Bloom's Sixth

It’s the little things we miss when our routines change. This isn’t the working whistle. It’s the one on display in the Kansas Union. As classes move online, those little things will add up for faculty, staff and students. We won’t bump into colleagues along Jayhawk Boulevard. There will be no chalking on sidewalks on Wescoe Beach, no sound of the fountain on West Campus Drive, no view of the Campanile over Potter Lake, no smell of books in the stacks at Watson Library, no view of the flags atop Fraser Hall. We can …

One aspect of online teaching that I feared would make it less enjoyable for me as an instructor is that my students and I wouldn’t get to know one another as well as we do in our in-person courses. I thought that it would be difficult to replicate the interaction and dynamic atmosphere of a classroom where we all exchange ideas, participate in thoughtful discussions, challenge each other’s beliefs and positions, develop an understanding of and respect for one another, and come to care about each other as fellow humans. As I have developed new courses and adjusted and redesigned old…

This is what teaching online looks like. That’s not quite right. This is what planning for teaching online looks like after a week and a weekend of long days and an early meeting on Monday morning. About noon, I looked down and realized I was wearing mismatched boots. Some people wear mismatched socks. I wear mismatched boots. Rather than hide them, I showed them to everyone I met on what was probably the last day of in-person meetings for quite some time. I emailed the photo to colleagues and to my students. Everyone needed the laugh. “We’re not really laughing at you,” Diana Koslowsky…

Take a deep breath. You are about to launch into an online adventure. Yes, I know, you didn’t want to take this trip. The corona virus – and the university – made you do it. Like it or not, though, we are all on the same trip, one that will take us deep into the uncharted territory of a quickly deployed online teaching and learning matrix of enormous scale. This involves not just the University of Kansas, but hundreds of colleges and…

Distilling hundreds of comments about the future of the university into something manageable and meaningful is, in understated terms, a challenge. The university’s department of Analytics and Institutional Research accomplished that, though, creating a 73-item list that summarizes ideas from a fall planning session and from comments submitted through an online portal. That list, titled What We Could Do at KU, was distributed to the 150 or so university employees who gathered last week for…

WASHINGTON – As colleges and universities prepare to encounter what has become known as a cliff in traditional student enrollment, they are looking for ways to reach out, branch out, and form partnerships that might once have been unthinkable. That desire to branch out was clear from the sessions I attended at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. For instance, speakers at the conference urged colleagues and their universities to…

By Doug Ward The end of a semester is always hectic, but it’s important to spend time reflecting on your classes while things are still fresh in your mind. Did students learn what you had hoped? If not, what do you need to change the next time you teach the class? What activities or assignments led to unexpected results or fell short of your expectations? What readings did students struggle with and how can you help students grasp them better? What discussion areas resulted in a mostly silent classroom? What elements of your syllabus did students find unclear and need revision? Those…

Jennifer Roberts doesn’t hold back when describing her first attempt at active learning in a large lecture course. “It was a train wreck,” said Roberts, a professor of geology who is now chair of the department. “It was bloody. Students were irate.” Jennifer Roberts works with students in Geology 101. This was in Geology 101, a required course for geology majors and one that typically draws a large number of engineering students. Starting in 2013, Roberts worked with a…

I’ve been doubtful about the emergence of a Generation Z. Strangely, Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen, along with some reassurances from Pew Research, have me reconsidering. Before I get to Hogwarts and …

Enrollment at Kansas regents universities declined again this year. I say again because enrollment has declined each year since 2011. The decline – 5.7% since 2011 — is relatively small, but it illustrates the challenges of a state university system that has become increasingly dependent on student tuition dollars to finance operations. It also illustrates the challenges that regents…