But I don't like to be (too) repetitive in making my posts, so I will aim differently here. There was a PowerPoint presentation produced by Kevin Pitts, the new Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education. The first slide after the title slide does a recounting of initiatives in this category since the last strategic plan was implemented. My attention was caught by the fact that the word major (used before the expression - educational initiatives) was in bold. Were these initiatives indeed major or was casting this word in bold mere hype? My instinct was to consider the initiatives from the perspective of the one undergraduate class I now teach each fall - The Economics of Organizations. Do the initiatives listed on the slide matter for that class (which is taught in DKH where the Economics Department is located)? My conclusion was that they do not. Do they matter for students who are Econ majors? My conclusion was that for current majors probably not, while for future majors perhaps a little, but not much. With that bit of observation complete, I started to generalize. We tend to innovate at the edges in instruction while leaving core business practices largely intact. Maintaining that belief about where innovation occurs is my bias on these matters; that bias informs the rest of the piece. The underlying question that I'd like to get at is this. Might we innovate on core business practice in a way that actually improves matters?
There are five sections in what follows: 1) Optics, 2) Benchmark Measures, 3) Ethical Issues, 4) Suggested Reforms That I've Developed In Prior Posts, and 5) Conclusion. The first three of these follow immediately from what I've written in the previous paragraph. The fourth comes from responding to the bottom of slide 6 and the last slide in Kevin Pitts' presentation. He asks about redesigning college education from scratch. What would that look like? He encourages the reader to "think big." In fact, I've done this (in concept though not in implementation outside my own teaching) with some frequency on my blog, so I will link to some instances of those exercises and provide some annotation along with the links. The final section is meant as a way to connect the dots.
1. Optics
Any SWOT analysis will have parts that are elevating, the strengths and opportunities, and parts that are discouraging, the weaknesses and threats. For the analysis to be effective, all parts must be considered in full. When I was in the campus IT organization, as the Assistant CIO for Educational Technologies (2002-06), we did such planning sessions off site and behind closed doors, with higher level management and senior staff in the organization. Presumably, this was to promote open and honest dialogue among the group in attendance. The current strategic planning process is meant to be fully out in the open. Idealistically, such open debate should be encouraged. But one wonders whether, in practice, that means the weaknesses and threats will be soft pedaled, or ignored entirely. At one level, this could happen simply because we don't have enough mental bandwidth to do otherwise and because in terms of goodwill the campus possesses, that has been exhausted on other matters - all things pertaining to Chief Illiniwek, the pending GEO strike, and lingering effects from the Steven Salaita matter. There is the further concern that when done in the open the press gets hold of the issues, does its own spin on those, and this serves to reframe the debate.
To illustrate the last point I want to turn to a post I wrote a couple of months ago, The discord between how the U plays in the press and what is actually happening on the ground, which offered a critique of a column written by Frank Bruni of the New York Times. It was/is my view that Bruni has elevated certain issues about free speech and political correctness, at the cost of entirely missing the more important learning issues that happen in many if not most classrooms. Below is the last paragraph from that piece:
Let
me wrap up. The freedom of speech issue, as it pertains to Higher Ed,
usually seems to be about discussions of our national politics and
whether those happen on our campuses with both the liberal and
conservative view represented in the conversation. While that may be
interesting to readers of Bruni's column, it really is a tertiary issue
on campus. The fundamental issue is about what students are learning
and whether they are learning in a deep manner. We actually don't have
freedom of speech on this front, but it is not because of censorship.
It's because of the current business model of universities, which are so
reliant on donations and tuition. For both, it is believed necessary
to promote a nice shiny view about what college is about, at least that
is the belief by those in charge of marketing the university. So there
is discord between those marketers and the people on the ground,
students and instructors. I wish Bruni would write about this. That
might actually help to improve matters.
So, in my view, there is a very real issue of whether it is possible to do a credible SWOT analysis of undergraduate education, or if the marketing people will end up blocking it, and indirectly people like Kevin Pitts who are from the Provosts's Office will block it too, because each of them wants to be a team player. It seems to me that until this optics issue is embraced squarely, those of us who are part of the campus community but not in the Provost's Office should have very low expectations of what will come out of the strategic planning process - cheer-leading but not real change. However, we are living in a time of much social upheaval. Perhaps that will create a positive spillover effect for us in considering undergraduate education, and thereby serve as a credible counter to business as usual.
One reason to make this post on my blog rather than in the comment box on the Strategic Planning Web site is that I am entitled to my views so can raise some contentious issues. Further, I normally get very few readers these days, so this likely will not cause a broad airing of the issues. If I can bend one or two heads, I've reached my goal. Then, if they care to do so, they can pick up the baton and take it from there.
2. Benchmark Measures
When I first joined SCALE, in spring 1996, I did a project on student retention rates on campus, comparing the 10 day enrollment numbers to the final enrollment numbers in all undergraduate classes. (The data were provided by DMI. At the time the campus wanted to be very cooperative with the Sloan Foundation and retention was something Sloan was interested in.) The upshot was that retention by this measure was quite high, though it was lower for College of Engineering classes (more on that in the ethics section). But there was another quite interesting lesson from the exercise. The size distribution of classes was highly skewed. (I'm doing this from memory so I may be slightly off with the facts, but the picture I'm sketching is pretty close to what the finding was then.) There were about 1500 classes overall. About 30 of them were super large, and accounted for about half of all enrollments. Our course numbering scheme was different then, but the upshot was that the bulk of the large classes were at the 100-level. The only 300-level course among the giants (in excess of 800 students per semester) was intermediate microeconomics.
For these very big classes, also for the next sized down classes, it is useful to know how much human instructional resource (FTE faculty, graduate teaching assistants, and other human resources) are deployed to get some sense of a student to instructional resource ratio. This is the course-level analog to the student-faculty ratio that many college guides publish. At one extreme, is it only big lectures with no discussion section? At the opposite extreme, is it only many small discussion sections and no lecture? Or is it something else? At the time, intermediate microeconomics was taught mainly in amphitheater classrooms with about 60 students per section - so there were a lot of sections, but they weren't nearly as small as in the introduction to rhetoric sections or the sections in the first semester of Spanish, where there were about 20 students. I don't have the picture for what this looks like now, in general, but I know nowadays that intermediate micro is taught in the large lecture hall in DKH, with about 200 students per section.
It is also useful to know not just which courses are large but also which students are taking those courses. When I started at Illinois back in fall 1980, freshman paid lower tuition (I believe there were three tiers then with sophomores paying a bit more and juniors and seniors paying still more). This practice was justified by the observation that freshman were taking the large classes, those entailed less labor intensive instruction, so the expenditure on instruction per student was less. We have since gotten rid of this particular practice for differential tuition. Is it still true, however, that the large classes are mainly taken by freshman?
If so, we really should think that through. Any theory of human capital development will focus on the benefits of making investments in human capital early, so those investments can bear fruit over a longer duration. This is the logic behind early childhood interventions for low income students. The same principle should apply to college students. Yet the practice at big public universities is to do something of the opposite, or so it would seem. Having the data on this would be useful for considering the matter in depth.
A related issue is whether the practices of the university perpetuate differences in income inequality among the families of our students. For example, we should understand how prior college credit from AP classes is distributed among the student population. Do students from wealthy districts earn a good chunk of their gen ed credits while still in high school? If so, do they bypass some of the high enrollment classes, just for that reason? If students from poorer school districts don't have the same opportunities for advance placement courses, do they get less expensive instruction when at the university, because they have to take more high enrollment classes? Again, having the data on this would be useful.
It would also be useful to look at these sorts of questions for courses in the major. How do popular majors compare with less popular majors regarding class size? Does the answer depend on which college the major is located in?
A second set of issues to investigate, hence requiring other data to provide benchmark information, is about tenure-track faculty teaching undergraduates versus adjuncts teaching undergraduates. In this, think of the tenure-track faculty as the bosses who set department policy, while the adjuncts are the hired help. Back in 1980, the standard teaching load in Economics was 2 courses a semester and the expectation was that one of those would be a graduate class and the other an undergraduate class. Just about every full-time instructor then was on the tenure track. Faculty clearly preferred to teach graduate students, so they could better tie their teaching to their research. Undergraduate teaching was deemed service work. There were exceptions to this rule, to be sure, but the rule gave the then current ethos.
What is the ethos now? How does that vary from department to department? A general thought is that if the tenure track faculty largely are teaching graduate students only, serious reform of undergraduate education will be given short shrift by that department. Even if at the campus level changes are desired, they won't be implemented in such departments or will be implemented in a halfhearted manner. A related matted is how connected the adjuncts are to the tenure track faculty. My sense is the two groups are largely separate. Further, while the tenure track faculty have something of a community within their departments, the adjuncts are more autonomous and many of them are not plugged into the campus support community for instruction, even though teaching is their full-time activity. It would be good to bring evidence to bear, to determine whether that perception is accurate. If it is right, how might reform then be implemented? Does the entire culture need to change to get even modest changes in teaching practice?
One last area to benchmark would be course grades. Aggregate distributions could be published, by department, sorted by 100-level, 200-level and so on, then sorted by college, etc. The aggregation would need to be sufficiently large so that individual instructors didn't feel compromised by the practice. Let's say that it is possible to respect individual instructor privacy in this way. Then the idea would be to provide information that speaks to George Kuh's Disengagement Compact. If grades were not mutable, high grades would be indicative of high performance and low grades of the converse. But might it be that on campus low grades signify intellectual rigor maintained in the course and high grades the opposite? The tradition has been for grade distributions in most classes to be the instructor's prerogative, while in a few high enrollment classes with multiple lectures and common exams, there is an agreed-upon grade distribution imposed ahead of time. (Or it might be that the course coordinator imposes the grade distribution and doesn't seek the assent of the other instructors.) Adjunct instructors, in particular, need to get tolerable teaching evaluations to secure their employment. This impacts not just grades, but how the course is taught. (I fear there is a lot of teaching to the test.) Have we addressed this issue on campus or largely ignored it? I would argue the latter.
3. Ethical Issues
I'm going to consider the ethical issues through the lens of inequality - haves versus have nots. This distinction is sometimes rendered geographically, north of Green (College of Engineering) are the haves while south of Green are the have nots. But that distorts things in certain ways. There are STEM departments south of Green and many of them are haves as well. Also, specifically from the perspective of undergraduate education, the College of Business is one of the haves.
With that, here I'm going to focus on two distinct practices that we should question from the perspective of a Campus strategic plan, rather than separate college-specific strategic plans. The ethical dilemmas arise in the presence of inter-college exchanges that work less well than they should. One of the practices is the college-specific tuition surcharge. Both Business and Engineering have higher than the base tuition. LAS, in contrast, does not have a tuition surcharge.
The other practice is about students changing their major by transferring from one college to another. Some of these transfers are motivated purely by intellectual interest. The student took an intro course that resonated and now wants a different major. It is different for those students who start out in the College of Engineering. This is the one college on campus that seems to deliberately pursue an attrition strategy for students in the first and second year. Many students find Engineering education brutal and non-nurturing. Some survive the ordeal and then treat it as a badge of honor. Others become quite discouraged and want out. Most stay at the university but transfer to another college. This past semester in my Econ of Organizations class, 10 out of the 25 who finished the course had transferred from Engineering. As they blog about their campus experiences to tie into course themes, I can report that they were not prepared for this to happen and were quite disillusioned thereafter. In my framing of things, Engineering makes a mess with these students and then leaves it to others to clean up the mess.
Elsewhere on campus you don't see the attrition strategy broadly applied. In fact the Campus is under some pressure to increase graduation rates. President Killeen has argued that as a goal in his appeal for greater support from the State of Illinois. If the Economics department as a whole deliberately embraced an attrition strategy, where would the students go? My guess is that many would not do an internal transfer but would leave the university entirely. The Campus would count that as a black mark. If that is right, we really should be reconsidering the internal transfers out of Engineering and how to make these students whole again and/or Engineering needs to adopt an approach that students find less punitive. Tying this to the previous section, it would be good to have the numbers on how big an issue this actually is. Until this past semester, I was under the impression that it didn't happen so often. Now I'm less sure of that.
Economics is an odd major on our campus because many of the students aren't really interested in the subject matter. A good chunk, however, are College of Business wannabes. But College of Business has restrictive admission; it requires a high standardized test score for admission as a freshman or a high GPA during the freshman year to be an internal transfer. Students who are Econ majors often can't get over those bars, but they can imitate the Business major to a certain extent. Many, indeed, do a Business minor. The Business minor is another flashpoint where the ethical issues manifest.
As I was an Associate Dean in the College of Business from 2006-10, I have seen these issues on both sides. The minor does not enhance the reputation of the College of Business. And, historically, minors have been underfunded across the board. (I'm ignorant of the present situation. But I'm guessing while it may be better than 10 years ago, there are still issues with it.) At the time I became an Associate Dean, the number of Business minors were kept down. Partly to get some goodwill with Campus at the time BIF came online, the minor was expanded soon thereafter. But the quality of the offerings in the minor courses has been mixed at best. Some of my students from last semester told me as much. In my own teaching, I was trying to send a message to my class during much the course - they should value their college experience as a thing in itself as much as it is a passport for later. That proved a very hard sell for those students in the Business minor.
I will add one other point on this, about my younger son, who is a U of I graduate now, having graduated after the spring 2016 semester. He started off in ECE. After one year he wanted to transfer to CS, but didn't get in then. So he transferred to the Math Department, which has a CS program. He paid the College of Engineering surcharge for that. A year later he did transfer into CS. The Math Department intermediate step worked, in part, because the tuition surcharge was part of the deal. Why does Math have students pay this surcharge to Engineering, but Econ doesn't have the surcharge paid to Business? It looks like a historical accident and/or sidebar negotiations determined these practices rather than a sound ethical approach. Because I'm aware of this inconsistency, it's very hard for me to believe that the students' best interests are what determines these matters.
So, in my view, there is a very real issue of whether it is possible to do a credible SWOT analysis of undergraduate education, or if the marketing people will end up blocking it, and indirectly people like Kevin Pitts who are from the Provosts's Office will block it too, because each of them wants to be a team player. It seems to me that until this optics issue is embraced squarely, those of us who are part of the campus community but not in the Provost's Office should have very low expectations of what will come out of the strategic planning process - cheer-leading but not real change. However, we are living in a time of much social upheaval. Perhaps that will create a positive spillover effect for us in considering undergraduate education, and thereby serve as a credible counter to business as usual.
One reason to make this post on my blog rather than in the comment box on the Strategic Planning Web site is that I am entitled to my views so can raise some contentious issues. Further, I normally get very few readers these days, so this likely will not cause a broad airing of the issues. If I can bend one or two heads, I've reached my goal. Then, if they care to do so, they can pick up the baton and take it from there.
2. Benchmark Measures
When I first joined SCALE, in spring 1996, I did a project on student retention rates on campus, comparing the 10 day enrollment numbers to the final enrollment numbers in all undergraduate classes. (The data were provided by DMI. At the time the campus wanted to be very cooperative with the Sloan Foundation and retention was something Sloan was interested in.) The upshot was that retention by this measure was quite high, though it was lower for College of Engineering classes (more on that in the ethics section). But there was another quite interesting lesson from the exercise. The size distribution of classes was highly skewed. (I'm doing this from memory so I may be slightly off with the facts, but the picture I'm sketching is pretty close to what the finding was then.) There were about 1500 classes overall. About 30 of them were super large, and accounted for about half of all enrollments. Our course numbering scheme was different then, but the upshot was that the bulk of the large classes were at the 100-level. The only 300-level course among the giants (in excess of 800 students per semester) was intermediate microeconomics.
For these very big classes, also for the next sized down classes, it is useful to know how much human instructional resource (FTE faculty, graduate teaching assistants, and other human resources) are deployed to get some sense of a student to instructional resource ratio. This is the course-level analog to the student-faculty ratio that many college guides publish. At one extreme, is it only big lectures with no discussion section? At the opposite extreme, is it only many small discussion sections and no lecture? Or is it something else? At the time, intermediate microeconomics was taught mainly in amphitheater classrooms with about 60 students per section - so there were a lot of sections, but they weren't nearly as small as in the introduction to rhetoric sections or the sections in the first semester of Spanish, where there were about 20 students. I don't have the picture for what this looks like now, in general, but I know nowadays that intermediate micro is taught in the large lecture hall in DKH, with about 200 students per section.
It is also useful to know not just which courses are large but also which students are taking those courses. When I started at Illinois back in fall 1980, freshman paid lower tuition (I believe there were three tiers then with sophomores paying a bit more and juniors and seniors paying still more). This practice was justified by the observation that freshman were taking the large classes, those entailed less labor intensive instruction, so the expenditure on instruction per student was less. We have since gotten rid of this particular practice for differential tuition. Is it still true, however, that the large classes are mainly taken by freshman?
If so, we really should think that through. Any theory of human capital development will focus on the benefits of making investments in human capital early, so those investments can bear fruit over a longer duration. This is the logic behind early childhood interventions for low income students. The same principle should apply to college students. Yet the practice at big public universities is to do something of the opposite, or so it would seem. Having the data on this would be useful for considering the matter in depth.
A related issue is whether the practices of the university perpetuate differences in income inequality among the families of our students. For example, we should understand how prior college credit from AP classes is distributed among the student population. Do students from wealthy districts earn a good chunk of their gen ed credits while still in high school? If so, do they bypass some of the high enrollment classes, just for that reason? If students from poorer school districts don't have the same opportunities for advance placement courses, do they get less expensive instruction when at the university, because they have to take more high enrollment classes? Again, having the data on this would be useful.
It would also be useful to look at these sorts of questions for courses in the major. How do popular majors compare with less popular majors regarding class size? Does the answer depend on which college the major is located in?
A second set of issues to investigate, hence requiring other data to provide benchmark information, is about tenure-track faculty teaching undergraduates versus adjuncts teaching undergraduates. In this, think of the tenure-track faculty as the bosses who set department policy, while the adjuncts are the hired help. Back in 1980, the standard teaching load in Economics was 2 courses a semester and the expectation was that one of those would be a graduate class and the other an undergraduate class. Just about every full-time instructor then was on the tenure track. Faculty clearly preferred to teach graduate students, so they could better tie their teaching to their research. Undergraduate teaching was deemed service work. There were exceptions to this rule, to be sure, but the rule gave the then current ethos.
What is the ethos now? How does that vary from department to department? A general thought is that if the tenure track faculty largely are teaching graduate students only, serious reform of undergraduate education will be given short shrift by that department. Even if at the campus level changes are desired, they won't be implemented in such departments or will be implemented in a halfhearted manner. A related matted is how connected the adjuncts are to the tenure track faculty. My sense is the two groups are largely separate. Further, while the tenure track faculty have something of a community within their departments, the adjuncts are more autonomous and many of them are not plugged into the campus support community for instruction, even though teaching is their full-time activity. It would be good to bring evidence to bear, to determine whether that perception is accurate. If it is right, how might reform then be implemented? Does the entire culture need to change to get even modest changes in teaching practice?
One last area to benchmark would be course grades. Aggregate distributions could be published, by department, sorted by 100-level, 200-level and so on, then sorted by college, etc. The aggregation would need to be sufficiently large so that individual instructors didn't feel compromised by the practice. Let's say that it is possible to respect individual instructor privacy in this way. Then the idea would be to provide information that speaks to George Kuh's Disengagement Compact. If grades were not mutable, high grades would be indicative of high performance and low grades of the converse. But might it be that on campus low grades signify intellectual rigor maintained in the course and high grades the opposite? The tradition has been for grade distributions in most classes to be the instructor's prerogative, while in a few high enrollment classes with multiple lectures and common exams, there is an agreed-upon grade distribution imposed ahead of time. (Or it might be that the course coordinator imposes the grade distribution and doesn't seek the assent of the other instructors.) Adjunct instructors, in particular, need to get tolerable teaching evaluations to secure their employment. This impacts not just grades, but how the course is taught. (I fear there is a lot of teaching to the test.) Have we addressed this issue on campus or largely ignored it? I would argue the latter.
3. Ethical Issues
I'm going to consider the ethical issues through the lens of inequality - haves versus have nots. This distinction is sometimes rendered geographically, north of Green (College of Engineering) are the haves while south of Green are the have nots. But that distorts things in certain ways. There are STEM departments south of Green and many of them are haves as well. Also, specifically from the perspective of undergraduate education, the College of Business is one of the haves.
With that, here I'm going to focus on two distinct practices that we should question from the perspective of a Campus strategic plan, rather than separate college-specific strategic plans. The ethical dilemmas arise in the presence of inter-college exchanges that work less well than they should. One of the practices is the college-specific tuition surcharge. Both Business and Engineering have higher than the base tuition. LAS, in contrast, does not have a tuition surcharge.
The other practice is about students changing their major by transferring from one college to another. Some of these transfers are motivated purely by intellectual interest. The student took an intro course that resonated and now wants a different major. It is different for those students who start out in the College of Engineering. This is the one college on campus that seems to deliberately pursue an attrition strategy for students in the first and second year. Many students find Engineering education brutal and non-nurturing. Some survive the ordeal and then treat it as a badge of honor. Others become quite discouraged and want out. Most stay at the university but transfer to another college. This past semester in my Econ of Organizations class, 10 out of the 25 who finished the course had transferred from Engineering. As they blog about their campus experiences to tie into course themes, I can report that they were not prepared for this to happen and were quite disillusioned thereafter. In my framing of things, Engineering makes a mess with these students and then leaves it to others to clean up the mess.
Elsewhere on campus you don't see the attrition strategy broadly applied. In fact the Campus is under some pressure to increase graduation rates. President Killeen has argued that as a goal in his appeal for greater support from the State of Illinois. If the Economics department as a whole deliberately embraced an attrition strategy, where would the students go? My guess is that many would not do an internal transfer but would leave the university entirely. The Campus would count that as a black mark. If that is right, we really should be reconsidering the internal transfers out of Engineering and how to make these students whole again and/or Engineering needs to adopt an approach that students find less punitive. Tying this to the previous section, it would be good to have the numbers on how big an issue this actually is. Until this past semester, I was under the impression that it didn't happen so often. Now I'm less sure of that.
Economics is an odd major on our campus because many of the students aren't really interested in the subject matter. A good chunk, however, are College of Business wannabes. But College of Business has restrictive admission; it requires a high standardized test score for admission as a freshman or a high GPA during the freshman year to be an internal transfer. Students who are Econ majors often can't get over those bars, but they can imitate the Business major to a certain extent. Many, indeed, do a Business minor. The Business minor is another flashpoint where the ethical issues manifest.
As I was an Associate Dean in the College of Business from 2006-10, I have seen these issues on both sides. The minor does not enhance the reputation of the College of Business. And, historically, minors have been underfunded across the board. (I'm ignorant of the present situation. But I'm guessing while it may be better than 10 years ago, there are still issues with it.) At the time I became an Associate Dean, the number of Business minors were kept down. Partly to get some goodwill with Campus at the time BIF came online, the minor was expanded soon thereafter. But the quality of the offerings in the minor courses has been mixed at best. Some of my students from last semester told me as much. In my own teaching, I was trying to send a message to my class during much the course - they should value their college experience as a thing in itself as much as it is a passport for later. That proved a very hard sell for those students in the Business minor.
I will add one other point on this, about my younger son, who is a U of I graduate now, having graduated after the spring 2016 semester. He started off in ECE. After one year he wanted to transfer to CS, but didn't get in then. So he transferred to the Math Department, which has a CS program. He paid the College of Engineering surcharge for that. A year later he did transfer into CS. The Math Department intermediate step worked, in part, because the tuition surcharge was part of the deal. Why does Math have students pay this surcharge to Engineering, but Econ doesn't have the surcharge paid to Business? It looks like a historical accident and/or sidebar negotiations determined these practices rather than a sound ethical approach. Because I'm aware of this inconsistency, it's very hard for me to believe that the students' best interests are what determines these matters.
I want to note that the above is meant purely for illustration. The ethical issues are far broader. Even in-state base tuition and fees are now far higher in real terms than the tuition my parents paid back in the 1970s for me to attend Cornell (Arts and Sciences), an Ivy League school. Further, tuition as a share of overall university revenues is now much higher than it was when I started back in 1980, when State of Illinois Tax dollars provided the bulk of university revenue. These twin facts, which are similar at many other public R1s, put the university in a squeeze. The faculty culture that I experienced didn't give the ordinary undergraduate a prominent role to play on campus. But in an ordinary business sense, a functional enterprise needs to put is resources in places that encourage subsequent revenue production. If tuition is the university's meal ticket, the student experience must be a good one. The have colleges seems to be doing that. The have nots, not so much.
4) Suggested Reforms That I've Developed In Prior Posts
I've learned a bit about how to promote my ideas over the years. Rather than refer to labor-intensive teaching, a label that makes sense to an economist but that other instructors might find offensive, I've come to call it high touch instruction, with a focus on the emotional aspect, a student who has been touched because the student's instructor evidently cares that the student learns. Each of the suggestions below are about different aspects of high touch instruction. I will present these in reverse chronological order.
This one is quite recent. I wrote it last week.
The Freshman Seminar - Taught By A Retired Faculty Member
This posts suggests to counter the large-class syndrome, offer a freshman seminar taught by a kindly grandparent-like figure, conjuring up images of Mr. Chips, if you will. Specifically, I juxtapose the pedagogic goals I have for The Economics of Organizations class that are not specific to that content of that course but instead pertain to getting the students to better understand their role as learners, with the needs of freshmen students. The further thought is that retirees are time abundant, which is necessary for this type of teaching, so would be more willing to do it as long as they got some recognition for the effort. Thus it might be possible to do this without breaking the bank.
This next one is actually a series of six posts that comes under the tag, Everybody Teaches. The link is to the first post in the series. The link to the tag, which has all six posts on one page, can be found near the bottom of the post.
Everybody Teaches
At the time of this writing, the Campus was gearing up its relationship with Coursera and, in my view, going a bit MOOC crazy. As a possible source of innovation, MOOCs surely are interesting. But I didn't think they should be the only game in town, so I took it upon myself to propose an alternative, one entailing high touch instruction. Each of these posts are rather long, so together it is a lot of reading. Also note that the fifth in this series is similar to though not identical to the Freshman Seminar piece linked above, while the sixth in the series relates to the next link.
This last one is another series of posts. This time there are seven of them on Inward Looking Service Learning (INSL).
Inward Looking Service Learning
The logic in these posts is first that the only possible labor input that truly scales with the number of undergraduate students is the students themselves. More experienced students can and should be helping students who are newer to campus. Second, and this point is probably more controversial so would have to be investigated in some depth, peer mentoring is an especially valuable activity for the mentors. They learn a great deal from the mentoring. So the mentoring activity literally should be thought of as applied instruction, just as now some students who do internships have it satisfy an academic requirement for doing fieldwork. Third, large class instruction can have a high touch aspect, if we re-conceptualize the organization structure to give prominence and make formal the discussion group. Peer mentors should be deployed in small group settings and in one-on-one interactions with other students. They shouldn't be viewed as cheaper substitutes for graduate student TAs which, unfortunately, is how they are too often deployed on campus now.
5) Conclusion
I need to critique my own idealism, as represented by the posts I linked to in the previous section. I base that critique on my experience with learning technology. In the SCALE days, we did some wonderful things with technology. Then SCALE morphed in the Center for Educational Technologies (CET) and the mission changed - to bring those wonderful things to the mainstream. While there was broad diffusion of usage of online tools in teaching, ultimately culminating in an enterprise learning management system (Illinois Compass) the reality is that most of the usage was rather dull and the wonderful things didn't scale nearly as much as the adoption of the technology itself.
I came to realize that innovative faculty and early adopter types of instructors do those wonderful things, through their own sitzfleisch and imagination on how to deploy the technology effectively. It remains an open question whether more mainstream faculty can produce interesting results as well, if they get suitable encouragement and support. A related question is what that encouragement and support looks like and whether it is affordable. I really don't know.
In the 1990s, there were faculty who were far more innovative than I was in deploying the technology for teaching. Mostly I stole/borrowed ideas from others and then retrofitted those ideas for my course. But, all modesty aside, I was much more innovative than the majority faculty who were the bread and butter audience for CET. My confidence in the suggestions in the previous section come from my own experience teaching. I have had some good results recently with high touch teaching and twenty years ago the use of peer mentors, who conducted online office hours during the evening, was the best part of my technology innovation. Whether any of that can scale now, I don't know, but I'm hopeful it might.
I want to wind this up with a greater sense of urgency. The ethical issues I described need to be addressed. I believe that high touch teaching is at least part of the answer to that. In other words, because of the nature of public R1s, there will be some large class instruction and some ways students will feel they are being treated more like a number than like a person. But if they can have other experiences where instructors treat them with decency and where they can see they are being encouraged to learn deeply, that can serve as a suitable counter force. That's the argument I'm trying to make in this piece.
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