colleagues on the search committee keep an open mind about what I have to say and I will do the same for them.

My ideal candidate should be a leader, more than a manager or a technical expert. He or she should view their primary responsibility as building a community of thinkers interested in exploring teaching and learning through a scholarly perspective, colleagues who are willing to approach their teaching responsibilities with as much seriousness and care as they do their disciplinary scholarship. The candidate should be able to manage programs and should understand the technical aspects of in-class and web-based learning, but those aptitudes without leadership ability are not sufficient.

My ideal candidate should have experience as a disciplinary practitioner, consisting of a pattern or history of teaching and scholarship in their field. This characteristic is important for several reasons. First, the teaching center director is to be a faculty member, though one with substantial administrative responsibilities. Faculty members teach and do scholarship. ‘Staff’ members do not teach, and most do not do scholarship. This is not to diminish staff members, but to point out that they have a different set of responsibilities and a different culture.

Another reason the candidate should teach and do research is credibility. The Teaching Center is more than a place; indeed, at present there is no place! The TC Director will not be effective if he or she is perceived as an outside ‘expert’ whose job it is to fix what most faculty believe isn’t broken: their teaching. The Director must be seen as a fellow faculty member, a colleague from another department who has something to offer A staff member or pure administrator is unlikely to be perceived that way.

There is a great deal of innovative teaching and thinking about such at UMW, but most of us don’t know about all of what’s going on. How can we harness that? How can we build on what we’ve got? The TC is not about remediation. It’s a venue for sharing ideas and exploring opportunities. My ideal candidate would have a plan for catalyzing this.

The ideal candidate should be an excellent listener. They should be diplomatic. They should be respectful of teaching faculty. Teaching is perceived as a very personal thing, and at the same time, most teachers are apprehensive about letting others see what they do. Someone coming in saying, “You should be teaching this way, instead of the way you are doing!” is unlikely to be very successful. The ideal candidate should probably build relationships before they try to facilitate change.

The ideal candidate should understand the strengths and weaknesses of Web2.0 tools. The candidate should understand that many faculty don’t see those tools as having any relevance for their teaching, even while the candidate believes that they may. They should be able to appreciate and build on the work we’ve already done here at UMW with these tools.

The ideal candidate should understand the strengths and weaknesses of using a course management system, like Blackboard. They should understand that for many if not most faculty, a CMS is all the technology they think they need to employ in their teaching, and the candidate needs to respect that point of view. After all, all faculty were trained in their discipline but few were trained to teach and even fewer to teach with technology.

The ideal candidate should see technology as merely a tool to reach the end of more effective teaching and learning, not as an end in itself. They should see this all the while understanding that every teaching approach uses technology at some level, where technology is understood to mean tools and method. A blackboard and chalk is a technology. The candidate should rarely approach faculty to persuade them to adopt a new technology tool, instead they should approach them to help solve a teaching and learning problem or to make an existing pedagogical tack stronger and more effective.

This is my current thinking about our ideal candidate. I’m willing to be persuaded differently by others on the search committee, but only if they are willing to talk about what they think.

Postscript: A reader pointed out that Jerry Slezak might be blamed for these views when the author is me, Steve Greenlaw. Apologies to Jerry!

Knock down those silos!

Published on January 13, 2009 in TC Feed and The Future of Higher Education. 0 Comments

Want your students to see their undergraduate program as a coherent curriculum rather than an almost random set of courses? If so, you must read Gerald Graff’s article from Inside Higher Ed. The article is adapted from his presidential address at this past year’s MLA Meetings.

State of the University

Published on December 2, 2008 in The Future of Higher Education and UMW. 6 Comments

On November 17, Dr. Judy Hample, President of UMW since July, gave the first substantive speech of her tenure. A video recording of the speech can be viewed here.

I’ve been mulling over how to respond to the speech or whether to respond at all. I decided that it’s important to make public my response in hopes of promoting conversation on the direction of UMW.

I was hoping to be inspired by the speech to make UMW stronger and more distinctive than it currently is. I’m not sure how much of that hope was fulfilled.

Dr. Hample’s thesis was the following:

“My vision and dream is that UMW will become a premier, public, national liberal arts university.”

Fair enough, but how will we get there?

The first third of the speech, with a few nods to catch phrases like ‘fewer silos’ and ‘embracing a culture of excellence,’ emphasized administration, rather than academic leadership. Dr. Hample talked about greater efficiency and the need for tough decision-making. She stated that decisions would be made on the basis of an upcoming strategic planning initiative.

She claimed that UMW faces three challenges which prevent us from achieving her vision:

1. We need to make UMW student-centered.
2. We need to make UMW a more diverse, inclusive institution.
3. We need to realize the full potential of being a [real] university.

I admit to being taken aback by her first challenge. UMW is the most student-centered institution that I know. Classes are relatively small (though not as small as they used to be) and faculty know and work closely with their students. Unlike at large state universities, it is all but impossible for a student to remain just ‘a number’ at UMW.

It turns out that Dr. Hample meant the term ‘student-centered’ in a much different and narrower sense than I interpreted it. She used it to refer to the user-friendliness of business services like accessing financial records and registering for courses.

Dr. Hample made several remarks about campus life, saying alumni she talked with praise what they call the “Mary Washington experience.”

“I wonder if that is as strong today? I’ve sort of come to the conclusion that it might not be. The perception of too many of our students is that we have an unresponsive bureaucracy and administration.”

I have no quarrel with more user-friendly access to services, but her alumni story seems a non-sequitur to me. I doubt that the Mary Washington experience alumni describe is about business services; I imagine it is about close relationships they formed with other students and with faculty, something which is still very much a characteristic of UMW. And to be fair to administrative staff, my sense is that existing bureaucratic hurdles, and there are some, are largely the result of resource constraints as past leadership has moved funding out of administration to protect the instructional program.

Dr. Hample also said she wants to renovate dorms into “living and working environments” with places to study, socialize and get a cup of coffee after midnight. “These simple things that students want, need and are, frankly, long overdue,” she said. Yes, but these innovations come with a cost, and I don’t think UMW will ever win the battle of student amenities; nor do I think we should. Rather, if we are to be a truly distinctive institution, it will be on the basis of our academic programs.

Dr. Hample’s second challenge is to make UMW a more diverse, inclusive institution. This is, of course, worth doing and something we have struggled with as an institution for years. If she has a way of achieving this, I applaud her.

The third challenge, on which Dr. Hample spent the majority of her speech, is to make UMW realize the potential of becoming a university. She plans to accomplish this by creating two new schools: a College of Business and a College of Education, as well as developing selective graduate programs in the College of Arts & Sciences. These are worthwhile goals. Arguably, the College of Graduate and Professional Studies has failed to live up to its potential, and so reorganizing its programs along traditional disciplinary lines makes sense to me.

My concern comes in that Dr. Hample plans to finance these plans by belt-tightening and eliminating programs that don’t meet her standards.

“The choice comes down to this: What programs, what jobs are critical for insuring high quality education, high quality safety, high quality services, [and] high quality welfare for our students?”

I don’t doubt that these initiatives are worth doing, but in my view they won’t make UMW a premier, national institution. The College of William & Mary is such an institution. It has a total budget of roughly $220 million or more than three and a half times UMW’s total budget.

I don’t think it’s possible to build a premier public, national liberal arts institution on our current budget no matter how well we reallocate it. To achieve such a goal would require significant additional funding which Hample didn’t address.

What I fear is that without significant additional resources, the changes planned by Dr. Hample will only reduce what makes UMW distinctive, and turn us instead into a generic state university.

What should higher education be?

Published on August 13, 2008 in The Future of Higher Education and What is Education?. 5 Comments

First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn’t meet the goal. We will call the goal a “BA.”

So begins a thought-provoking op-ed piece in today’s Wall Street Journal. Is this an argument for or against liberal education?

On the Sadness of Higher Education

Published on May 27, 2008 in The Future of Higher Education. 0 Comments

Alan Charles Kors has a deeply thoughtful and provocative critique of higher education in the US today. I challenge you to read it. (If you can’t get to it via the link above, let me know and we’ll try something else.)

Edit: Gardner points out that this article is a reprint from a special issue of The New Criterion on education.

What is a student’s job?

Published on March 5, 2008 in Teaching and Learning, The Future of Higher Education and What is Education?. 0 Comments

Shannon has another stunning post that I really want to see students respond to. But I don’t just want the usual suspects. That’s why I’m going to send a challenge to my first year advising group and see if they’ll rise to the challenge.

Want a Second Opinion in Your Course Lectures?

Published on August 1, 2007 in Teaching and Learning and The Future of Higher Education. 0 Comments

Some time ago I blogged about self-directed college learning using the BBC’s In Our Time podcast series. Brian Lamb reports that you can go a step further with Openculture: Stanford Courses Available as Free Podcasts. How cool is that? At present the courses include:

* The Historical Jesus,

* Modern Theoretical Physics: Quantum Entanglement,

* Virgil’s Aenead: Anatomy of a Classic,

* Geography of World Cultures, and

* The Literature of Crisis

While I haven’t listened to any of these yet (just having discovered them today), they appear to be lectures covering the complete courses.

Time to warm up the iPod.

New Media Final Projects Session: A Comment

Published on August 1, 2007 in Teaching and Learning and The Future of Higher Education. 1 Comment

Jeff recently blogged on the final project in Gardner’s New Media course. Gardner’s discussion is here. Talk about taking it to another level–wow! I’m sorry I missed it.

Jeff talked about the energy generated by this project, both for the participants and him. But then he notes, apologetically:

The reality check is that not every day feels like this in this job. There are days when I would love to have 1/10 of the energy I felt tonight. There are conversations with colleagues or students that leave me drained, not inspired. There are days I plod along, rather than lead and innovate. I know that.

I don’t think any apology or qualification is necessary. As I noted here, we couldn’t stand having every day as energized as this one was. We only need them often enough to keep school “sticky”.

Published on May 10, 2007 in Teaching and Learning and The Future of Higher Education. 1 Comment

Gary Brown has a profound article in the May/June 2007 Educause Review If you care about the future of higher education, read it–it’s only two pages!

There’s a lot there, for example, observation:

The metaphor embedded in that nameâ€”course management systemâ€”is perhaps the best indicator that a tool with the potential to crack open educational space and time constraints now provides mostly powerful leverage for the reigning dominance of in-the-box thinkingâ€”thinking that fails to leverage the social and burgeoning technological aptitudes of learners, fails to harness the power of collaborative learning and peer critiques, systems thinking, and global awareness, and most important, fails to cultivate learnersâ€™ pro-social instincts that ultimately make learning interesting.

The part that most resonnated with me was the following:

It isnâ€™t just one course that matters; it is the sum of lessons and learning experiences inside and, more than ever, outside of the classroom, precisely where blogs, wikis, e-portfolios, and the Web have evolved to take us.

How can we help students see that an undergraduate degree is more than the sum of its requirements? How can we effectively reach students early–as first years, to help them embark on Gardner’s caravan of learning? How can we help students part way along see what they’ve accomplished and think about where they might be going?