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Just the other day, a friend of mine, a superb cultural anthropology professor, was railing against her university's imposition of a requirement that every faculty member provide "learning outcomes" for their courses. It was the end of the semester, and she'd worked hard to provide a meaningful class for her students, and it felt cynical to then tack on a bunch of meaningless outcomes. Who hasn't felt anger at this increasingly frequent, seemingly cynical tendency of institutions to reduce the complexity of learning to a metric, productivity and outcomes?

That was certainly my response when, some years ago now, my own institution debated requiring faculty members to include such outcomes on their syllabus. I protested. Then I happened to be keynoting a conference that included a workshop for beginning faculty members, intended to help them design a syllabus, including identifying meaningful learning outcomes. I asked if I, a senior faculty member, could attend.

One of the young professors leading the workshop read out loud from a student course evaluation where the student noted that, until her professor had included learning outcomes on a syllabus, she had no idea why she was taking a given class or why her university thought this course (but not some other) should be required for general education distribution or for a major. She compared college to a child asking "Why?" and the parent responding, "Because I told you so."

You don't need to go very deep in the pedagogical research to know that the key to successful learning is for the learner to be aware of what the given knowledge will add to their goals and their life. As professors, departments and institutions, we tend to do a poor job connecting the lofty language of our "mission statements" to our actual practices: what we require, how we organize knowledge, how we facilitate learning and what we hope our students will gain from what they learn-- not just as job preparation (a shortsighted goal in a changing world) but also as preparation for a complex world where nothing is stable. We do a poor job helping students translate the specific content or knowledge gained in our classrooms into a tool (informational, conceptual, methodological, epistemological or affective) that will help them thrive in life. If higher education doesn't do that -- if it isn't geared to helping students succeed beyond the final exam and after graduation -- then why bother?

That workshop for beginning instructors helped me understand how I could turn learning outcomes from a cynical exercise into a key component of institutional change, starting in the realm over which I and other faculty members have control: how we run our classrooms. Borrowing from the long tradition of progressive education that extends from John Dewey and Paulo Freire to bell hooks and Carol Dweck, I challenge my students to take the lead in their learning. In the case of learning outcomes, I now often leave that section blank on the syllabus and use part of the first or second class meeting to have students challenge themselves, thinking up the most aspirational, world-changing outcomes they can imagine.

I do this with a simple, traditional think-pair-share exercise. First, I ask students to take 90 seconds to jot out responses to an open-ended question: "What are the three most important things you hope to take away from this class and into the rest of your life?" That's the "think" part of the exercise. I then give them another 90 seconds to turn to "pair" with the student nearest them, introduce themselves, and take turns, with one person reading her three things and the other listening. This allows everyone a chance to express an original opinion without interruption or critique.

Once they have heard one another, I ask them to then work together to choose or craft one item that they will "share" with the class. In a small group, I have them read those out loud. In a large one, they might add them to a Google Doc. I once did a Think-Pair-Share with 6,000 international teachers in the Philadelphia '76ers arena. I try to do one TPS (as it's known in the pedagogy business) every class period in every class.

It is my conviction that we need thoughtful, active collective engagement and participation -- by both students and faculty members -- to transform not just our classrooms but all of higher education. We don't need more edicts from on high or technocratic solutions, but we desperately need engaged, participatory rethinking about what we really want for and from our students -- and for and from ourselves and our institutions.
Aspirational Learning Outcomes
Here are 10 of my favorite learning outcomes, including some used by various other students and colleagues over the last several years.
"In this course I hope that we will . . . "

1. Learn to respect intellectual life and education as a precious gift that no one can steal from us.

2. Be challenged by a scholar who maintains the highest standards of her profession to succeed educationally to our own highest standards in college and beyond.

3. Learn to absorb and transfer knowledge and wisdom from lectures, readings and class discussion into own cogent thinking and writing.

4. Form an appreciation of the importance of critical and creative thinking and problem-solving and use these to guide my future life and work.

5. Gain the highest respect for intellectual rigor, including self-respect.

6. Fight for the dignity and justice of all peoples, regardless of race, religion, national background, gender, ability or sexuality. We're all learning together.

7. Come to understand how everyday incidents -- the small victories as well as the constant abrasions of life and politics -- are grounded in histories and cultural practices, including those of racism or other inherited and structural forms of discrimination that are sometimes invisible to those who perpetuate them.

8. Become a lifelong advocate for public higher education that can change lives and improve society.

9. Learn to masterfully control chaos whenever we are faced with a complex web of ideas and results.

10. Stay alert to surprise. Many times -- in class and out -- the best learning outcomes are the ones we never expected.

What are your aspirations for learning, in the classroom and out? What's missing here? If you are inclined, I hope you will use the "Comments" section below to add your own aspirations for learning. Everybody learns when everybody is learning.

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Learning outcomes that help students translate classroom learning into life tools (essay)

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Just the other day, a friend of mine, a superb cultural anthropology professor, was railing against her university's imposition of a requirement that every faculty member provide "learning outcomes" for their courses. It was the end of the semester, and she'd worked hard to provide a meaningful class for her students, and it felt cynical to then tack on a bunch of meaningless outcomes.

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Last year, I asked students in my Introduction to Public Humanities course to write the syllabus. I wrote about this here: you won't believe what happened next! I didn't repeat that project this year. In part, that's because of different circumstances: teaching the fall, not the spring, means that students are new to the program, and the field.

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The rapidly shifting landscape of higher education is well documented; fewer traditional 18- to 24-year-olds but increasing numbers of non-traditional-age students, decreasing state allocation causing an increasing dependence on tuition, greater competition for a decreasing number of students (including international ones), and decreasing demand for face-to-face lectures in rows of desks while steadily increasing demand for online and blended classroom models. When it comes to trying to launch new program offerings, the considerations and challenges are much greater now than in the recent past.

It was not that long ago when new programs could be launched with relative ease. The primary obstacle was a vague defense of why the program was needed, how it would be staffed-making sure course offerings did not encroach on the turf of other departments, and spell checking the new syllabi to ensure they would make it through a campus-wide Academic Committee and Faculty Senate. New programs were often similar to ones developed at other institutions. Little originality or innovation were considered. The mentality seemed to be that if it was a successful program at another institution, it will certainly be one for us as well. There was little consideration to program saturation and competition among institutions with similar offerings. Further, new syllabi were generally parceled together from existing ones or modified from other institutions. Students were abundant, full-time staff were available to teach, and the funding support to add new programs was available to broaden the portfolio of program offerings. The thought was the larger the menu of program offerings, the greater the appeal to more students. Times have rapidly changed. There is a new reality of how programs should be conceived and developed. With these realities come new challenges that are not quickly overcome.

Primary to these challenges is how differently we must now begin to think about what a program actually means and how it is structured and delivered. New program offerings must be in tune with the changing landscape of higher education mentioned above with a defined focus on the target population. All of this is taken into account while staying aligned to the institutional mission and complementing the current offerings and resources available. The large shifts currently occurring in higher education and with the demands of proven accomplishments and competencies by employers, institutions must make more substantial changes to programs and how they are delivered or risk falling further behind in the arms race to stay relevant. If you're only making small changes to existing programs or developing new majors with the same basic boilerplate of traditional curriculum (e.g., lecture, seat time, credit hours to a degree), most likely the program will not achieve the level of success upon which it was presented to the dean or provost for approval. Monumental shifts in higher education demand bold changes in programs. The traditional questions asked when conceiving a new program must be replaced with ones that recognize a paradigm shift from business as usual:

Is a full degree program necessary or will a certificate or digital badge be more attractive and useful to both students and potential employers?

Could a series of certificates or badges be combined to equal a degree?

How will past employment and experience be valued with credit toward program completion?

Will the program be a traditional face-to-face model, blended, or entirely online?

With employers demanding proof of experience and skill, what type of experiential learning/internship could be embedded in the program?

Could the new program be offered in a competency-based format that requires students to demonstrate their knowledge and skills?

Are there "courses" in the traditional sense, and if so, must they span a defined time frame, such as a semester or quarter?

How could we partner with the community in the development and delivery of the program?

These are samples of the types of questions that demonstrate a shift in thinking when considering additions to a program portfolio.

The information above leads us to what, in my opinion, is the one true roadblock in conceiving, developing, and launching new programs for the students of today. That is, the vast majority of faculty and administration still have the higher education mindset of a generation ago. This is through no fault of their own. It is what they know and are comfortable with when it comes to higher education. Faculty are clearly the workhorses of the institution and most often the ones relied upon to conceptualize and develop new programs. As part of that process, it means constructing new syllabi, developing advising maps, recruiting support from faculty across campus, and developing promotional information to market the program. These are extremely time-consuming tasks. And, at a time when state support has been diminishing and enrollment is a challenge, faculty have been asked to do more with less.

At a critical moment in the history of higher education, when faculty need time to reflect and be creative to develop new and innovative programs to help boost enrollment and revenue, they are often denied reassigned time or extra compensation to develop these programs. Without the time or incentive to support their efforts, they naturally fall back to the traditional program templates they know. This could be a partial explanation of the why digital badging, competency-based programs, educational certificates, and experiential partnerships with businesses, to name a few, have been slow to develop and are keeping higher education out of sync with student and business demands.

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It's Time to Revise Our Approach to Program Design

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The rapidly shifting landscape of higher education is well documented; fewer traditional 18- to 24-year-olds but increasing numbers of non-traditional-age students, decreasing state allocation causing an increasing dependence on tuition, greater competition for a decreasing number of students (including international ones), and decreasing demand for face-to-face lectures in rows of desks while steadily increasing demand [...]

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Course Goal / Learning Outcome

describes broad aspects of behavior which incorporate a wide range of knowledge and skill

Upon completion of this course the student will have reliably demonstrated the ability to use the conventions of grammar when creating paragraphs.

Learning Objectives

tend to describe specific, discrete units of knowledge and skill can be accomplished within a short timeframe

Given a paragraph of ten sentences, the student will be able to identify ten rules of grammar that are used in its construction.

Course goals or learning outcomes are a broad statement of what the students will be able to do when they have completed the course. You may want to think of it as the 'moral of the story'. Generally, these learning outcomes connected to the overall goals of the curriculum for a given discipline. Clarifying these larger ideas and making connections to the curriculum helps students see the purpose and relevance of the course content. A practical approach to writing learning outcomes is to frame them as responses to the phrase: Upon completion of this course, students will...

Learning Objectives

Once the overall learning outcome(s) for the course is identified, the next step is to develop related learning objectives that are observable and measurable. These learning objectives will allow students to demonstrate specific knowledge, mastery of a skill, or a change in attitude. Two questions to consider might be:

What behaviors or applications would enable you to infer students' understanding of what they have learned?

What evidence or products, if done well, would provide valid ways of distinguishing between understanding and mere recall?

If your course is divided into modules or units, you may consider developing 2-3 learning objectives for each module. Alternatively, it may make more sense to just develop 4-6 learning objectives for the entire course. Regardless of how you organize the course, a practical way to write learning objectives is to frame them as responses to: Upon completion of this course students will be able to...

Example Learning Objectives

Upon completion of the unit on plant growth and development students will be able to:

list the five most common plant growth hormones

describe the relationship between carbon dioxide level and photosynthesis

illustrate the transpiration stream in a corn plant

It is easy to measure each of the objectives. Either the student has or has not accomplished each one. These measurable objectives can then be used as the basis for your grading or another type of student assessment. For example, based on the first learning objective above, if a student is able to list all 5 plant hormones they earn 100% for the assignment if they can only list 4 plant hormones they earn 90%, and so on.

Bloom's Taxonomy as a Framework for Writing Learning Objectives

Developing a basic understanding of Bloom's Taxonomy (Bloom et al., 1956) is a good place to start as you begin writing learning objectives.

Bloom's Taxonomy in a nutshell: In the late 1940's a group of educators began classifying educational goals and objectives. The intent was to develop a classification system for three domains: the cognitive (mental skills or knowledge), the affective (feelings and emotional skills or attitude), and the psychomotor (manual or physical skills). The work that resulted in the cognitive domain was completed in 1956 and is commonly referred to as Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain ( Bloom et al., 1956).

The major concept of the taxonomy is that educational objectives can be arranged in a hierarchy that moves from less to more complex levels of knowledge. The levels are successive; one level must be mastered before the next level can be reached.

The original levels published by Bloom et al. (1956) were ordered as follows: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation.

In 2001 Anderson and Krathwohl published a revised version of Bloom's Taxonomy that reflected what has been learned in the forty or so years since it was first published. In summary, the changes reflect more outcome-focused modern education objectives and include switching the names of the levels from nouns to active verbs. The two highest levels have also been changed with the pinnacle level now being 'create'. The revised levels are: Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate and Create. View CELT's Revised Bloom's Taxonomy webpage.

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Tips on Writing Course Goals/Learning Outcomes and Measurable Learning Objectives

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Course Goal / Learning Outcome describes broad aspects of behavior which incorporate a wide range of knowledge and skill Upon completion of this course the student will have reliably demonstrated the ability to use the conventions of grammar when creating paragraphs.

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The authors of the revised taxonomy underscore this dynamism, using verbs and gerunds to label their categories and subcategories (rather than the nouns of the original taxonomy). These "action words" describe the cognitive processes by which thinkers encounter and work with knowledge.

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The teaching and learning practices listed and described below are designated as "high-impact practices," based on evidence of significant educational benefits for students who participate in them.

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Association of American Colleges & Universities

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Something remarkable is happening in programs of liberal education all over the country. The longstanding notion that learning should occur almost exclusively in classrooms is being amended to give a much more prominent place to various forms of experiential education. The belief that liberal education should focus on a narrow range of intellectual qualities is being revised to include an emphasis on connecting ideas with action. These developments constitute a profoundly important, indeed revolutionary, challenge to the version of liberal education that has dominated American higher education since the early years of the twentieth century.

The trend to connect liberal education with practice takes multiple forms at the campus level and reflects a range of interests among students, faculty, and administrators. The various developments that make up this trend do not yet constitute a coherent movement, nor are they united by shared purposes. They remain on the margins of mainstream thought about the proper characteristics of liberal education. Yet they should command the attention of thoughtful academics for one basic reason: they seek to enact the traditional mission of liberal education to nurture engaged, effective, constructive professionals and citizens, and they implicitly question whether learning experiences that cultivate analytic skills in classroom settings constitute the most effective way to achieve this purpose.
Forms of experiential education
The most prominent attempt to introduce practical activity into liberal education is the civic engagement movement, through which students are encouraged to participate in off-campus community service, sometimes in connection with credit-bearing service-learning courses, sometimes outside the formal curriculum. Such programs aim to cultivate habits of "active citizenship" and build problem-solving skills in community settings. Some explicitly promote an appreciation of democracy and sophistication about influencing public policy. Many campuses have created administrative units charged with promoting service. Among the better-developed programs are those offered by the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford, the Harward Center at Bates, the Morgridge Center for Public Service at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, and the Nutter Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Campus Compact is the most prominent national organization promoting community service within higher education.

Though important in its own right, the civic engagement movement is also a specific instance of the broader effort to link liberal education with action and practice. Even more common are programs offering students off-campus work placements, frequently related to their career interests. These programs are organized in many different ways, but all use direct experience to deepen understanding and nurture practical effectiveness. Wellesley College, for example, encourages students to participate in internships and annually cancels classes for a day so that those who do can report on what they have learned. Cooperative education, in which students alternate periods of full-time paid employment and periods of full-time study, is the fullest expression of this idea. At Northeastern University, most liberal arts majors do at least one co-op placement during the course of their studies.

Internships have, of course, been available at many colleges and universities for many years. But during the final quarter of the twentieth century, these types of programs became far more popular with students and far more pervasive among institutions than previously. At present such programs are nearly universal on American campuses, and most high school students indicate an intention to complete an internship during college. These programs have become so central to the idea of a college education that traditional liberal arts colleges frequently emphasize the availability of off-campus work experiences in their recruiting materials.

Two other widely available forms of experiential education are undergraduate research and study abroad. Like internships, programs that involve undergraduates in faculty research have existed for a long time, but they have become more widely available and have found common ground with the civic engagement movement. Community service often involves students working with faculty on community-based research projects intended to help residents address local problems. The Center for Urban Learning and Research at Loyola University Chicago is an outstanding example of this approach. David Hodge of Miami University of Ohio and his collaborators, Marcia Baxter Magolda and Carolyn Haynes, have advanced an even deeper link between discovery-oriented education and effective action.1 They argue that the developmental capacity for self-authorship, or an internally generated belief system, is an essential ingredient in both scholarly intellectual work and effective action. Study abroad, which also has an extensive history, has become far more widespread in an era preoccupied with globalization and often now includes non-classroom experiences.

The movement to link liberal education more closely to action and practice is not limited to programs that take students out of the classroom. The trend is also reflected in modifications of arts and sciences coursework. Most liberal arts colleges now offer opportunities to study applied and professional subjects, for example, and many universities encourage liberal arts majors to take minors in professional fields. The Carnegie Foundation has sponsored an effort to enrich the "thinking" orientation of liberal education with the "doing" emphasis of professional studies by incorporating practice-oriented pedagogies, such as simulations and case studies, in liberal arts courses. Many colleges offer interdisciplinary, problem-focused minors like urban studies or international relations through which students learn to think about complex, real-world problems. These programs often provide platforms for community-based research projects, internships and service opportunities, and Model UN-type simulations.

All forms of experiential education-community service, internships, cooperative education, undergraduate research, study abroad- and the curricular modifications associated with them have been developing independently and with little interaction among their advocates, who tend to focus on their own specific goals. Yet these movements share a focus on empowering students to be effective actors and problem solvers in organizational, social, and civic settings, and they reflect the perception that direct experience adds significantly to classroom study in promoting student development. These movements are in no way hostile to liberal education; on the contrary, their champions have deep roots in the liberal arts and sciences. The goal is to enrich liberal learning by connecting it more strongly with the lives students will actually live after college. In advancing the link between learning and experience, today's educators are rediscovering ideas articulated by John Dewey in the early 1900s but largely ignored by mainstream higher education for the last century.
The convergence of student, faculty, and administrative interests
Many forces are driving the movement to connect liberal education with practice. Some of the energy comes from students. In recent years, undergraduates have sensed that a traditional liberal education may not, by itself, be a sufficient preparation for the adult world. They have been pressuring colleges to offer internships, work placements, and volunteer activities through which they can gain experience and competence. Two impulses appear to be involved here. The first is anticipating the workplace. Many students want to explore career possibilities even as they pursue a liberal arts degree, and they know a successful internship can help them land a first job. The second is contributing to the community. The interest of young people in community service and social entrepreneurship is one of the most exciting and hopeful developments within contemporary youth culture.

Faculty are drawn to including practice-oriented experiences in liberal arts programs for reasons of their own. Some are impressed by research indicating that "engaged learning"-that is, learning through activities that require active participation-is more pedagogically powerful than learning based on traditional, frequently passive, classroom study. Other faculty, concerned by reports of diminished student interest in political and social issues, see the civic engagement movement as a way to counteract this trend. Still other faculty focus more on the practical challenges that students will face after graduation and are sympathetic with student desires to equip themselves for the world of work.

Institutional leaders are also attracted to a version of the liberal arts actively engaged with the nonacademic world. Individuals in these roles are mindful of the criticism of governmental, political, and business leaders that higher education does not contribute enough to the community, the state, and the nation-a longstanding complaint that has gained force from current worries about the global competitiveness of the United States. Presidents of urban campuses, faced with concerns among civic officials and neighbors about the adverse impacts of their institutions, love to highlight the contributions their students make through community service. Many current academic leaders, moreover, began their careers imbued with the idealistic sprit of the 1960s and 1970s. For these leaders, the impulse to expand the concerns of liberal education beyond the walls of the campus reflects a personal commitment to social progress and a resistance to the historical association of the liberal arts with withdrawal from the nonacademic world. Administrators also know that offering off-campus experiences or adding practice-oriented coursework to a liberal arts curriculum can help maintain strong enrollments.

Viewed from a historical perspective, the convergence of student, faculty, and administrative interests in amending liberal education to include an emphasis on practice represents the flowering of ideas that emerged from the wave of curricular experimentation of the early 1970s. A response to the student protests of the 1960s, that movement was inspired by the belief that the expanded enrollments and more diverse student bodies that characterized higher education after World War II required a wider array of learning experiences than had been appropriate when access to higher education was more restricted. Off-campus learning opportunities and interdisciplinary, problem-focused studies were two of the most widely advocated innovations emanating from those years.

Two recent enrollment trends have reinforced interest in these curricular ideas. One involves the accelerating diversification of the student body as more and more young people from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds enter college. This phenomenon has heightened the focus on creating dynamic learning experiences appropriate for a wide variety of learning styles that highlight the diverse perspectives all students bring to the learning environment. An additional factor has been the shift in higher education's center of gravity from country to city, with the majority of the nation's students now attending urban institutions. Urban campuses tend naturally to be more involved with their surrounding communities than are campuses in more isolated settings, and they have often taken the lead in creating off-campus service and work opportunities for their students.
Sources of resistance
The idea that liberal education should help students become effective actors and problem solvers as well as disciplined thinkers has inspired initiatives at most colleges and universities, and it is being championed by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Nonetheless, the movement's most important innovations remain controversial within academia. Undergraduate research and study abroad can be easily accepted, since they involve essentially academic activities. But because they imply the educational value of practical experience, community service and off-campus employment are more challenging. Stanley Fish (2008) speaks for many when he argues that the proper end of college is the mastery of intellectual and scholarly skills because that is what academics know how to teach. Translating ideas into action is unfamiliar territory. Including practice-oriented material within the liberal arts curriculum also inspires traditionalist objections. When leaders of the Carnegie project on bridging the gap between liberal and professional education convened faculty from both traditions, they found deep skepticism among both groups about each other's work.

There are sources of resistance to moving liberal education toward effective practice at the institutional level as well. Academia's prestige hierarchy is dominated by the major research universities and exclusive liberal arts colleges, and these institutions tend to be deeply committed to the intellectually focused version of the liberal arts that Fish articulates. Although many high-status institutions have made room for internships and service-learning courses-among New England's leading liberal arts colleges, for example, Amherst, Bowdoin, Clark, Smith, and Williams have all done so-none, as yet, has made these types of experiences a central part of the learning experience or explicitly embraced the linking of liberal education with practice. Some upwardly mobile institutions like Northeastern University, Wagner College, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute have placed greater emphasis on these innovations, but most institutions will follow the lead of the top-ranked schools.

Against this background, the basic pattern at the campus level with respect to all of these ideas has been to make room for them to accommodate interested students and faculty while leaving the overall program untouched. There are exceptions. Tulane University has made completion of a community service project and related coursework a graduation requirement. But in most instances, service learning and internship opportunities exist as "one-off" experiences tied to particular courses and individual faculty members but not integrated into the overall structure of general education or the major. Indeed, in many cases, off-campus experience is offered as an extracurricular activity, valued and encouraged but not incorporated into the formal program of instruction. A recent assessment of the service-learning movement by some of its strongest advocates expressed frustration that the effort had achieved little success in becoming institutionalized.
The movement at a crossroads
The effort to connect liberal education with action and practice is at a crossroads. The question is this: Since advocates of various themes within this movement-the importance of civic engagement, the pedagogical power of "active learning," the legitimacy of attention to practical skills, the advantages of undergraduate research and study abroad-have gained a measure of acceptance around the edges of the curriculum for their particular purposes, should these different advocacy groups come together to advance the broader idea that the ability to translate careful thought into effective action should be a central element of what it means to be liberally educated? This is, after all, the implicit educational idea that unites all these developments.

The case for moving in this direction is clear. Champions of liberal learning have historically insisted that their primary mission is to educate the next generation of national leaders and to prepare young people to be effective participants in society. I have yet to read a college catalog that identifies the nurturing of intellectuals as the institution's primary mission. The qualities of mind historically associated with the arts and sciences are typically described as essential for enlightened participation in social and organizational settings, which includes but is not limited to membership on a university faculty. Top liberal arts programs take as much or more pride in the corporate and governmental leaders they have produced as in the scholars they have graduated. Yet there has been little actual analysis showing that cultivating certain intellectual qualities in classroom settings is the optimum way to prepare young people to engage the adult world. The movement to connect liberal education with practice contends that there can be a more effective way to achieve this time-honored goal.

Advocacy for a stronger and more direct focus on practice in no way repudiates either the traditional goals of liberal learning or the educational practices associated with them. On the contrary, research indicates that the ability to master complex material, to analyze difficult problems, and to communicate effectively is critical for success in many areas of life. The point is that these qualities are only part of the equipment we need to be effective in our careers and our civic activities. Psychologist Robert Sternberg of Tufts (1999), who has studied the characteristics of successful people, argues for a "triarchic" concept of mind that includes not only "academic (or analytic) intelligence," but the capacity to respond creatively and independently to unforeseen, multidimensional problems (creative intelligence) and the ability to use ideas to solve practical problems (practical intelligence). He stresses the importance of a balanced deployment of these capacities while also urging colleges and universities, in cultivating these capacities, to emphasize the importance of using them for the common good, a characteristic that he calls "wisdom." Most programs of liberal education focus almost exclusively on only the first of these qualities.

There is room for debate about Sternberg's particular formulations. Other scholars have developed other ways to characterize the multiple intelligences that contribute to effective action in various realms of activity. But the basic point that success in institutional, professional, and social contexts requires qualities of character, personality, and mind that go far beyond "academic intelligence" is widely accepted as a matter of folk wisdom (even among professors) and is also supported by scholarly research. If this is true, and if the most important mission of liberal education is to nurture individuals who will make important contributions to society, then shouldn't we take account of these realities in designing undergraduate programs in the liberal arts and sciences?

There is much at stake in seeking wider appreciation of the value of linking liberal education and effective practice as well as greater understanding of the role experiential education can play in establishing that link. The pedagogical claims advanced by advocates of community service and internships are too important merely to be tolerated at the margins of our thinking about liberal learning. We need to take a hard, fresh look at the qualities needed for effectiveness as professionals and as citizens, to compare those qualities to the outcomes we cultivate through the arts and sciences, and to design educational formats that will empower our graduates to translate the values and skills we nurture into constructive social action. As Carol Geary Schneider has argued in championing a heightened emphasis on practice, the challenges our country faces in the twenty-first century are too great for us to rest comfortably with any lesser educational goal.

References

Fish, S. 2008. Save the world on your own time. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hodge, D. 2008. The engaged university and student success: The foundations of intellectual, personal, and professional growth at Miami University. President's annual address, Miami University, Oxford, OH.

Sternberg, R. J. 1999. The theory of successful intelligence. Review of General Psychology 3 (4): 292-316

NOTE

1. See David Hodge, "The Engaged University and Student Success".

Richard M. Freeland is the Jane and William Mosakowski Distinguished Professor of Higher Education at Clark University and president emeritus of Northeastern University.

To respond to this article, e-mail liberaled@aacu.org, with the author's name on the subject line.

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Liberal Education and Effective Practice: The Necessary Revolution in Undergraduate Education

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By Richard M. Freeland Campus-level efforts to connect liberal education with practice are designed to nurture engaged, effective, constructive professionals and citizens. And they implicitly question whether learning experiences that cultivate analytic skills in classroom settings constitute the most effective way to enact this traditional mission of liberal education.

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The teaching and learning practices listed and described below are designated as "high-impact practices," based on evidence of significant educational benefits for students who participate in them.

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Read "Exploring the Intersection of Science Education and 21st Century Skills: A Workshop Summary" at NAP.edu

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Read chapter 5 Promising Curriculum Models II: An emerging body of research suggests that a set of broad "21st century skills"--such as adaptability, comp...

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The rapidly shifting landscape of higher education is well documented; fewer traditional 18- to 24-year-olds but increasing numbers of non-traditional-age students, decreasing state allocation causing an increasing dependence on tuition, greater competition for a decreasing number of students (including international ones), and decreasing demand for face-to-face lectures in rows of desks while steadily increasing demand for online and blended classroom models. When it comes to trying to launch new program offerings, the considerations and challenges are much greater now than in the recent past.

It was not that long ago when new programs could be launched with relative ease. The primary obstacle was a vague defense of why the program was needed, how it would be staffed-making sure course offerings did not encroach on the turf of other departments, and spell checking the new syllabi to ensure they would make it through a campus-wide Academic Committee and Faculty Senate. New programs were often similar to ones developed at other institutions. Little originality or innovation were considered. The mentality seemed to be that if it was a successful program at another institution, it will certainly be one for us as well. There was little consideration to program saturation and competition among institutions with similar offerings. Further, new syllabi were generally parceled together from existing ones or modified from other institutions. Students were abundant, full-time staff were available to teach, and the funding support to add new programs was available to broaden the portfolio of program offerings. The thought was the larger the menu of program offerings, the greater the appeal to more students. Times have rapidly changed. There is a new reality of how programs should be conceived and developed. With these realities come new challenges that are not quickly overcome.

Primary to these challenges is how differently we must now begin to think about what a program actually means and how it is structured and delivered. New program offerings must be in tune with the changing landscape of higher education mentioned above with a defined focus on the target population. All of this is taken into account while staying aligned to the institutional mission and complementing the current offerings and resources available. The large shifts currently occurring in higher education and with the demands of proven accomplishments and competencies by employers, institutions must make more substantial changes to programs and how they are delivered or risk falling further behind in the arms race to stay relevant. If you're only making small changes to existing programs or developing new majors with the same basic boilerplate of traditional curriculum (e.g., lecture, seat time, credit hours to a degree), most likely the program will not achieve the level of success upon which it was presented to the dean or provost for approval. Monumental shifts in higher education demand bold changes in programs. The traditional questions asked when conceiving a new program must be replaced with ones that recognize a paradigm shift from business as usual:

Is a full degree program necessary or will a certificate or digital badge be more attractive and useful to both students and potential employers?

Could a series of certificates or badges be combined to equal a degree?

How will past employment and experience be valued with credit toward program completion?

Will the program be a traditional face-to-face model, blended, or entirely online?

With employers demanding proof of experience and skill, what type of experiential learning/internship could be embedded in the program?

Could the new program be offered in a competency-based format that requires students to demonstrate their knowledge and skills?

Are there "courses" in the traditional sense, and if so, must they span a defined time frame, such as a semester or quarter?

How could we partner with the community in the development and delivery of the program?

These are samples of the types of questions that demonstrate a shift in thinking when considering additions to a program portfolio.

The information above leads us to what, in my opinion, is the one true roadblock in conceiving, developing, and launching new programs for the students of today. That is, the vast majority of faculty and administration still have the higher education mindset of a generation ago. This is through no fault of their own. It is what they know and are comfortable with when it comes to higher education. Faculty are clearly the workhorses of the institution and most often the ones relied upon to conceptualize and develop new programs. As part of that process, it means constructing new syllabi, developing advising maps, recruiting support from faculty across campus, and developing promotional information to market the program. These are extremely time-consuming tasks. And, at a time when state support has been diminishing and enrollment is a challenge, faculty have been asked to do more with less.

At a critical moment in the history of higher education, when faculty need time to reflect and be creative to develop new and innovative programs to help boost enrollment and revenue, they are often denied reassigned time or extra compensation to develop these programs. Without the time or incentive to support their efforts, they naturally fall back to the traditional program templates they know. This could be a partial explanation of the why digital badging, competency-based programs, educational certificates, and experiential partnerships with businesses, to name a few, have been slow to develop and are keeping higher education out of sync with student and business demands.

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It's Time to Revise Our Approach to Program Design

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The rapidly shifting landscape of higher education is well documented; fewer traditional 18- to 24-year-olds but increasing numbers of non-traditional-age students, decreasing state allocation causing an increasing dependence on tuition, greater competition for a decreasing number of students (including international ones), and decreasing demand for face-to-face lectures in rows of desks while steadily increasing demand [...]

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Just the other day, a friend of mine, a superb cultural anthropology professor, was railing against her university's imposition of a requirement that every faculty member provide "learning outcomes" for their courses. It was the end of the semester, and she'd worked hard to provide a meaningful class for her students, and it felt cynical to then tack on a bunch of meaningless outcomes. Who hasn't felt anger at this increasingly frequent, seemingly cynical tendency of institutions to reduce the complexity of learning to a metric, productivity and outcomes?

That was certainly my response when, some years ago now, my own institution debated requiring faculty members to include such outcomes on their syllabus. I protested. Then I happened to be keynoting a conference that included a workshop for beginning faculty members, intended to help them design a syllabus, including identifying meaningful learning outcomes. I asked if I, a senior faculty member, could attend.

One of the young professors leading the workshop read out loud from a student course evaluation where the student noted that, until her professor had included learning outcomes on a syllabus, she had no idea why she was taking a given class or why her university thought this course (but not some other) should be required for general education distribution or for a major. She compared college to a child asking "Why?" and the parent responding, "Because I told you so."

You don't need to go very deep in the pedagogical research to know that the key to successful learning is for the learner to be aware of what the given knowledge will add to their goals and their life. As professors, departments and institutions, we tend to do a poor job connecting the lofty language of our "mission statements" to our actual practices: what we require, how we organize knowledge, how we facilitate learning and what we hope our students will gain from what they learn-- not just as job preparation (a shortsighted goal in a changing world) but also as preparation for a complex world where nothing is stable. We do a poor job helping students translate the specific content or knowledge gained in our classrooms into a tool (informational, conceptual, methodological, epistemological or affective) that will help them thrive in life. If higher education doesn't do that -- if it isn't geared to helping students succeed beyond the final exam and after graduation -- then why bother?

That workshop for beginning instructors helped me understand how I could turn learning outcomes from a cynical exercise into a key component of institutional change, starting in the realm over which I and other faculty members have control: how we run our classrooms. Borrowing from the long tradition of progressive education that extends from John Dewey and Paulo Freire to bell hooks and Carol Dweck, I challenge my students to take the lead in their learning. In the case of learning outcomes, I now often leave that section blank on the syllabus and use part of the first or second class meeting to have students challenge themselves, thinking up the most aspirational, world-changing outcomes they can imagine.

I do this with a simple, traditional think-pair-share exercise. First, I ask students to take 90 seconds to jot out responses to an open-ended question: "What are the three most important things you hope to take away from this class and into the rest of your life?" That's the "think" part of the exercise. I then give them another 90 seconds to turn to "pair" with the student nearest them, introduce themselves, and take turns, with one person reading her three things and the other listening. This allows everyone a chance to express an original opinion without interruption or critique.

Once they have heard one another, I ask them to then work together to choose or craft one item that they will "share" with the class. In a small group, I have them read those out loud. In a large one, they might add them to a Google Doc. I once did a Think-Pair-Share with 6,000 international teachers in the Philadelphia '76ers arena. I try to do one TPS (as it's known in the pedagogy business) every class period in every class.

It is my conviction that we need thoughtful, active collective engagement and participation -- by both students and faculty members -- to transform not just our classrooms but all of higher education. We don't need more edicts from on high or technocratic solutions, but we desperately need engaged, participatory rethinking about what we really want for and from our students -- and for and from ourselves and our institutions.
Aspirational Learning Outcomes
Here are 10 of my favorite learning outcomes, including some used by various other students and colleagues over the last several years.
"In this course I hope that we will . . . "

1. Learn to respect intellectual life and education as a precious gift that no one can steal from us.

2. Be challenged by a scholar who maintains the highest standards of her profession to succeed educationally to our own highest standards in college and beyond.

3. Learn to absorb and transfer knowledge and wisdom from lectures, readings and class discussion into own cogent thinking and writing.

4. Form an appreciation of the importance of critical and creative thinking and problem-solving and use these to guide my future life and work.

5. Gain the highest respect for intellectual rigor, including self-respect.

6. Fight for the dignity and justice of all peoples, regardless of race, religion, national background, gender, ability or sexuality. We're all learning together.

7. Come to understand how everyday incidents -- the small victories as well as the constant abrasions of life and politics -- are grounded in histories and cultural practices, including those of racism or other inherited and structural forms of discrimination that are sometimes invisible to those who perpetuate them.

8. Become a lifelong advocate for public higher education that can change lives and improve society.

9. Learn to masterfully control chaos whenever we are faced with a complex web of ideas and results.

10. Stay alert to surprise. Many times -- in class and out -- the best learning outcomes are the ones we never expected.

What are your aspirations for learning, in the classroom and out? What's missing here? If you are inclined, I hope you will use the "Comments" section below to add your own aspirations for learning. Everybody learns when everybody is learning.

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Learning outcomes that help students translate classroom learning into life tools (essay)

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Just the other day, a friend of mine, a superb cultural anthropology professor, was railing against her university's imposition of a requirement that every faculty member provide "learning outcomes" for their courses. It was the end of the semester, and she'd worked hard to provide a meaningful class for her students, and it felt cynical to then tack on a bunch of meaningless outcomes.

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Last year, I asked students in my Introduction to Public Humanities course to write the syllabus. I wrote about this here: you won't believe what happened next! I didn't repeat that project this year. In part, that's because of different circumstances: teaching the fall, not the spring, means that students are new to the program, and the field.

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When you begin creating a course, you want to design with the end in mind. The best way to approach this is to start by writing measurable, learning objectives. Effective learning objectives use action verbs to describe what you want your students to be able to do by the end of the course or unit. Aligning assessments with course expectations is much easier when you have written measurable objectives from the beginning.

1. Identify the noun, or thing you want students to learn.
Example: seven steps of the research process

2. Identify the level of knowledge you want. In Bloom's Taxonomy, there are six levels of learning. It's important to choose the appropriate level of learning, because this directly influences the type of assessment you choose to measure your students' learning.
Example: to know the seven steps of the research process (comprehension level)

3. Select a verb that is observable to describe the behavior at the appropriate level of learning.
Example: Describe these steps

4. Add additional criteria to indicate how or when the outcome will be observable to add context for the student.
Describe the seven steps of the research process when writing a paper.

Here are some examples of learning objectives we've seen and how we revised them:

Course level outcome examples

Original version: Understand the American criminal justice system.

Revised version: Describe the history of the American criminal justice system.

Understand is not a measurable verb, however the intent of the instructor was to have the students be able to describe, which is measurable.

Original version: Describe and create a social media plan for your organization.

Revised version: Create a social media plan for your organization.

Describe and create are two different levels of learning, and it's strongly suggested that you avoid having more than one action verb. Create is a higher level of learning than describe, therefore it can be assumed that you will be able to describe the process prior to applying it.

Unit level examples

Original version: Understand elements of editing.

Revised version: Identify elements of editing, including composition, setting and lighting.

Understand is not a measurable verb, and it was too broad for a unit level objective. Therefore, we narrowed the focus.

Original version: Complete the quiz.

Revised version: None

Complete the quiz is an action item for the student, not a learning objective. If your assessment is being used to meet your objective, then you will want to write a measurable objective that describes the content of the assessment. For a course to meet the Quality Matters standards, it must have learning objectives that are measurable and the assessments must align with the learning objectives. For example, if your learning objective has the action verb "identify", then you do not want to have an assessment that is above that level of learning, such as analyzing the topic. On the other hand, if you have an application level verb, such as "design", then you do not want to assess the learning objective with only a multiple choice, knowledge level quiz. Remember, when creating assessments, look at the action verb being used for your learning objective and the level of learning to apply. Co-written with fellow Quality Matters expert, Steven Crawford. Bloom's image created by Alyssa Robinson.

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Writing Measurable Learning Objectives - Teach Online

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When you begin creating a course, you want to design with the end in mind. The best way to approach this is to start by writing measurable, learning objectives. Effective learning objectives use action verbs to describe what you want your students to be able to do by the end of the course or unit.

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The authors of the revised taxonomy underscore this dynamism, using verbs and gerunds to label their categories and subcategories (rather than the nouns of the original taxonomy). These "action words" describe the cognitive processes by which thinkers encounter and work with knowledge.

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Course Goal / Learning Outcome

describes broad aspects of behavior which incorporate a wide range of knowledge and skill

Upon completion of this course the student will have reliably demonstrated the ability to use the conventions of grammar when creating paragraphs.

Learning Objectives

tend to describe specific, discrete units of knowledge and skill can be accomplished within a short timeframe

Given a paragraph of ten sentences, the student will be able to identify ten rules of grammar that are used in its construction.

Course goals or learning outcomes are a broad statement of what the students will be able to do when they have completed the course. You may want to think of it as the 'moral of the story'. Generally, these learning outcomes connected to the overall goals of the curriculum for a given discipline. Clarifying these larger ideas and making connections to the curriculum helps students see the purpose and relevance of the course content. A practical approach to writing learning outcomes is to frame them as responses to the phrase: Upon completion of this course, students will...

Learning Objectives

Once the overall learning outcome(s) for the course is identified, the next step is to develop related learning objectives that are observable and measurable. These learning objectives will allow students to demonstrate specific knowledge, mastery of a skill, or a change in attitude. Two questions to consider might be:

What behaviors or applications would enable you to infer students' understanding of what they have learned?

What evidence or products, if done well, would provide valid ways of distinguishing between understanding and mere recall?

If your course is divided into modules or units, you may consider developing 2-3 learning objectives for each module. Alternatively, it may make more sense to just develop 4-6 learning objectives for the entire course. Regardless of how you organize the course, a practical way to write learning objectives is to frame them as responses to: Upon completion of this course students will be able to...

Example Learning Objectives

Upon completion of the unit on plant growth and development students will be able to:

list the five most common plant growth hormones

describe the relationship between carbon dioxide level and photosynthesis

illustrate the transpiration stream in a corn plant

It is easy to measure each of the objectives. Either the student has or has not accomplished each one. These measurable objectives can then be used as the basis for your grading or another type of student assessment. For example, based on the first learning objective above, if a student is able to list all 5 plant hormones they earn 100% for the assignment if they can only list 4 plant hormones they earn 90%, and so on.

Bloom's Taxonomy as a Framework for Writing Learning Objectives

Developing a basic understanding of Bloom's Taxonomy (Bloom et al., 1956) is a good place to start as you begin writing learning objectives.

Bloom's Taxonomy in a nutshell: In the late 1940's a group of educators began classifying educational goals and objectives. The intent was to develop a classification system for three domains: the cognitive (mental skills or knowledge), the affective (feelings and emotional skills or attitude), and the psychomotor (manual or physical skills). The work that resulted in the cognitive domain was completed in 1956 and is commonly referred to as Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain ( Bloom et al., 1956).

The major concept of the taxonomy is that educational objectives can be arranged in a hierarchy that moves from less to more complex levels of knowledge. The levels are successive; one level must be mastered before the next level can be reached.

The original levels published by Bloom et al. (1956) were ordered as follows: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation.

In 2001 Anderson and Krathwohl published a revised version of Bloom's Taxonomy that reflected what has been learned in the forty or so years since it was first published. In summary, the changes reflect more outcome-focused modern education objectives and include switching the names of the levels from nouns to active verbs. The two highest levels have also been changed with the pinnacle level now being 'create'. The revised levels are: Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate and Create. View CELT's Revised Bloom's Taxonomy webpage.

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Tips on Writing Course Goals/Learning Outcomes and Measurable Learning Objectives

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Course Goal / Learning Outcome describes broad aspects of behavior which incorporate a wide range of knowledge and skill Upon completion of this course the student will have reliably demonstrated the ability to use the conventions of grammar when creating paragraphs.

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Developing Learning Outcomes: A Guide for University of Toronto Faculty 

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Developing Learning Outcomes: A Guide for University of Toronto Faculty 

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Alma R. Clayton-Pedersen with Nancy O'Neill
Association of American Colleges and Universities

© Alma R. Clayton-Pedersen with Nancy O'Neill

Introduction

When I first began working in higher education, most of the traditional-aged students in the class of 2005 had just been born. I remember my excitement when a departing colleague gave me her PC. I confess that I've never used my computer as more than a glorified typewriter; however, I can also say that colleagues and I have done groundbreaking work that used many cutting-edge technologies in the service of learning. This chapter focuses on how higher education can use technologies to implement curricula designed to meet 21st-century expectations for students' learning.

Recently, a new college graduate said to me that, in her experience, professors' use of technology had largely consisted of converting their teaching notes into PowerPoint slides. Where students had once called a large number of their classes "death by lecture," she noted they were now calling them "death by PowerPoint." Why did this student have such a cynical view of the use of technology for learning? Prior to college, most students have used a wide variety of technologies in their everyday lives, ranging from audio book cassettes as very young nonreaders, to sophisticated handheld games as adolescents, to instant messaging programs to "talk to" their friends-at home or abroad-anytime, anywhere via the Internet as young adults.

Yet too often, students' use of technology in higher education settings has been relegated to searching the Internet, accessing an online course, or word-processing. In some pockets of campus, faculty have used technological applications to disseminate information or to help students expedite problem solving. Some typical examples include

graphing calculators for complex mathematical computations and displaying trigonometric functions;

graphics programs for displaying phenomena in the natural and earth sciences;

statistical software packages that can manipulate large data sets in the social sciences; and

design software for developing architectural and engineering models.

With such specific applications of technology and the limited use of other forms (for example, multimedia), students' low expectations for the use of technology in the curriculum is not surprising. Such constrained use of technology by the faculty in the curriculum and low student expectations may serve to limit innovation and creativity as well as the faculty's capacity to engage students more deeply in their subject matter. Like all organizations, colleges and universities respond to the demands placed upon them. Students' and institutions' low expectations for the use of technology for learning provide insufficient impetus for faculties to change their behavior and make broader, more innovative use of these tools in the service of learning.

Students' personal experience with technology is typically broad and in many cases very deep. Moreover, their extensive use of technology continues throughout their college experience-that is, except fully integrated into the curriculum.

Implications

Faculty's understanding of the teaching and learning power of technology needs to be increased.

Increasing the use of technology will increase demands for technological tools to be effectively integrated into the curriculum to enhance student learning.

Tools need to be developed to help faculty integrate technology into the curriculum.

21st-Century Expectations

Changes in the larger society over the last 100 years-various social movements, the advent of telecommunications, the movement from industrial-based to knowledge-based work, struggles over political boundaries, modern technology and science breakthroughs employed in both the most positive and most negative of circumstances-have in some form or another impacted the ways colleges and universities "do" higher education. Colleges and universities in the 21st century educate a much larger, more diverse population of students, foster scholarship countless new areas of inquiry, and offer opportunities in many new settings and formats, including online. Yet many facets of higher education have remained relatively untouched by time, at times to the detriment of our functioning in this new era. To better meet individual and societal needs of the 21st century, numerous leaders-inside and outside higher education-recognized at the end of the 20th century that college and university missions and practices needed to be reinvigorated. Within such a process, perhaps consensus could be reached about the new expectations we needed for students, for curricula, and given its infusion into society, for technology.

For Students

Since 2000, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has engaged colleges and universities across the nation in such a process, through a multiyear, multilayered initiative called Greater Expectations. For the first two years of the initiative, AAC&U senior staff convened a national panel of experts who were charged with identifying the hallmarks of a 21st-century college graduate. With input from a consortium of leadership campuses engaged in innovative practices to realize high achievement levels for their students, the national panel recommended new emphasis be placed on educating students to be purposeful and self-directed in multiple ways-on becoming intentional learners. The report issued from their work, Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College, states:

Becoming such an intentional learner means developing self-awareness about the reason for study, the learning process itself, and how education is used. Intentional learners are integrative thinkers who can see connections in seemingly disparate information and draw on a wide range of knowledge to make decisions. They adapt the skills learned in one situation to new problems encountered in another-in a classroom, the workplace, their communities, and their personal lives. As a result, intentional learners succeed even when instability is the only constant.

The report also notes:

The intentional learner is empowered through intellectual and practical skills; informed by knowledge and ways of knowing; and responsible for personal actions and civic values... Mastery of a range of abilities and capacities empowers intentional learners as they maneuver in and shape a world in flux.... Intentional learners possess a core of knowledge, both broad and deep, derived from many fields... Through discussion, critical analysis, and introspection, intentional learners come to understand their roles in society and accept active participation.

In short, students are expected to draw on various knowledge bases, integrate them, conduct increasingly more sophisticated analyses as they progress through college, and use their integrated knowledge to solve complex problems.

In 2004, AAC&U commissioned a series of focus groups to determine students' views of liberal education. Data obtained from these sessions with high school and college seniors in Indiana, Oregon, and Virginia revealed that both groups of students have individualized and material interests in mind in wanting to obtain a four-year college degree. Greater Expectations-and by extension, many institutions of higher education-has broader goals for Net Generation student learning than do students themselves. In other words, each group has a very different view of higher education's purpose. In addition to articulating the larger purposes of higher education and aligning students' and institutions' expectations, increased attention must be paid to how technology can be used for both these purposes.

Implications

Better alignment is needed between higher education's communication of its purposes and what K-12 education, parents, and the community perceive as its purpose.

Communication needs to include better uses of technology to assess high-quality educational environments.

For the Curriculum

Low-level technologies such as overhead projectors, televisions, and videocassette recorders have been used for some time to focus college students on specific subject matter. The use of technologies typically included text, equations, graphics, and pictures to enhance learning through models and content-rich stories. Early work in learning technology focused on combining what we knew about visual learning and low-end technologies to create multimedia tools to enhance student learning.

Examples of products of this early work by the Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt University (CTGV) included the Adventures of Jasper Woodbury Series and Scientist in Action. Today, these tools still provide middle school teachers with vehicles to enlarge their students' learning. Math and science problem sets are embedded in authentic stories that students understand because the stories reflect their everyday experiences. These authentic problem-solving exercises not only engage students in their learning but also stimulate them to want to learn more.

From the beginning, however, a problem arose in that those middle school students went on to high schools and later to colleges that did not (and do not) provide this type of rich learning experience-a learning experience that can best be achieved when technology is used in the service of learning. If we are to adequately prepare students for an era of change, information, and knowledge explosion in the 21st century, we must alter this scenario. Schools, colleges, and universities must draw on a variety of technologies and use them as resources to deepen students' learning. When we simply ensure that students have access to the latest, most powerful computers, we make technology an end unto itself instead of the powerful teaching and learning tool that it can be.

Implications

Much of the learning technology innovation in higher education has been focused on K-12 teacher preparation and development. More focus needs to be placed on preparing existing faculty for the future Net Generation students who will populate the 21st-century classroom.

To the extent that colleges and universities involve interested faculty and students in working together to develop tools that truly engage them both, the more fruitful their efforts are likely to be for the larger higher education community.

For Technology

Over the past 20 years, most colleges and universities have moved technology from being a one-time budget expenditure to being a hard budget line to support the purchase, maintenance, and, in many cases, use of technology on campus. Less attention has been given to how to help students achieve the desired learning outcomes through technology. While significant financial resources have been devoted to building the technical infrastructure at colleges and universities, much less has been devoted to ensuring that this investment is used to its maximum.

For example, at present, new residence halls are almost never built without considering the choice of hardwired or wireless high-speed Internet access. The question is not if, but how, to make technology more accessible for students. Colleges also increase students' access to technology by establishing computer labs in various locations on campus, defining laptop requirements, and offering computer loan programs. Yet, comparatively little support has been devoted to helping faculty use computers and other technologies in creative and innovative ways to deepen student learning. Worse yet, institutional structures and practices to resolve technical problems that faculty invariably encounter are very limited or are not the type of aid needed. Such lack of support limits the amount of time faculty can spend on what they do best-building a compelling curriculum and integrating technology for more powerful learning.

College and university faculty must effectively tap students' existing familiarity with technology to engage them in constructing an integrated knowledge base and developing habits of the mind that will enable them to become lifelong learners. Technology can then become a tool used in the service of learning rather than an end itself.

Implications

Institutions need to establish greater expectations for maximizing their investment in technology by exploring and assessing the best use of technology for learning.

Greater investments may be needed in faculty professional development in the effective use of technology for learning.

Faculty's effort to infuse technology into the curriculum requires support in developing strategies and in resolving technical difficulties. This means more than the technical help desk. What is needed is assistance for using technology to achieve the teaching and learning outcomes we desire.

Technology and the Curriculum

What is the current role of technology in the college curriculum? To develop intentional learners, the curriculum must go beyond helping students gain knowledge for knowledge's sake to engaging students in the construction of knowledge for the sake of addressing the challenges faced by a complex, global society.

According to the Greater Expectations National Panel, the curriculum and the cocurriculum should provide numerous paths by which students can achieve broad liberal education outcomes alongside specialized knowledge of one or more disciplines. If students have achieved these outcomes, they will excel at

communicating well in diverse settings and groups, using written, oral, and visual means;

employing both quantitative and qualitative analysis to describe and solve problems; and

working well in teams, including those of diverse composition, and building consensus.

These outcomes can be achieved through strategies such as writing assignments (expository, creative, and personal writing); required and critiqued oral presentations; and problem-based learning.

Students need mastery in areas that include knowledge of human imagination and expression, global and cross-cultural communities, and modeling the natural world. This mastery can be obtained thorough

undergraduate research;

inquiry-based science labs;

planned and supervised experiences in teamwork, both in class and in off-campus settings;

interdisciplinary and integrated courses on creativity through the ages;

drawing on students' diverse experiences to enrich classroom discussion;

integrating study abroad into courses back on the home campus;

teaching courses worldwide through videoconferencing; and

student team-designed lab experiments to answer questions.

Students can be expected to be responsible for active participation as citizens of a diverse democracy, understanding themselves and their multiple identities by engaging in

service learning;

debate on proposed solutions to current social problems; and

personal writing that requires self-reflection on a wide variety of subjects and that situates the self in relation to others.

Use of Technology

In what ways might technology enhance each of these innovations and help students achieve desired learning outcomes? At the most basic level, effectively using computer technology is itself a skill that we want students to develop. Using computer applications such as Access and Excel makes managing and manipulating data much more efficient.

While it's clear that such applications have great utility in business administration courses such as accounting, these programs are often used for other purposes and in other subjects. These applications can be designed to sort a variety of types of information, such as to sort information obtained from qualitative interviews or to sort by predetermined criteria a number of funding possibilities for a service-learning project. The mere act of setting up small text databases and linking them to equations for analysis gives students practice in managing knowledge, as well as allowing them to easily transfer text to charts and displaying information in a variety of ways. Knowing how to use all the functions of these and other programs such as PowerPoint enables learners to efficiently edit text and include graphics in the final products they submit to demonstrate their learning. These uses of technology can be applied to undergraduate research and can contribute to students making reasoned linkages among seemingly discreet pieces of information, therefore integrating knowledge for deeper learning.

Multiple Media

By using multimedia, faculty and students can demonstrate an enriched teaching and learning enterprise that goes well beyond more traditional "cubicle-based" computer use. Consider this scenario: A sociology professor forms student teams to explore the presence of various racial and ethnic populations in the United States over time, with a focus on groups that are underrepresented in higher education today. Technology is to be used to facilitate team cohesion, as well as to demonstrate outcomes of the research. The professor first has the class discuss the process of working in teams, both in person and virtually, with one outcome of the project being for students to learn to work in diverse groups. The professor then explains that the project will require a traditional literature review and written analysis, but teams are encouraged to make the text Web-based and combine it with graphics and video to provide comparative analysis and illustration of, for example, voluntary immigration to the United States among new African populations versus patterns of involuntary enslavement of Africans over a specified period of time. The use of multimedia allows this particular team to incorporate video clips of descendents of slaves from library archives and their own interviews with new immigrants alongside third-person historical accounts and newspaper articles. At the end of the project, the professor asks the teams to include video clips of a reflection session where the group considers what benefits might have been accrued from working in a diverse team that would not have been gained by tackling the project individually. By opening up both the process and the content to multimedia, the professor encouraged more powerful learning than would have occurred with simply assigning independent term papers.

The use of multimedia enables students to demonstrate learning beyond a specific topic under study. The example above specifically focuses on comparisons of voluntary and involuntary immigration; however, working in teams and using multiple technological forms facilitates the introduction of other topics such as social justice, ethics, and economic systems more easily. Group work where students can match their talents and interests to specific technological tasks enables each student to pursue an aspect of the assignment that appeals to the way she or he learns best.

Add Flexibility

Because we know that different students learn best when they are challenged to learn in different ways, technology allows teachers to add flexibility to how they present new information and provide feedback to students. For example, both skills and content will be enhanced when students are asked to demonstrate their learning through multimedia presentations to the rest of the class. Virtual discussions allow instructors to help the class develop their analytical judgment.

Real-Time Engagement

The course assignment cited above can also help students explore the circumstances surrounding each immigrant group's departure from its homeland, the route or routes taken to arrive in the United States, where they arrived, and why. The assignment could take on a deeper dimension by using videoconferencing and e-mail to link teams to students living in the countries of origin of the groups being studied. Integrating real-time global experiences into the classroom can provide a new, first-person information source and engender debate about the validity of various sources of information used in conducting research. These technologies make it easier for courses to depart from chronological, linear formats.

Undergraduate Research

Undergraduate research can provide students with an opportunity to learn problem-solving and discovery techniques and to apply what they've learned to real-life, unscripted problems. With the infusion of technology, students can learn not only new techniques for discovery but also techniques for demonstrating the results of discovery. For example, as part of a Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education grant, several colleagues and I at Vanderbilt University embedded student research in a course designed to develop a multimedia Diversity Opportunity Tool (DOT). The tool was designed to help students, faculty, and staff develop the skills needed to productively respond to acts of discrimination and to make decisions about when they need to act, depending on the situation. The team-taught course required students to conduct a literature review on U.S. race relations historically and currently, the psychology of discriminatory behavior, and racial-attitude development. Students also conducted interviews with peers and analyzed the data in light of specific topics they would cover in their final projects. They then developed scripts that told compelling stories centered on discrimination, connected to the findings of their original and archival research. Students integrated their learning through a demonstration video that served as a companion piece to their final written work.

Our goal was to combine students' research with video stories to shape vignettes that would make up this educational tool. In developing the scenarios, scripts, video, pilot testing, and final products related to DOT, graduate and undergraduate students were engaged in filming, acting, and producing the tool. Undergraduate research, combined with technology, became a vehicle to bring research into practice in a tangible way and to contribute to the fields of educational and antidiscrimination training.

Repositories over Time

These illustrations focus on course-level learning, but technology can support learning in broader, cumulative ways as well. For example, students can use multimedia e-portfolios as repositories for culminating classroom assignments, for demonstrations of learning in the major and in general education, and for a senior-year capstone project. Additionally, e-portfolios can be used to demonstrate leadership and learning outcomes gained through cocurricular and work experiences, and they can follow a student if she or he transfers from one institution to another.

Blended Instruction

As faculty become more comfortable with assigning multimedia projects-and students with completing them-there will likely be growth in interdisciplinary multimedia assignments and projects. These assignments not only serve the student developing the project but also can be used as a resource for users' learning. Tools such as the Adventures of Jasper Woodbury, Scientists in Action, and DOT illustrate this potential. Each had elements of its development tied to graduate and undergraduate research and coursework. Such tools can enable users to engage in self-paced movement through activities or can be blended into traditional group training.

The examples given above integrate multiple learning objectives and introduce students to many of the learning strategies outlined in the Greater Expectations report, such as

practice in team building;

writing that is both expository and creative;

multiple forms of communication;

informed judgment about sources of information; and

reflection that situates the self in relation to others and provides an opportunity for individuals to come to a deeper understanding of differences, commonalities, and systemic inequities.

Technology alone does not make this happen. Each of these strategies is facilitated through the intentional use of a variety of tools-both traditional and cutting edge-by individual faculty and campus-wide curriculum planners.

Some faculty have expressed concern that expanding the use of technology in and out of the classroom will both undermine the role of faculty and overburden them with additional responsibilities. With the expansion of online courses, cyberdiscussion groups, the increasing ubiquity of communication technologies, and faculty already feeling the pressure of added responsibilities, these concerns are not surprising. Faculty concerns perhaps center less on being "replaceable" and more on worrying that the teaching and learning enterprise will be reduced to students gathering information that can be easily downloaded, causing them to rely too heavily on technology instead of intellect.

The Greater Expectations report recognizes new demands on the faculty at all educational levels. Yet there are at least two reasons why technology concerns should be allayed. First, traditional age students overwhelmingly prefer face-to-face contact with faculty to mediated communication. Second, technology used in the service of learning will require more-not less-sophistication on the part of students as they engage in processes of integration, translation, audience analysis, and critical judgment. The learning outcomes of a 21st-century education will enable us to meet new challenges here and abroad, ranging from information "overload" to persistent inequality and pressing social issues. These challenges require educators who can think in interdisciplinary, multimedia ways to construct the 21st-century curriculum. Faculty with expertise in one or more subjects, who have been exposed to what we know about how people learn, can determine how to enhance this learning through the use of technology. But simply understanding how to use technology will not provide the integration needed to reach the desired learning outcomes.

When thinking about integrating technology into the curriculum, Chickering and Gamson's seven principles of good practice continue to be sound:

Encourage contact between students and faculty.

Develop reciprocity and cooperation among students.

Encourage active learning.

Give prompt feedback.

Emphasize time on task.

Communicate high expectations.

Respect diverse talents and ways of learning.

Implications

There is a need for integrating technology that is in the service of learning throughout the curriculum.

More intentional use of technology to capture what students know and are able to integrate in their learning is needed.

Assessment

As we increase the use of multiple technologies in the service of learning, we will need to assess its impact. Students tend to be more technology savvy than faculty. Faculty are still much more knowledgeable about the subject matter at the heart of what students should learn. As such, concerns that students choose form over substance are probably unwarranted-content will triumph over glitz when it is delivered in rich, engaging, purposeful, and practical ways, as can be done with multilayered teaching strategies and tools.

In light of this, higher education will need to assess the elements of technology that work best to facilitate students' learning-not just generically but under specific circumstances. This requires that an initial baseline of students' prior use of technology be established (including the kinds of technology used) and the contexts in which they have used technology. Faculty, as architects of the curriculum, must then articulate learning outcomes for the different levels of curriculum (course, sequence, major, general education, and entire collegiate curriculum). Those faculty members interested in the intersection of teaching, technology, and learning must identify the elements critical to learner success as well as those that can impede success. But we must also listen to our learners. Too often we engage in curricular design and assessment without benefit of feedback from students.

Implications

Students' learning of the subject matter and the role of technology in their learning will need to be assessed.

The extent to which technology is a tool for learning and a tool for assessment of learning will facilitate faculty's increasing comfort in integrating technology into the curriculum.

Conclusion

Future careers will require higher levels of education than in the past. That education must enable individuals to discover what they need to know rather than just having static knowledge. Society will need college graduates with mental agility and adaptability.

If this is the goal of education, colleges and universities must reexamine how that goal is achieved. The Net Generation and the current capabilities of information technology make it possible to support learning activities that will enable graduates to be mentally agile and adaptable. However, beyond technical infrastructure, the use of technology in the service of learning is limited.

The Greater Expectations report calls for a focus on developing intentional learners; it also calls for developing intentional institutions. Colleges and universities are connecting silos of administrative work with relational databases so that, for example, financial aid structures can interface with human resources and accounting, ensuring students can work for the institution and maintain simultaneous student and staff categorizations. Eight years ago this was not easy, but today no one thinks it should be any other way. Clearly, technology can facilitate the achievement of the operational goals of the institution. But achieving one of its most important goals-improving the learning of all students-through technology will require conversations at all levels-department, college, institution, and state. With calls for greater accountability for increased spending and for assessment of student learning, we can ask for no less than the effective and coherent integration of technology into an enriched curriculum that meets both student and societal expectations.

Endnotes

1. Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) Greater Expectations National Panel, Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College (Washington, D.C.: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2002), https://secure.aacu.org/iMIS/ItemDetail?iProductCode=GXREP&Category=GE&WebsiteKey=bce618ce-91ef-4ecc-9c9d-a116c1a6d37c, pp. 21-22 [https://www.aacu.org/publications/greater-expectations]. ↩

2. Ibid., pp. 22-23. ↩

3. AAC&U, unpublished research. ↩

4. The Education Trust will be releasing a database of information that provides every college and university's graduation rates disaggregated by race and ethnicity. This database will enable parents and communities to begin to make comparative analysis of their college choice based on one criterion-graduation rates. This will not indicate quality, but it is a start in demonstrating comparatively the outcomes of colleges. As such databases become easier to develop and make accessible, I envision the inclusion of more compelling criteria that gets directly at the learning outcomes defined in the Greater Expectations initiative. ↩

5. A description of the Adventures of Jasper Woodbury Series can be found at https://jasper.vueinnovations.com/. Contact the Department of Teaching and Learning at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University (https://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/departments/tl/index.php) for more information. ↩

6. AAC&U Greater Expectations National Panel, op. cit., p. 22. ↩

7. For more on structuring groups to accrue the educational benefits of students' compositional diversity, see Jeffrey F. Milem, Mitchell J. Chang, and Anthony L. Antonio, Making Diversity Work on Campus: A Research-Based Perspective (Washington, D.C.: AAC&U, 2004); available January 2005 at http://www.aacu.org/. 1 ↩

8. See Arthur W. Chickering and Zelda F. Gamson, "Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education," AAHE Bulletin, vol. 39, no. 7 (March 1987), pp. 3-7, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED282491. ↩

9. Beyond classroom and programmatic assessment, it is important to consider how research on technology and learning can be fostered on our campuses and used to inform our institutional functioning. For more information on the scholarship of teaching and learning, visit the Web sites of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/CASTL/index.htm) and the American Association for Higher Education (http://www.aahe.org/projects/campus_program/index.html). A simple Google search on the scholarship of teaching and learning and technology will reveal many campus efforts devoted to this work, such as Penn State's Teaching and Learning with Technology (http://tlt.its.psu.edu/). ↩

Further Reading

J. D. Bransford et al., "Anchored Instruction: Why We Need It and How Technology Can Help," in Don Nix, R. J. Spiro, and Rand Sprio, eds., Cognition, Education, and Multimedia (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum Associates, 1990).

Arthur W. Chickering and Stephen C. Ehrmann, "Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever," AAHE Bulletin, vol. 49, no. 2 (October 1996), pp. 3-6; available with updated information at http://www.tltgroup.org/programs/seven.

Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, "Anchored Instruction and Its Relationship to Situated Cognition," Educational Researcher, vol. 19, no. 6 (1990), pp. 2-10.

Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, "Anchored Instruction and Situated Cognition Revisited," Educational Technology, vol. 33, no. 3 (1993), pp. 52-70.

About the Authors

Alma R. Clayton-Pedersen is a vice president at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). She codirects the Network for Academic Renewal, a series of four annual meetings that addresses institutional leadership topics including technology and learning. As part of the Greater Expectations initiative, Clayton-Pedersen directs a summer institute designed for campus teams of administrators and faculty to explore institutional change strategies. While at Vanderbilt University (1984-1999), she and her colleagues developed the Diversity Opportunity Tool (DOT), an interactive multimedia product. There she was also an investigator on the project Building on Strengths: Accelerated, Integrated Curriculum and Its Effects on Children, Teachers, and Parents, which combined technology-based middle school curriculum in science, math, and language arts for more integrated learning. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her MEd and PhD degrees at Vanderbilt University.

Nancy O'Neill is director of programs for the Office of Education and Institutional Renewal at AAC&U, where she works with the Pathways to College Network, BellSouth Foundation's College-Going Minorities initiative, and the new Inclusive Excellence initiative. At the University of Maryland (UMD), she served as the Arts and Humanities liaison at the Career Center, directed the Sexual Harassment Prevention Program, and launched First Year Focus, designed to support students outside honors and enrichment programs. O'Neill earned her bachelor's from State University of New York-Buffalo. She holds an MA in American Studies and an MEd in College Student Personnel from UMD. Her interests include student development, academic affairs/student affairs partnerships, diversity, women's studies, and pedagogical reform.

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curricula designed to meet 21st-century expectations

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Curricula Designed to Meet 21st-Century Expectations

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Alma R. Clayton-Pedersen with Nancy O'Neill Association of American Colleges and Universities © Alma R. Clayton-Pedersen with Nancy O'Neill When I first began working in higher education, most of the traditional-aged students in the class of 2005 had just been born. I remember my excitement when a departing colleague gave me her PC.

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AAC&U's Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education initiative, or VALUE, provides an authentic, rubric-based system for assessing student progress on the Essential Learning Outcomes.

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The Essential Learning Outcomes (ELOs) define the knowledge and skills gained from a liberal education, providing a framework to guide students' cumulative progress.

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Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs

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WASHINGTON -- General education is not simply filler for a student's time in college beyond the major. Done well, gen ed can answer students' questions about what college is, and why it matters.

Gen ed is also a great American contribution to higher education, affording students the time and space for intellectual exploration, and teaching them to learn to think in different ways.

Yet general education is under threat. Politicians question the value of it, specifically requirements that aren't explicitly job oriented. Students don't always get it. And creating and adopting a strong general education program demands much of already time- if not resource-strapped professors and their institutions.

Is gen ed worth the fight? Speakers at Wednesday's Inside Higher Ed Leadership Series event, The Future of Gen Ed, think so. The sold-out all-day meeting, held at Gallup's headquarters here, featured conversations on why general education matters more than ever, along with data-driven arguments for gen ed. Other speakers offered thoughts on challenges and lessons learned in their own institutions' gen ed reforms, and whether diversity should be a program requirement.
'A Common Commitment'
Geoffrey Harpham, visiting scholar and senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University and former president and director of the National Humanities Center, talked about the namesake figure of his 2018 book on the "golden age" of education, What Do You Think, Mr. Ramirez?: The American Revolution in Education. Harpham once met a Mr. Ramirez (that's a pseudonym) during a campus visit and described how general education transformed the man's life.

Ramirez went from being a penniless Cuban refugee in 1960s Florida who spoke no English to a professor emeritus of comparative literature. The turning point was when he enrolled in a community college and was forced to take a course on Shakespeare. A professor asked him what he thought about some topic of discussion -- the first time anyone had ever done so. Ramirez was too embarrassed to answer at the time, as he thought he had nothing to say and "no thoughts at all."

But of course he did have thoughts and things to say. He just needed someone to ask him the right question.

Harpham said he's under no illusion that we'll return to that golden age of general education. But he said he does hold out hope that general education survives as a powerful democratizing force and a "common commitment -- variously realized to be sure -- to a common culture that we all share and have a responsibility for."

While general education is often expressed as a program of courses and values, it's also an "aspiration," or spirit, that can be embodied by any professor in any class, he said.

Lynn Pasquerella, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, agreed that general education is a democratizing force that provides a mind- and life-broadening education to the many, not just the elite few. And so political rhetoric that "calls into question the value of higher ed generally, and of liberal education in particular, perpetuates growing racial and economic segregation in our society," she said.

What can be done? Higher education needs to "demonstrate in a more compelling way that we are teaching 21st-century skills," Pasquerella said. She offered the example of her own son, Pierce, who railed against having to take courses in small group communication and intercultural competence while he was studying to be a filmmaker.

Then Pierce's first job out of college happened to be on the Jerry Springer show, where he helped manage guests for hours on end in the green room. Finally all that education made sense to him.

Still, Pasquerella said, if a student who has two academics for parents doesn't understand at the time what good his education is doing him, "What hope do other students have of sticking with a structure they think is totally useless?"
Case Studies in Gen Ed Reform
Indeed, one measure of a gen ed program's value is student buy-in. In one of a number of general education case studies presented, Mary Dana Hinton, president of the College of Saint Benedict, said that her faculty members are seeking to build a more cohesive and student-centered program with the college's new Integrations Curriculum. The program, set to begin in fall 2020, was guided by three design principles: making explicit connections between classes via themed courses, reflection and more; high-impact practices including writing-intensive courses, common intellectual experiences and a student portfolio; and a strong liberal arts and sciences education.

"Our faculty was seeking to answer two key questions: Why does general education matter to liberally educated students, and what content and pedagogy best support our goals for the liberal arts" on campus? Hinton said. While the process was faculty driven, Hinton added, students were engaged in conversations about what courses would help them lead and make positive change in the world from the start.

Linda A. Bell, provost and dean of the faculty at Barnard College, helped oversee a general education reform around 2016 that was, in part, prompted by students' requests for a change. There wasn't necessarily anything wrong with the 16-year-old curriculum centered on nine ways of knowing, she said. But "fundamentally working is not good enough."

Barnard's reform, also driven by the faculty, resulted in a new Foundations curriculum promoting six modes of thinking, including thinking technologically and digitally. Courses in dance, architecture and fine arts, among other disciplines, satisfy it. Barnard has devoted more resources to it based on student demand. It's also committed to reviewing the Foundations every five years.

Ursinus College also hopes to transform the residential college experience with its new general education program based on four enduring questions, Mark B. Schneider, provost and dean, said in a separate TED talk-style presentation.

While liberal arts colleges were well represented at the event, administrators, faculty members and even students from across institution types shared insights, too. Pam Y. Eddinger, president of Bunker Hill Community College, reminded those present that half of all college students are at institutions like hers. So if general education is to survive, she said, community colleges must be involved in conversations about it. And those conversations must be inclusive, she added, saying that her culinary students and faculty members are intellectuals, too, for example.

Melody Bowdon, interim vice provost for teaching and learning at the University of Central Florida, is helping lead an overhaul of the general education program there. It's complicated by the institution's massive enrollment (some 68,000 students, mostly undergraduates), state restrictions on the curriculum and the fact that over half of undergraduates transfer from community colleges.

Still, she said, the process has gone relatively smoothly and enjoyed high levels of faculty enthusiasm. A valuable part of the process is hearing faculty members make explicit connections between program requirements and the content they're already teaching -- making what's often invisible in general education visible. Bowdon also personally invites faculty members to participate in workshops on the pedagogical innovations that make gen ed courses that much more successful.

Donald J. Laackman, president of preprofessional Champlain College, talked about the merits of integrating general education across disciplines, for all four years, via the Core. And Melinda Zook, professor of history at Purdue University, discussed the runaway success of a Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts certificate program for students studying outside the liberal arts. The 15-credit-hour certificate is based on engagement with transformative texts and advanced humanities study.
Diversity Matters
An increasing number of institutions are requiring students to study diversity within their curricula. Should they?

Lucía Martínez Valdivia, assistant professor of English and humanities at Reed College, spoke with candor about her lingering doubts as to how her institution responded to a long-term student protest over a shared introductory humanities courses. The course, Hum 110, previously began with The Epic of Gilgamesh and covered ancient texts from Rome to Egypt. But following student complaints that the curriculum was "too white," there are now new modules. One of them attempts to cover 500 years of Mexican cultural history in a few weeks.

At least one student involved in the protest has since expressed regret, acknowledging that she "didn't know what she didn't know" at the time, Valdivia said. Valdivia's response was that that's typical for an 18-year-old. But the fact that students don't know what they don't know is something colleges might seriously weigh in responding to these kinds of student demands, she said.

Valdivia also said her last few weeks of teaching have confirmed that the closer in time and space diversity-based content is to students' own experiences, the harder it is for them to be objective and ready to take information in.

Students' "learning identity is something we can no longer take for granted at liberal arts colleges," she said. "Things have changed so much in the last 10 years."

Laura Rosanne Adderley, associate professor of history at Tulane University, said students were involved in but did not drive a decision to add two diversity-related requirements to their curriculum. Students are now requred to take one course that is more than 50 percent related to race and inclusion in the U.S.., and one course on global perspectives. The latter requirement was inspired by the idea that when one studies life, language or culture outside one's own domain, one's racial empathy grows.

Adderley said it's too soon to call these new requirements a success. But one hope is that they'll not only revitalize enrollments in history and other courses dealing with diversity, but possibly draw students deeper into these programs, through exposure.

But to Valdivia's point, students only benefit when they are in a growth mind-set and believe they have something to learn, Adderley said.

"These courses are not to fix people who don't already know," Adderley said. "It's not what they're there for."
Measuring Gen Ed's Value
Getting gen ed right is clearly tricky. But beyond anecdotes and personal opinion, the data on long-term outcomes indicate that students benefit when colleges do get it right. Richard A. Detweiler, founder and managing director of HigherEdImpact, discussed his findings from 1,000 interviews with both liberal arts and other kinds of college graduates, 10 to 40 years postgraduation. He found that gradates who reported key experiences associated with liberal arts colleges (which tend to value general education) had greater odds of measures of life success associated with these colleges' goals.

Graduates who reported discussing philosophical or ethical issues in many classes, and who took classes in the humanities, were 25 to 60 percent more likely than other graduates to have characteristics of altruists, for example (meaning they volunteered and gave to nonprofit groups, etc.). And those who reported that professors encouraged them to examine the strengths and weaknesses of their views, and whose course work emphasized questions on which there is not necessarily a correct answer, were 25 to 40 percent more likely to report that they felt personally fulfilled.

As for money, Detweiler has found there is a strong relationship between a having a broad undergraduate education and financial success. Those who take more than half of their course work in subjects unrelated to their majors -- an extensive general education -- are 31 to 72 percent more likely than others to have higher-level positions and to be earning more than $100,000.

A number of commenters throughout the day bemoaned the difficulty in assessing general education at the institutional level. But Carol Geary Schneider, fellow at the Lumina Foundation and president emerita of the AAC&U, bristled at that idea, saying that there's no need to recreate the wheel on assessment. Groups such as AAC&U have long-standing essential learning outcomes for a liberal education, she said.

"You don't have to measure every little course," she said. "We're not doing enough to celebrate the tools that already exist."

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Advocates share war and success stories at 'Inside Higher Ed' event

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General education is under threat, but it's worth the fight. Advocates share war and success stories at Inside Higher Ed event.

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When it comes to lecture halls, the University of Toronto's Lee & Margaret Lau Auditorium is the gold standard.

The room, located in the new Myhal Centre for Engineering Innovation & Entrepreneurship, is outfitted with the latest technology - including a 60-foot-wide screen, believed to be the largest of any North American classroom.

But it's the subtleties of its design that make the 468-person classroom special, says Steven Bailey, director, Academic + Campus Events (ACE) at U of T.

Instead of rows of chairs facing the front of the room, seats are arranged in groups of four around a rectangular table, with plenty of room for instructors, TAs and students to walk across the aisles.

"The focus of the room is not at the front like a typical lecture hall, the focus is actually at the table," says Bailey. "This is where the important conversations and sharing of ideas is going to happen."

The auditorium is a model for the future of teaching and learning - but at a nearly 192-year-old university with plenty of aging classrooms, replicating this brand new lecture hall gets a bit complicated.

That's where Bailey and the ACE team come in. They've set out on an ambitious plan to renovate 174 classrooms on campus through the Transforming the Instructional Landscape (TIL) initiative.

"It's a beautiful hall, but it's expensive," says Bailey of the Lee & Margaret Lau Auditorium. "We can't build everything to look like that but what we can do is to take elements of that and incorporate it into other spaces."

Myhal auditorium's unique features (from left): plenty of aisle space and rectangular tables, built for collaboration; a microphone and video hookup at every table for easy class participation; a gigantic digital screen and enough room at the front of the class for a car (photos by Romi Levine)

Central to TIL is engagement with faculty and students on what they view as the ideal learning environment. Bailey and his team take that feedback and incorporate it into the design process for the classrooms.

"One of the tenets of design thinking talks about designing with, not designing for. That really resonated with us," he says.

This week, ACE, in partnership with Student Life's Innovation Hub, will be hosting events on the downtown Toronto campus, inviting the U of T community to share their input at What Makes a Classroom Great? Students, staff and faculty can test out different types of furniture and provide input on what they like.

"We can get an idea of how they can be combined or improved in a classroom setting to help their learning and teaching experience," says Emily Ling, architect and classroom design and development officer at ACE.

by the numbers

42 classrooms renovated

174 classrooms to be renovated

6,000 courses that will be impacted

Early feedback from students made it clear there needed to be outlets near seats to charge laptops and phones, and a solid wireless connection. But they also cared about how their classrooms were designed, says Bailey.

"They talked a lot about aesthetics of the space, about things like natural light, about creating an environment that was calm - somewhere you would want to spend some time in."

This kind of design-forward approach is core to the TIL project, he says.

"We want spaces that are functional, but we also want spaces that are designed. We see the value in understanding that people react to spaces, not just as functional, but they react to them as human beings," says Bailey.

Words that have rarely been used to denote learning environments have become central to the renovation project.

"We want colour. We want excitement," says Bailey. "We have a lot of beige classrooms. Beige doesn't really do too much to a lot of people."

TIL planners are also working closely with accessibility services at the university to ensure that classrooms are designed with inclusivity in mind - installing doors that are power operated and creating space for wheelchairs, while also providing a range of seat and table heights to accommodate additional needs.

"The idea here is you get to choose where you want to go in the room," says Bailey.

While the TIL initiative only involves renovating classrooms on the downtown Toronto campus, U of T Scarborough and U of T Mississauga are taking part in the conversation while embarking on similar initiatives, says Bailey.

"Everyone is excited about what we're doing here and we're bringing the community together to work on this."

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Classroom 2.0: How U of T is creating innovative, accessible learning spaces

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When it comes to lecture halls, the University of Toronto's Lee & Margaret Lau Auditorium is the gold standard. The room, located in the new Myhal Centre for Engineering Innovation & Entrepreneurship, is outfitted with the latest technology - including a 60-foot-wide screen, believed to be the largest of any North American classroom.

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The Truth About Student Success: Myths, Realities, and 30 Practices That Are Working

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Delve into the pressing issue of student success, and learn how to pursue this crucial but challenging work. Student success is now an institutional priority, but the uncomfortable truth is that helping more students thrive is hard.

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General Education Gets an ‘Integrative Learning’ Makeover - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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science education in the 21st century - what might it look like_ _ BioBlog_ University of Waikato

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Computing for Students Getting Started Antivirus Software Computer Labs Email (Quotas & Spam) Software Residence Services Moodle Passport York Wireless Computing for Faculty & Staff Antivirus Software Email Financial Records (eReports, PER) Office 365 Passport York Software Student Records (Classlist, Grades) Teaching Support (MOODLE) Wireless

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Library research skills (and information literacy) are best learned in the context of particular disciplines rather than in the abstract. Each discipline has a different scholarly culture with its own research practices. A context-sensitive approach is more meaningful and is more likely to prepare students for challenges they will actually face. In addition library research skills can be embedded strategically at various points in the curriculum allowing students to absorb these skills in a graduated and cumulative way.

How can research skills be integrated into the curriculum?

Library research skills can be integrated into the curriculum at the course, program or degree level. At the course level, research skills can be addressed at various points and incorporated into assignments and other course requirements. Instructors can partner with librarians to design effective assignments that reinforce good research skills. Librarians are also available to teach classes and workshops on research skills.

Ideally information literacy skills are incorporated into programs in a systematic way. One way to do this is to consider which research skills students will likely need at particular points in the program. We can then target specific courses in a program for more intensive information literacy instruction. These layers can be built into the program in collaboration with a librarian. Integration of research skills is preferable at the program level because it allows a program to build in levels of information literacy competence at various points as a student progresses through the curriculum. Integration at the program level also has the potential of reaching all (or a greater number of) students in a program. This approach can result in a coherent and graduated learning experience for students.

Are there any examples at York of how research skills can be integrated in a program?

Some academic units on campus have already taken steps to integrate library research skills into their programs. Integration of research skills looks different depending on the nature of the discipline and the structure of the program. Some examples of programs that have taken steps to integrate research skills in a systematic way are Psychology, Biology and Nursing. For more information please contact Dana Craig.

Resources
ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education Information Literacy Goals Mapped to OCAV Guidelines

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Curriculum Development & Research Skills

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Library research skills (and information literacy) are best learned in the context of particular disciplines rather than in the abstract. Each discipline has a different scholarly culture with its own research practices. A context-sensitive approach is more meaningful and is more likely to prepare students for challenges they will actually face.

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Fall-Winter 2020-21, Summer 2021 Academic Sessions

June 1, 2019
Deadline for Complete Proposal Packages

Proposals must be submitted online:

Minor modifications (including proposals for new courses, change to existing course, and minor changes to existing programs) received by June 1st will be reviewed by the Committee on Curriculum, Curricular Policy and Standards (CCPS) only when they are complete. Packages must contain all relevant documentation, including evidence of unit-level approval, consultation with affected programs, and a library statement (for new course proposals).

Proposals are reviewed in the order submitted; proposals submitted after the deadline may not be processed in time for the change to take effect in the desired term.

The ideal time to submit a Major Modification, New Program or New Program with Expedited Approval proposal is between March and May so that once the proposal receives full approval by Senate and/or the Quality Council, the approved proposal can meet the Academic Calendar deadline (February) and the Ontario Universities' Application Centre deadline (March) for publishing updates to available programs. Proponents are welcome to submit a proposal at any time of year.

Degree Expectations
The Guidelines for University Undergraduate Degree Level Expectations were developed by the Ontario Council of Academic Vice-Presidents, and act as a framework for the expression of degree level expectations of graduates of Baccalaureate/Bachelors programs of Ontario's publicly assisted universities. The guidelines express the expected learning outcomes, skills, and creative and intellectual development that all Ontario university undergraduates should possess upon completion of their degree.
See OCAV Guidelines: Degree-Level Expectations (UUDLEs) (PDF)

Program Learning Outcomes
Program learning outcomes are statements about what program graduates are expected to be able do and know upon successful completion of their program, as a result of their learning in the program. Program outcomes are established by each undergraduate program and are reviewed as part of the cyclical program review. Proponents of new courses are expected to consult the program learning outcomes and articulate how the course prepares students to meet some of the program learning outcomes upon graduation.
Governance Process for Changes to Existing Degree and Certificate Programs

1. Department-level committee

2. Committee on Curriculum, Curricular Policy and Standards (CCPS)

3. Faculty Council

4. Academic Policy, Planning & Research Committee (APPRC)

Governance Process for New Course Proposals, Changes to Existing Courses and Retired Courses

1. Department-level committee

2. Committee on Curriculum, Curricular Policy and Standards (CCPS)

3. Faculty Council

Minor modifications are curriculum proposals dealing with courses or less substantive changes to existing degrees or programs. New Course Proposals, Course Expires, and Change to Existing Course proposals are reviewed by the Faculty curriculum committee, CCPS, and once approved there, are placed on the consent agenda of Faculty Council for final approval. Minor Change to Existing Degree or Certificate proposals are reviewed by the Faculty curriculum committee, the Faculty's Academic Planning and Policy Committee (APPC) and are included on the regular agenda for Faculty Council meetings before proceeding to Senate.

If you are unsure whether a change you want to propose is a major or minor modification, please consult the Faculty Curriculum Manager, Kathryn Doyle, for additional clarification. The York University Quality Assurance Protocol stipulates that, in ambiguous cases, the Office of the Vice-Provost Academic decides which proposal type and process proponents should follow.

Minor modifications forms:

General Education Courses
The hold on proposals for new General Education courses is now lifted. The Faculty Curriculum Committee will now accept new course proposals for general education courses. Proponents should submit proposals with relevant supporting documentation through the minor modification submission link at the top of the Curriculum Toolkit. Other inquiries related to general education in LA&PS should be directed to the Associate Dean, Programs at adprog@yorku.ca.
Governance Process for New Programs, Modifications to Existing Programs and Program Closures

1. Department-level committee

2. Committee on Curriculum, Curricular Policy and Standards (CCPS)

3. Academic Policy & Planning Committee (APPC)

4. Faculty Council

5. Academic Standards, Curriculum & Pedagogy Committee (ASPC)

6. Academic Policy, Planning & Research Committee (APPRC)

7. Quality Council

Major modifications involve substantial changes to existing programs due to curricular renewal, program restructuring, program mergers and proposals for new programs.

New Degree Program ApprovalThe development of new undergraduate programs follows the protocol for new program approvals as outlined in the York University Quality Assurance Process and also complies with the Quality Council's Quality Assurance Framework. For assistance initiating a program proposal or developing a program brief, please contact the Faculty Curriculum Manager, Kathryn Doyle.

Please visit the New Degree Program Approvals page for further details.

New Programs with Expedited Approval
In some cases, new program proposals can be expedited when the Quality Council does not require an external review of the proposed program. Ultimately, the Office of the Vice-Provost, Academic- in consultation with the Quality Council- determines which process a program brief will follow.

Please visit the New Programs with Expedited Approvals page for further details.
Please note that before proponents develop a full proposal for either a new program or new program with expedited approval, the Dean must first approve the proponent's Notice of Intent to Develop a Proposal (NOI).
Major Modification to Existing Degree or Certificate

Major modifications to existing programs typically involve at least one of the following:

Significant changes to program requirements

Addition of a new major or specialization where a similar one exists at the undergraduate level.

Merger of two or more programs.

Significant changes to the learning outcomes of an existing program

Significant changes to the faculty complement delivering an existing program

Change to the essential resources of a program that impair its delivery.

Please visit the Major Modification: Templates and Guidelines page for further details.

If you are unsure whether a proposed change constitutes a major or minor modification, please contact the Faculty Curriculum Manager, Kathryn Doyle, for additional clarification. In ambiguous cases, the York University Quality Assurance Protocol stipulates that the Office of the Vice-Provost, Academic decides which template and process proponents should use.

Program ClosureThe protocol for a program closure includes the closure of degrees, diplomas, and certificates. Examples of reasons for program closures include:

low enrolment

changes in academic programs

poor program quality whether articulated in cyclical reviews or determined solely by the institution.

Please visit the Program Closure page for further details.

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Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies

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June 1, 2019 Deadline for Complete Proposal Packages Proposals must be submitted online: Minor modifications (including proposals for new courses, change to existing course, and minor changes to existing programs) received by June 1st will be reviewed by the Committee on Curriculum, Curricular Policy and Standards (CCPS) only when they are complete.

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York University's bicameral governance structure is comprised of the Board of Governors and the Senate. The powers of both governance bodies derive from the York University Act. For more information see Governance Structure at York University and the chart Governance at a Glance.

The Board of Governors has responsibility for all matters affecting the government, conduct, management and control of the University, subject only to those duties specifically assigned to the Senate, the President and the Chancellor. This includes authority over property, revenues, and expenditures as well as the appointment of the Chancellor, President and all teaching and administrative staff.

The Senate is responsible for the University's academic policy in areas including the establishment of faculty councils; standards for the admission of students, for the curriculum and requirements for graduation; awards; adjudication of appeals of academic decisions and findings of academic dishonesty; and recommendations to the President on candidates for tenure and promotion.

The University Secretariat administers the governance of the University by supporting the Board of Governors and Senate and their committees. The Secretariat also maintains the corporate records of the University.

Where Do I Find...

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York University's bicameral governance structure is comprised of the Board of Governors and the Senate. The powers of both governance bodies derive from the York University Act. For more information see Governance Structure at York University and the chart Governance at a Glance.

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Registrar's Office | Registrar | York University

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Stay informed! Check that your contact information is up-to-date and be aware that if you unsubscribe from York emails you may miss receiving information that's important to your progress. Effective January, 2019, students enrolled in classes who previously unsubscribed will be automatically resubscribed at the beginning of each term.

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The Teaching Commons is a positive and safe space where faculty, graduate students, and staff from across our campuses can engage in professional development activities related to any aspect of teaching and learning. We offer a broad range of learning opportunities including individual workshops and consultations, comprehensive courses, certificates, and research related to teaching. Our team is ready to help you explore best practices and innovative strategies, support program renewals and course design, and offer guidance specific to York institutional priorities. We are here to help connect you to a network of colleagues, scholarly resources and evidence-based practice to explore and develop your teaching in new and unimagined ways.

Educational Developer Services
What we can do for you
Teaching and Learning Blog

From September to May we publish a weekly blog on teaching and learning at York. Each week a different author shares their thoughts on a teaching related topic. If you teach at York and would like to contribute a blog please contact Geneviève Maheux-Pelletier - gmp@yorku.ca

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The Teaching Commons is a positive and safe space where faculty, graduate students, and staff from across our campuses can engage in professional development activities related to any aspect of teaching and learning. We offer a broad range of learning opportunities including individual workshops and consultations, comprehensive courses, certificates, and research related to teaching.

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Office of Institutional Planning and Analysis (OIPA)

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OIPA provides access to a variety of databases and dashboards to York's internal and external communities. Here you can find information on Enrolment, Faculty, Research, Space, Admissions, Academic Programs, IR Plans, the new SHARP Budget, York's KPI Report, and much more.