By Doug Ward

Women teach a sizable majority of online courses at KU, even though men make up a sizable majority of the university’s faculty.

Data provided by Laura Diede, the associate director at the Center for Online and Distance Learning, shows that of 171 online courses that CODL worked with in the 2014-15 school year, 60 percent were taught by women.

That’s especially interesting when you consider that of 1,649 faculty members on the Lawrence campus that fiscal year, only 42 percent were women.

I’ve not been able to find comparable data for online courses nationally, so I have no way to know whether the dominance of women in online teaching is unusual or not. In general, faculty members have been highly skeptical of online courses. In a recent survey by Inside HigherEd, more than half of faculty members said they didn’t think online courses could achieve the same level of learning as in-person classes. That attitude makes many long-time faculty members resistant to, if not hostile toward, online teaching.

Still, Diede and I still puzzled over the high percentage of women teaching online courses at KU. We came up with three possibilities:

• Women are more willing than men to try new approaches to teaching.
• Women prefer the flexibility that online teaching provides.
• Men, who are more likely to have tenure, are more likely to refuse to teach online courses.

That last possibility seems the most likely, although there may be factors we hadn’t thought about. Whatever the case, it will be interesting to see whether this trend grows as the number of online courses grows.

Female instructors score slightly higher in online course evaluations

The data that Diede provided about online courses also showed another interesting facet of online teaching at KU: Female instructors score slightly higher than their male counterparts on student evaluations.

This runs counter to a widely publicized recent study (and widespread perceptions) that argued that student evaluations are inherently biased against female instructors. I’m not going to wade into that debate here other than to say that student evaluations of teaching are problematic on many levels. The reliance on them as the sole measure of teaching quality benefits no one.

Fear and loathing about good teachers

The observation below is from Richard M. Felder, a professor emeritus at North Carolina State University. It was reprinted this week on Tomorrow’s Professor. It’s something I wonder about frequently and have talked about repeatedly with colleagues who value high-quality teaching:

“Some departments I know, including mine, have in the past hired faculty members who were exciting and innovative teachers and who didn’t do research. Some departments I know, again including mine, have hired former professionals with decades of practical experience who also didn’t do research. Both groups of faculty members did beautifully, teaching core courses brilliantly and serving as supportive advisors, mentors, and role models to the undergraduates who planned to go into business or industry after graduation. Professors like that are the ones students remember fondly years later, and endow scholarships and student lounges and sometimes buildings in honor of. And yet the thought of bringing one or two of them into a 20-person department faculty instead of hiring yet another research scholar who looks pretty much like the other 18 or 19 already there is unthinkable to many administrators and professors. Why is that?”

Doug Ward is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

Two recent education conferences I attended raised similar questions about developing and sustaining high-quality teaching. Things like:

• How do we measure the success of course transformation?
• How can we get buy-in from colleagues?
• How do we gain the support of department chairs and administrators?
• How do we share ideas among campuses?
• How do we sustain and grow communities around the idea of improving teaching?

That last question was central to both conferences, one at KU and one at the University of California, Davis.

The KU conference in late January helped launch a new CTE-led initiative called Trestle, or Transforming Education, Stimulating Teaching and Learning Excellence. CTE’s director, Andrea Greenhoot, leads the project, which is financed by a $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The goal is to spread the use of evidence-based teaching methods in science, engineering, technology, and math courses across several participating universities.

The conference at UC Davis was called TEA (There was a link, but it does not exist anymore), or Tools for Evidence-based Action. Its focus was on documenting teaching, learning, and curricula, specifically through digital tools that provide data visualizations of student performance and classroom activities.

At both conferences, faculty members shared successes and failures in teaching, and talked candidly about the challenges we face in bringing more people into the fold. By building a community of engaged teachers, we hope to share our experiences in and out of the classroom, improve our approaches to teaching, emphasize the importance of learning, and shape our classes with evidence-based, learner-centered approaches.

Those are buzzwords, yes, but in essence they mean we need to reflect on our teaching and approach it in measured, meaningful ways. By building community, we can all find ways of doing that.

Submit a proposal for our first Teaching Slam

As a way to expand our community of engaged teachers, we are putting on a Teaching Slam.

A Teaching Slam is a fast-paced session in which speakers from many disciplines around KU share their best teaching tips, assessment ideas, or class activities. Instructors in all disciplines are welcome to submit proposals, and we’ll choose the best for presentation on Friday, March 25 from 2 to 3:30 p.m.

We are looking for proposals for two types of presentations:

• Six + Six. You will have six minutes and six slides to share a useful class activity, an assessment idea, or a teaching tip.
• Class Demo. You will have 10 to 15 minutes to lead your colleagues (who will act as your class) through a hands-on classroom activity. These sessions must be interactive.

Both types of presenters must provide a handout to help others use the activity immediately.

Deadline for proposals is noon Friday, March 4. We’ll choose the best and let everyone know the results by early the following week.

Interested? Submit a proposal and join our community.

Financing public higher education has grown increasingly challenging, with state funding for research universities declining by an average of 28 percent since 2003. What were once state-supported institutions have in many cases become quasi-private institutions to which states provide some money but still want full control.

To shore up their budgets, state colleges and universities have increased the proportion of out-of-state and international students, who pay higher rates of tuition. In fact, 43 state flagship universities had fewer in-state students in their freshman class in 2014 than they did in 2004. And out-of-state students made up more than half of the freshman class at 10 of those institutions, the Washington Post reports.

Alabama reported the biggest swing from in-state to out-of-state recruits, with out-of-state students now making up 64 percent of the freshman class. The Post says the percentage of in-state students in the freshman class has dropped by more than 20 points at Missouri, South Carolina, Oregon, Arkansas, University of California-Berkeley, Idaho State, and UCLA. Michigan State, Ohio State, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky and Washington reported declines of more than 15 percentage points.

The University of Kansas had a slight increase in the percentage of out-of-state freshman between 2004 and 2014. In 2004, 29 percent of incoming freshmen were from out of state, according to university statistics. By 2014, that was about 33 percent. I say “about” because the Post’s analysis says that out-of-state students made of 37 percent of the freshman class of 2014, and federal data (which is based on university reports) says that 34 percent were from out of state.

10 ways to fail when creating an online program

Joshua Kim of Dartmouth offers an excellent list of potential pitfalls in the development of online programs.  All are worth a look, but two stood out to me, largely because they apply to all courses and degrees, online or not.

• If You Don’t Put Student Learning At the Heart of Your Online Program, You Will Fail
• If You Don’t View the Creation Of Your Online Program As A Disciplined Experiment, You Will Fail

You’ll find the full list of 10 at Inside Higher Ed.

What is the future of higher education?

The Atlantic asked seven leaders from various areas of higher education to list reasons for hope and reasons for despair in 2016. Their responses run the gamut from the challenges of technology to the rising cost of college to the growing importance of creativity and ingenuity. A response from the author William Deresiewicz struck me as particularly timely and cogent.

Asked about his biggest concern in higher education, he replied:

The continued dominance of a narrowly “practical” approach at all levels. This is the attitude that says that the exclusive purpose of education is to prepare workers for the labor force. It shows up, among other places, in the overwhelming focus on math and reading in K-12 and the fetishization of STEM fields and universal disparagement of the liberal arts in college. It also underlies the continuing privatization of public education through the promotion of charter schools and other aspects of the “reform” agenda as well as the ongoing defunding of state universities—the idea being that if education serves the purposes of the market, it should be under the control of the market.

Deresiewicz said he saw “a gathering resistance to this mentality,” though, adding: “Students (and their parents) are getting tired of being treated like revenue streams and exploitable resources. But whether we will gather sufficient political strength to oust the entrenched interests on the other side is still a very open question.”

KU’s chancellor, Bernadette Gray-Little, was among the leaders who provided responses to The Atlantic. She offered measured, thoughtful responses, saying:

While I don’t find much that causes me to despair, I do have concerns about the way we invest in our future. If public funding for universities continues to decline, we will need to find different ways to support the way we educate our future leaders and the way we discover new things in our country. So many of our great societal and technological advances happen because of universities, and we need to make sure to protect these efforts from harm.

Asked about a reason for hope, she replied:

I am inspired by the enthusiasm and intellectual capacity of our next generation of leaders. I interact with students each day, which is a great joy. Our students are intellectually curious, and they pursue interesting goals. They’re building faster race cars and more sustainable buildings. They’re looking for cures to the latest diseases. They’re already finding ways to do all these things better than their elders. And they’re also ensuring that we stay focused on issues like economic disparity and racial inequity. The problems of our society will not be getting any easier during the next 50 years, but I’m glad we will have the young people I engage with today to help try to solve them.

Briefly …

Kenneth Bernstein, a recently retired high school teacher, warns college instructors that even advanced placement classes have done little to help the critical thinking of college-bound students. … The Chronicle of Higher Education and Education Week have both make successful and profitable shifts to digital as their print subscriptions have declined, Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute writes. … The entertainment industry has entered the MOOC business in the form of MasterClass, which sells online courses with the likes of Kevin Spacey and Dustin Hoffman (acting), Serena Williams (tennis) and Usher (performing) for $90 each. The creator of MasterClass, New Enterprise Associates, recently raised $15 million in capital from, among others, Robert Downey Jr. and Usher, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Asked to describe the things that help them learn, students provide a remarkably consistent list:

• Engagement
• Interaction
• Clarity
• Openness
• Accessibility
• A sense of belonging

That’s hardly a complete list, but those ideas came up again and again during a focus group at KU’s recent Student Learning Symposium. Not surprisingly, those same components come up again and again in research on learning.

The focus group at the learning symposium consisted of three undergraduate and three graduate students who had agreed to share their experiences at a round-table discussion. They were open and candid in their assessment of their own learning and of the learning they see in classes they help with. These categories overlap, but they provide a good sense of what students say is important.

Engagement

One of the undergraduates, who also works as a TA for a biology class, described students’ mindset about their classes like this: “Is there a reason for being there?” That is, will attending class help them do better on quizzes, exams, papers, and other assignments? Or will the instructor just read from slides that are later posted online? When in-class work engages students and clearly makes a difference in their performance, “now there’s a reason to be there,” students said.

Openness

Many students are anxious and apprehensive at the beginning of a term, and a sullen or seemingly angry professor will push them away with just a look. Professors who do nothing except lecture can seem standoffish, students said, and students don’t know how those professors will react if students try to talk with them.

On the other hand, instructors who are approachable make a big difference in classes, students say. Even in big classes, some instructors walk around the room, talk with students and answer questions. It’s impossible to get to know students well in big classes, but setting a positive tone can make students feel that they belong and want to be involved in a class, students said.

Clarity

Too many instructors teach as if students are experts rather than beginners, students said. Instructors need to think more from students’ perspective and try to remember what it’s like to work with new material for the first time. Professors simply must get better at explaining, students said.

Relatedly, students say are willing to go along with experimentation in format, assignments, and other elements of a class. The key is communication. “As long as instructors explain, students will be up for that,” one undergraduate said.

Both undergraduate and graduate students said that disciplinary programs needed to do a better job of helping students see the bigger picture of a program or a degree. Students need to “understand that there’s a future to all this information,” one student said. Graduate students said departments also needed to do a better job of integrating coursework with research.

Sense of belonging

The first semester at a new university can be painful, and successfully negotiating the freshman jitters makes a huge difference in whether students will stay the year or eventually graduate. Universities have recognized that and use programs like First-Year Experience to reach out to freshmen and help them maneuver through the educational maze.

Graduate students said they experienced much the same pain, loneliness, and disorientation as undergraduates. Unfortunately, they said, the university doesn’t do much to help them get situated. They recommended orientation sessions for graduate students, a better means of acquiring coping and learning strategies from peers, and better communication from departments. Graduate school is “so much more rigorous and so much harder,” one student said, and the university needs to do a better job of helping students cope.

Interaction

Interaction among students, and between instructor and students makes class much more meaningful, students said, lamenting about classes where they are simply “talked at.” One undergraduate said, “Lecture makes me wonder why I am coming to class to have you read slides to me.”

A Ph.D. student in the sciences echoed that sentiment. Too many graduate courses in STEM fields involve little but lecture, he said. He came to graduate school expecting to delve into critical analysis of problems and pursuit of new ideas. Instead, he found a frustrating emphasis on delivery of information. Graduate students in STEM fields are discouraged from discussion, he said, even though “interaction makes or breaks a class.”

Training for TAs

Graduate students at the learning symposium said the university needed to do a better job of helping them learn to teach effectively, and to provide incentives for graduate assistants to teach well. Many teaching assistants, especially those in the sciences, are told to spend as little time as possible on teaching, students said. (We’ve heard the same lament from students at CTE events for years.)

Gradate programs should be designed so that doctoral students learn to be well-rounded faculty members, not just research machines, students said. They called for more teaching workshops and other training for TAs. “A lot of grad students are doing only research,” one student said. “Once they graduate, they will be thrown into teaching with no experience.” He added, “This narrow focus is hurting many grad students.”

Education changes people.

Those of us who teach know that well. We see students transform during their degrees, and sometimes during a semester. Their skills improve. Their thinking deepens. Their confidence blossoms.

As it changes minds, though, education also changes the relationships students have with family and friends, adding stress to students’ lives from an unexpected source. Students generally learn to cope with those changes, but they often aren’t sure how to broach the subject with family and friends. They don’t want to anger others, or make them feel diminished. But they also don’t want to hold themselves back.

That personal aspect of learning is just one of many issues that students have brought up during focus groups I’ve led on learning, engagement, and student motivation over the past two years. I wrote recently about what students say helps them learn. Students openly admit that they struggle with many aspects of higher education, though. If we are willing to listen, they will tell us what they think we need to know.

What students want faculty to know

Some of students’ best experiences in college come from meaningful discussions with professors who have expertise in a particular field or who simply take time to learn who they are and help them find their way. Students rave about professors who “made me feel comfortable and made time for me.”

On the other hand, students say that professors who come across as unapproachable, condescending, and inflexible diminish the value of classes, majors, and degrees. Some of those professors simply won’t make time for students, though students recognize the challenge that large classes bring. Big lectures make students feel lost and anonymous, they say, and professors in those classes often have a hard time connecting to students.

Other obligations. Remember that students are taking more than your class. They also have obligations at work, family and organizations. Also remind students about office hours. Yes, they know about office hours, they say, but a reminder now and then helps.

Pointless classes. Far too many classes seem pointless, students say. They give a variety of reasons for that:

• Some classes lack any relation to students’ goals or interests, and faculty members fail to explain the point of the class. All too often, the same professors who challenge colleagues to explain the “so what?” of research don’t ask the same question about the courses they teach. “I’m at point where I know what I want to do,” one student said. “I value the time and money I put into a class.”
• Some courses within a major are too basic, students say. They want to be challenged, and some assignments seem like little more than busy work.
• Some faculty members come across as pretentious and diminish the subject matter of their classes. They may think their class covers the most important topic in the world, students say, but simply saying that doesn’t make it so.

Professors also need to be clearer about the expectations of classes, students say. Some classes require more independent learning; others require students to follow specific guidelines. Students can work with either system, they say. They just need clear expectations.

What students want administrators to know

College costs too much. This is both a political and institutional issue, especially at a state university. Students understand the politics of state reductions in university financing and the corresponding rise in tuition. They also want a strong, vibrant university. Yet most have jobs to help pay college costs, they say, and some work 20 to 35 hours a week.

Advising is uneven. Most students rave about their advisors, especially the ones in their majors. They have harsh words for the general advising system, though. “For every good comment I’ve heard about general advisors, I’ve heard three bad ones,” one student said. Friends had been told to take classes they didn’t need, delaying graduation. One mentioned a friend who was told at freshman orientation that he had five minutes to figure out his first schedule. Most certainly, this isn’t a typical experience. Stories like these stand out in students’ minds, though, and cast a shadow on the advising system. Advisors and faculty members also need to keep an open mind, students say. Students change their minds about majors and classes as they learn more about themselves and their interests, and just learn more in general.

Smaller classes make a difference. I’ve heard this over and over from students, and pedagogical research backs it up. Those least equipped to handle large lecture classes are beginning students, yet those are the very students required to enroll in those classes. Many instructors have worked to overcome the weakness of large classes with in-class group work and two-stage exams, techniques that help shrink the class and improve student learning. Students at the most recent learning symposium spoke about the many benefits of that. Unfortunately, active learning in large classes is still rare.

Students generally rave about first-year seminars, saying that those types of courses help them make connections and help them acclimate to university learning. Some suggest a broader requirement for an orientation-type course that focuses on how to learn and how to structure your life in college.

Make classes more transparent. Students say they want to be able to make more informed decisions about the classes they take. Some want evaluations of courses and professors made public. They would take the evaluation system more seriously, they said, if they saw the results and knew their comments could help future students. They see the current system as opaque and don’t see that their evaluations matter much. That’s one reason they turn to sources like RateMyProfessor.com. They understand the downside of that sort of ratings system – that students who have had really good or really bad experiences are most likely to post – but they say the university has offered them no other options.

What students want families and friends to know

Students are often surprised by how education changes their relationships with friends and family members, they said. That’s especially true with first-generation college students, whose burgeoning independence, broadening views of the world, and distance from home make them wonder what to talk about with family and old friends. Those who had once anchored their lives seem to drift away as their lives change, they form new friendships, and they begin to understand better who they are.

As you can imagine, that unmooring generates stress. Students still care about family and friends back home, but they are torn between a new life and an old life. Family members and longtime friends, they say, sometimes don’t seem to value the changes the students are undergoing. Those changing relationships add to the stress students feel, and that stress can be enormous. A recent study of American freshmen found that a third felt overwhelmed by all the things they had to do in college.

None of this is particularly surprising, but it serves as a good reminder about the complexities of higher education. Students some to college to learn, and yet learning involves a tangle of interrelated components. Students at one focus group were especially vocal about something they wanted faculty members to keep in mind:

We are people, too.

Doug Ward is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

Among academics, online education inspires about as much enthusiasm as a raft sale on a cruise ship.

That’s unfortunate, given that higher education’s cruise ship has a hull full of leaks and has been taking on water for years.

The latest evidence of academic disdain for online education comes from the Online Report Card, which is sponsored by the Online Learning Consortium and other organizations (There was a link, but the page does not exist anymore), and has been published yearly since 2003. It is based on surveys conducted by Babson Survey Research Group in Fall 2015.

In that survey, only 29.1 percent of chief academic officers said their faculty viewed online education as valuable and legitimate. That’s a slight increase from the year before but a slight decrease from 2004. Granted the drop was only about a point and a half, but I was still surprised that faculty support for online education had declined over the past decade.

Less than two-thirds of those administrators say online education is crucial to their institutions’ long-term strategies. That is a drop from 2014, though considerably above 2002, when less than 50 percent of administrators saw online as an important option.

The report said that 28 percent of students were taking at least one online course, and the vast majority of those students were at public universities. The report’s authors write: “It appears that many traditional universities are using online courses to meet demand from residential students, address classroom space shortages, provide for flexible scheduling, and/or provide extra sections.”

Those are all logical, important reasons to pursue online education, yet some universities see their future as solely an in-person enterprise. That may make sense at some level, but failure to experiment with online learning now will only make it more difficult later.

Online learning isn’t a salvation for higher education. In fact, many of us who create and teach online courses see in-person learning as a better option for most students in most courses. Universities need online courses in their repertoire, though. Online courses provide flexible learning options to students, especially during summers and breaks. That flexibility offers a means for keeping students on track toward graduation, and gives them the option of pursuing jobs, internships, and study abroad. Online courses also help faculty and staff members develop expertise in creating materials for hybrid and flipped classes. And perhaps most important, they provide a means for exploring news ways to help students learn.

That’s one reason that the continued resistance to online education is so troubling. It is symptomatic of a recalcitrant attitude toward change. We can deny the holes in the hull all we want, but denial won’t stop the leaks.

What department chairs should say

Maryellen Weimer offers a wonderful wish list of things she wishes department chairs would say about teaching. It includes areas like introducing new faculty to teaching, overusing summative evaluation of teaching, and developing a reward system for innovative teaching.

Here’s one of the favorite wanna-be conversation starters she offers:

[pullquote]“We need to be having more substantive conversations about teaching and learning in our department meetings. We talk about course content, schedules, and what we’re offering next semester but rarely about our teaching and its impact on student learning. What do you think about circulating a short article or article excerpt before some of our meetings and then spending 30 minutes talking about it? Could you recommend some readings?”[/pullquote]

Briefly …

The Scout Report, a newsletter of curated web resources, recently released an excellent special issue on copyright and intellectual property. … The Hechinger Report looks into the 12-hours-as-full-time culture that keeps many students from graduating from college in four years. … Karin Forssell of Stanford suggests that talking about integrating tools rather than technology into teaching “frees teachers from worrying about the intimidation, complication and distraction that ‘technology’ can bring.”

Doug Ward is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

Innovation, meet frustration.

I’ve written frequently about how the lack of a reward system hampers (if not quashes) attempts to improve teaching and learning, especially at research universities.  A new survey only reinforces that short-sighted approach.

The survey was conducted by the consulting and research firm Ithaka S+R and involved a random sample of faculty members at U.S. universities in 2015. Ithaka has conducted the survey every three years since 2000.

The survey did offer reason for optimism: More than 60 percent of faculty members said they would like to use digital technology and new pedagogies to improve their teaching. The problem: Only 35 percent said their universities recognized or rewarded faculty for innovations in teaching.

The upshot: Most courses at most universities will remain mired in the past, failing to move beyond a curricular approach that emphasizes delivery and regurgitation of information over critical thinking, application, and adaptability. Only a small number of faculty members will be willing to risk the challenge of pedagogical innovation.

That’s especially unfortunate given another of the survey’s findings: More than 60 percent of faculty members in the humanities say that undergraduates do a poor job of finding and evaluating scholarly information. Those in the social sciences, sciences and medical fields are slightly more positive, but overall 54 percent of faculty members find students’ research skills lacking.

The United States has a larger number of colleges and universities relative to overall population than any other country. That provides more opportunities for more students, but it has also made it difficult for universities to distinguish themselves from one another. Research universities, especially, could do that by elevating the importance of teaching. Not only could students learn from top researchers and professionals, but they could learn in creative and innovative ways that would benefit them in the long run.

Or they could continue along the current path where teaching is treated as an afterthought, where one university pretty much looks like all universities, and where pedagogical innovation continually meets frustration.

Other findings from the survey:

• Nearly 40 percent of faculty said open access materials were important to their teaching, but 25 percent said those types of resources were hard to find.
• The percentage of faculty members looking to libraries to help undergraduates improve their research skills grew by 15 to 20 points between 2012 and 2015. The jump was largest among scientists.
• The percentage of faculty who start their research at a physical library has dropped to nearly zero, though humanists are more likely than other disciplines to start at a library. Most start with either a general search engine or a specific database. A slightly smaller percentage start with a library catalog.

Financial challenges and hard questions

Recent statistics cast stark relief on the financial challenges that public colleges and universities face.

Between 1991 and 2008, enrollment at public colleges and universities grew 23 percent, although state support for those institutions rose only 13 percent. By 2010, enrollment rose an additional 8 percent while state support fell by 7 percent.

The statistics come from an analysis of federal data by Steven Brint and Charles Clotfelter. Their article “U.S. Higher Education Effectiveness” was published this month in the Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences.

That declining state support has led to a growing reliance on part-time instructors. Non-tenure-track faculty now make up 37 percent of college and university faculty, up from 19 percent in 1970. Just as disturbing, the growth in spending on instruction has lagged that on student services and research. Actually, “lagged” isn’t quite the right word. Colleges and universities devoted two and a half times as much additional money to research (2.6 percent growth) as they did to teaching (1.1 percent), and nearly twice as much (2.2 percent) to student services.

That’s not bad on its own, but it is symbolic of how far too many universities view teaching. (See above.)

Another study, from an initiative of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, says that public flagship universities must adopt new financial models given the declining support from states. It called for states to increase their financing of public universities but said universities must reduce costs, seek out additional forms of revenue, and form new public-private partnerships.

In reviewing the state of public higher education, it asks some hard questions: “Is public higher education truly open to the public? Can high school graduates afford to attend their state’s postsecondary institutions?”

Those are pertinent questions given that the number of Americans with high-quality postsecondary credentials lags the needs of a digital-age economy.

One last question from the American Academy study should burn in the minds of all of us in academia: If students can afford to attend college, “what kind of education can they expect to receive?”

The future of higher education depends on how we answer that.

Briefly …

Faculty Focus offers a useful list of ways to deepen student learning. … A study of Chicago high schools found that students did considerably better in face-to-face courses than in similar courses online, NPR reports. … Schools that increasingly rely on digital resources also open themselves to risks of data breaches, PBS reports.

Doug Ward is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

The spread of evidence-based teaching practices highlights a growing paradox: Even as instructors work to evaluate student learning in creative, multidimensional ways, they themselves are generally judged only through student evaluations.

Students should have a voice. As Stephen Benton and William Cashin write in a broad review of research, student evaluations can help faculty members improve their courses and help administrators spot potential problems in the classroom.

The drawback is that too many departments use only student evaluations to judge the effectiveness of instructors, even as they submit faculty research through a multilayered evaluation process internally and externally. Student evaluations are the only university-mandated form of gauging instructors’ teaching, and many departments measure faculty members against a department mean. Those above the mean are generally viewed favorably and those below the mean are seen as a problem. That approach fails to account for the weaknesses in evaluations. For instance, Benton and Cashin and others have found:

• Students tend to give higher scores to instructors in classes they are motivated to take, and in which they do well.
• Instructors who teach large courses and entry-level courses tend to receive lower evaluations than those who teach smaller numbers of students and upper-level courses.
• Evaluation scores tend to be higher in some disciplines (especially humanities) than in others (like STEM).
• Evaluation scores sometimes drop in the first few semesters of a course redesigned for active learning.
• Students have little experience in judging their own learning. As the Stanford professor Carl Wieman writes: “It is impossible for a student (or anyone else) to judge the effectiveness of an instructional practice except by comparing it with others that they have already experienced.”
• Overemphasis on student evaluations often generates cynicism among faculty members about administrators’ belief in the importance of high-quality teaching.

Looked at through that lens, we have not only a need but an obligation to move beyond student evaluations in gauging the effectiveness of teaching. We simply must add dimension and nuance to the process, much as we already do with evaluation of research.

So how do we do that?

At CTE, we have developed a rubric to help departments integrate information from faculty members, peers, and students. Student evaluations are a part of the mix, but only a part. Rather, we have tried to help departments draw on the many facets of teaching into a format that provides a richer, fairer evaluation of instructor effectiveness without adding onerous time burdens to evaluators.

For the most part, this approach uses the types of materials that faculty members already submit and that departments gather independently: syllabi and course schedules; teaching statements; readings, worksheets and other course materials; assignments, projects, test results and other evidence of student learning; faculty reflections on student learning; peer evaluations from team teaching and class visits; and formal discussions about the faculty member’s approach to teaching.

Departments then use the rubric to evaluate that body of work, rewarding faculty members who engage in such approaches as:

• experimenting with innovative teaching techniques
• aligning course content with learning goals
• making effective use of class time
• using research-based teaching practices
• engaging students in hands-on learning rather than simply delivering information to them
• revising course content and design based on evidence and reflection
• mentoring students, and providing evidence of student learning
• sharing their work through presentations, scholarship, committee work and other venues

Departments can easily adapt the rubric to fit particular disciplinary expectations and to weight areas most meaningful to their discipline. We have already received feedback from many faculty members around the university. We’ve also asked a few departments to test the rubric as they evaluate faculty members for promotion and tenure, third-year review, and post-tenure review, and we plan to test it more broadly in the fall.

We will continue to refine the rubric based on the feedback we receive. Like teaching itself, it will be a constant work in progress. We see it as an important step toward making innovative teaching more visible, though, and toward making teaching a more credible and meaningful part of the promotion and tenure process. If you’d like to be part of that, let us know.

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This article also appears in Teaching Matters, a publication of the Center for Teaching Excellence.

Doug Ward is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

Hundreds of start-ups and established companies promoted their ideas and educational technology products at the ASU GSV Summit last week in San Diego. Many were quite good, even if they didn’t live up to the magic that some of them promised.

I’ll write more later about some of the ideas that emerged from the summit, a gathering of technology companies, investors, and educators. For now, though, I’d like to highlight some of the technologies that stood out as having the most potential. This is anything but a comprehensive list. Rather, it reflects my interests as a university professor, as someone who works to improve teaching and learning, as someone who thinks and writes about the future of higher education.

I have not tried any of these products extensively, and I am not endorsing any of them. Rather, they stood out as addressing real issues in education or seemed to have the potential to influence higher education in some way.

Mursion

What it does

Mursion is a training simulator that allows people to interact with on-screen characters. The interactions are realistic and can be tailored to many different scenarios. It works through algorithms but also through a person who acts a bit like a virtual puppeteer, adding real-life touches to the interactions.

Why it’s worth a look

This has great potential for things like diversity training (confronting racially charged scenarios) and teacher training (helping instructors learn to deal with controversial topics in the classroom). The company says that people who have used it engage with the characters much more frankly than they would real-life actors. I believe that based on the demo I saw. The cost is $125 an hour.

Versal

What it does

Versal is a platform for creating visually attractive and easy-to-follow online lessons. It has a drag-and-drop interface, and it ties into Blackboard, OneDrive and many other popular learning management systems and online tools, including Google. Widgets within the platform allow easy integration of material from about any online site.

Why it’s worth a look

As we create more hybrid and online courses, we need a way to provide visually appealing, interactive content. Versal looks as if it can do that through an easy-to-use interface. Its ability to embed content in learning management systems makes it especially appealing. A $50 faculty account allows a single user to create and embed course material. A school- or university-wide account starts at $7 per user.

SignalVine

What it does

SignalVine provides a two-way text messaging system for students. University staff members work through a computer dashboard to send personalized messages to students. Students can respond as well as ask questions and ask for help. The system provides data on students and messages.

Why it’s worth a look

Universities need to do a better job of reaching students on mobile devices. Students respond to and act on text messages far more than they do to email. (I’ve found that in my use of Remind in my classes.) The company founder made a compelling case that students tune out blanket text messages, as well. This could become a valuable tool for reaching all students but primarily for connecting with students we are concerned about losing. The cost is 50 cents to $1 per student per year. The company was a finalist for the Lumina Foundation Social Innovation Prize at ASU GSV.

Citelighter (There was a link, but the page no longer exists)

What it does

Citelighter is an online environment that provides a scaffolded approach to writing. Instructors drag and drop elements onto a board that students then use it to move step-by-step through writing assignments. It has built-in rubrics that provide data about each student.

Why it’s worth a look

Weak student writing is one of the biggest challenges many instructors face. Citelighter allows instructors to create structural guides for writing assignments, provide feedback quickly and easily through rubrics, and gather data about student performance. It is one of many companies with similar products aimed at helping students improve their writing and arguments, including Rationale, NoRedInk, Peerceptive, and EssayBuilder.

LTG Exam Prep (There was a link, but the page no longer exists)

What it does

The company creates mobile apps that allow students to study for the SAT, GMAT and other exams.

Why it’s worth a look

The company is using data from its apps to match students with universities, and allowing universities to reach out to students through the app. I don’t see this as a university teaching app but rather something that administrators need to pay attention to as students make their college choices. The company was one of three winners of the Venture Award at ASU GSV.

Doug Ward is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

The ASU GSV Summit bills itself as a gathering of entrepreneurs, policymakers, business leaders and educators who want “to create partnerships, explore solutions, and shape the future of learning.”

That sort of described the event, which was held last week in San Diego. Yes, it was possible to find a few real discussions about education, but only a few. Doug Lederman of Inside HigherEd estimated that 10 percent of the 3,500 attendees came from colleges and universities, though many of those came from Arizona State, which is the “ASU” in the summit name. (GSV is a Silicon Valley investment firm.)

Many of the sessions that addressed higher education took a critical, if not condescending, tone toward colleges and universities. Many speakers criticized educators for being slow to adopt technology (I agree) and failing to prepare students for high-paying jobs in technology (as if that is the only path). One session on the future of higher education had no educators. (If you figure that one out, let me know.)

A robot roamed the floor during the ASU GSV Summit

That shouldn’t have surprised me. Far too many technology vendors emphasize the magic of technology without having any real understanding of the educational process. They make their pitch to school and university technology departments, which too often buy the technology and present it gleefully to educators, only to find that the educators have no use for it.

Thankfully, many educational technology entrepreneurs do have an understanding of education, and many of their products evolve from experiences with family members or friends. And educators and IT departments are learning to speak with one another. At KU, we have created collaborations among IT, instructors and administrators. The process isn’t perfect, but we all feel that we are making much better decisions about technology through a shared vetting process.

I saw some of that sort of thinking at the conference, with entrepreneurs explaining partnerships with school districts and universities to test products, gather feedback, and revise the technology. One speaker even urged educators to demand evidence that products work as promised, something he said few schools and colleges did.

Bill Gates, in his keynote, made an excellent observation: Much of educational technology lacks any connection to the educational system. We need to figure out ways of working together to create a process of continuous improvement, he said.

I agree. Higher education needs desperately to change, as I’ve written about many times. But simply throwing technology at the problems won’t do anything but raise costs. Too often, vendors want to sell their products but don’t want to listen – really listen – to how those products are or are not used, and how feedback from educators could help improve those products. They also fail to do their homework about existing technologies that colleges and universities use, and explain how their products work with or improve upon existing platforms.

I love to explore new digital tools, but when it comes to technology for my students or for the university, I approach purchases with these questions in mind:

• How will this help student engagement and student learning?
• How steep is the learning curve?
• Is it truly better than something we already have?
• Will it integrate into the technology we have?
• Is the cost justified?
• Could we do this cheaper and better ourselves?

Until educators and tech entrepreneurs can talk frankly about those sorts of questions, we will be stuck in a cycle of finger-pointing and distrust.

Themes from the summit

Several themes emerged from the sessions I sat in on and the products I saw at the summit. Goldie Blumenstyk of The Chronicle of Higher Education pointed out two: mentorship tools and programs that help students connect to jobs. I agree, but as I wrote earlier this week in highlighting some promising digital tools, I’m looking at this through my lens as a professor.

Personalized and adaptive learning. These are in some ways the holy grail of education and certainly of educational technology. Entrepreneurs and educators have tried for a century to create technology that adapts to students’ learning needs, as Bill Ferster writes in his book Teaching Machines. Digital technology has reinvigorated that push, even as truly reliable adaptive, individualized learning remains elusive.

Data, data, data. We’ve been hearing about data in education (and everything else) for years, and tech vendors have taken note. Nearly every new product contains some element of data gathering and display.

Virtual reality. An exhibit room called Tomorrowland contained several tools for engaging students with virtual environments. Some used technology-enabled headsets; others used smartphones inside cardboard goggles. Again, this is no surprise, though it seems more of a stepping stone than a long-term direction for education.

Tools to help students write. This reflects a general decline in reading and writing skills that many of us in higher education have seen. Whether these tools, which provide structure and advice, can truly improve writing remains to be seen. I see potential in some, though I don’t want students to become overly reliant on technology for writing and thinking.

Tools to help students learn coding. Again, no surprise here, especially amid a widespread call for students to tap into the potential of digital technology and move into technology-related jobs.

Tools for developing online course material. Understandable given the spread of online and hybrid courses.

Social connection and peer evaluation. These run the gamut from platforms for reaching out to students through text messaging to apps for peer tutoring and goal tracking.

None of these themes is revolutionary, and many have been evolving for years. They do represent a cross-section of where entrepreneurs see opportunity in education.

A final thought

Tim Renick of Georgia State said higher education did a poor job of gathering evidence about what works and what doesn’t work in our own institutions. We have almost no research on academic advising, he said. Nor do faculty members base their own curriculums on evidence. Rather, he said, “we go to faculty meetings and make stuff up.” In a note of hope, though, he added: “We are becoming more data literate, and as that data falls into the hands of faculty, it is leading to change.”

Doug Ward is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.