Bloom's Sixth

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…

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…

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. Holly Storkel accepted the university’s Degree-Level Assessment award on behalf of the Speech-Language Pathology program. She was joined at the Student Learning Symposium by Sara Rosen,…

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…

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. Participants in the Trestle launch…

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, …

By Doug Ward Course redesign has become a crucial piece of helping college students succeed. The statistics below about enrollment and graduation rates make it clear that success is too often elusive. Course redesign is hardly the only solution to that problem, but it is a proven, tangible step that colleges and universities can take. Course redesign involves moving away from faculty-centered lectures and adopting student-centered techniques that improve learning. It usually includes online work that students do outside of class and in-…

By Doug Ward PALO ALTO, Calif. – Nearly all college faculty members want to teach well but few have both the pedagogical background to make their classes more student-centered and the incentive to do so, the Nobel laureate Carl Wieman said Monday. Carl Wieman (Stanford photo) Wieman, a physics professor at Stanford, has been a leader in promoting effective teaching practices in the sciences, primarily through his Science Education Initiative. He spoke Monday at a meeting of …

Doug Ward In this month’s Teaching Matters (There was a link, but it does not exist anymore), Mike Vitevitch writes about his experiences in having honors students give group presentations in lieu of a final exam. Vitevitch, a professor of psychology, says he was “bowled over” by the quality of the students’ work at the end of the spring semester. As he explains in the accompanying video, honors students in Introduction to Psychology tend to do very well on exams. They know the material, and Vitevitch…

We have all felt like “the other” at some point in our lives. “The other” is an outsider, someone who feels vastly different from those where they live and work. Being “the other” is uncomfortable and unsettling. It generates self-consciousness and suspicion. It drains energy. Mark Mort works with students in Biology 152. Recent events on campuses around the country have made it clear that far too many of our students feel like “the other.” For some, it’s the color of their skin. For others, their ethnicity, their sexual identity, or even their political views. They feel as if they have…