Bloom's Sixth

By Doug Ward At a meeting to provide highlights of KU’s latest climate survey, Emil Cunningham of Rankin & Associates asked audience members a question: What is the point of higher education? “Students,” someone in the audience said. “That’s right,” he said. “Our purpose for being here is students.” Cunningham is right, but the answer is more complicated than that. A university is an intellectual community with many different interests and goals that compete for the time of faculty members, staff members and students. Those include research, and service to the community, the…

By Doug Ward Rajiv Jhangiani makes a case for free and open course materials in very personal terms. As a student at the University of British Columbia, he and his cash-strapped roommates fashioned “pretend furniture” from sheet-covered cardboard boxes. When his roommates wanted to add a second phone line for dedicated dial-up Internet access, Jhangiani couldn’t afford the extra $8 a month. His grandfather, who had taken in Jhangiani in Bombay after his father died and his family lost their home, was paying for his schooling. There was no room for frivolous expenses. Rajiv Jhangiani…

By Doug Ward Matthew Ohland talks confidently about the best ways to form student teams. In a gregarious baritone punctuated by frequent, genuine laughs, he freely shares the wisdom he has gained from leading development of a team creation tool called CATME and from studying the dynamics of teams for more than two decades. Ohland, a professor of engineering education at Purdue, visited KU recently and spoke with faculty…

By Doug Ward Here’s a secret about creating a top-notch assessment plan: Make sure that it involves cooperation among faculty members, that it integrates assignments into a broader framework of learning, and that it creates avenues for evaluating results and using them to make changes to courses and curricula. Lorie Vanchena, Nina Vyatkina and Ari Linden of the department of Germanic languages and literatures accepted the Degree-Level Assessment Award from Stuart Day, interim vice provost for academic affairs. Actually, that’s not really a secret – really, it’s just good assessment…

By Doug Ward SAN DIEGO, Calif. – Here’s a harsh question to ask about the classrooms on our campuses: What are they good for? Yes, there’s more than a tinge of sarcasm in that question – answering “not much” comes immediately to mind – but it gets to the heart of a problem in learning and, more broadly, in the success of our students. Oregon State drew from several models as it created new classrooms, including a learning studio, an emporium style (below) and the set of a television talk show (bottom). Tim Reynolds of the architecture firm …

Students engaged in active learning tend to be gloriously noisy. They share ideas and insights with each other. They write on whiteboards. They debate contentious topics. They work problems. They negotiate group projects. In Genelle Belmas’s Gamification class, though, active learning took the form of silence – at least for a day. That’s right. Silence — in a room with more than 100 students. A seat creaked now and then. Someone coughed. A notebook rustled. Otherwise, nothing. If you don’t believe me, listen to the video in the multimedia file below. Just don’t expect to hear much.…

A new grant-funded initiative at the University of Kansas will promote the use of data to improve teaching, student learning and retention in science, engineering, technology and math programs. KU is one of 12 universities to receive a $20,000 grant from the Association of American Universities as part of a major AAU project to improve STEM education. The grant will be used to promote faculty-led course and curricular changes that enhance student learning among undergraduates, and to help eliminate long-standing achievement…

By Doug Ward A young woman with a flower headdress caught my attention as I walked through Budig Hall earlier this week. I stopped and asked her what the occasion was. “It’s Hat Day in Accounting 200,” she said. I wanted to know more, and Paul Mason, who teaches the 8 a.m. section of the class, and Rachel Green, who teaches the 9:30 section, graciously invited me in. Hat Day, they said, is a tradition that goes back 20 years. It takes place one day toward the beginning of each semester and works like this: Students get a bonus point if they wear a hat to class. Teaching assistants…

The annual conference of the Association of American Colleges and Universities(link does not exist) offered many thought-provoking sessions, teaching tips and discussions about the future of higher education. I wrote earlier about some of the themes. Here’s a sampling of some of the other ideas that stood out. The importance of engaged learning A session on engaged learning offered some of the most insightful observations of the conference. Engaged learning…

SAN FRANCISCO – A sense of urgency pervades this year’s meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities(link expired). The tenets of a broad, liberal education have been under assault at the state and national level, many Americans have grown skeptical of the cost – and debt – that college brings, and the terms “evidence” and “value” seem mandatory in any conversation about higher education. The sessions at the AAC&U’s annual meeting this week have been filled with discussions about telling the story of liberal education, effecting change across departments and…