September-October 2010

by Stephen C. Ehrmann

How can a degree program, general education program, or other course of study make substantial, widely appreciated improvements in who learns, what they learn, and how well they learn it? Under the right circumstances, such improvements are possible. What follows are suggestions, some counter-intuitive, that increase the chances of their being successful and sustained.

• Don't implement a change strategy by delegating each part of it to a different stakeholder—this recommendation for faculty, that one for the information technology unit, a third for administrators, a fourth for the assessment staff. Instead, work with a team composed of people from all those groups and more.

• Simultaneously upgrade content, deepen learning, and improve the program's ability to attract and retain a variety of students.
• But in doing so, take your time.
• Use technology as a lever for change, but slow down. Don't leap from one hot technology to the next.
• Find ways for faculty and students to save time.

Before elaborating on these suggestions, I'll explain why they allude to time so frequently.

Two Working Assumptions About Time

First, to really take hold, any change initiative needs to be sustained for perhaps a decade. That's how long it can take to improve outcomes and then for potential students, employers, benefactors, and other stakeholders to recognize that the program is now producing better graduates.

Second, any improvement strategy must cope with the fact that many key players would prefer not to get involved until they have more time and money, a day that will never come. As C. Northcote Parkinson once observed, work expands to fill the time available. That's especially true when the people are energetic and committed. The best faculty and staff will already feel over-committed by the time someone approaches them with a grand idea for improving their programs.

Similarly, spending tends to expand to use up all available revenues. Howard Bowen called this phenomenon “the revenue theory of costs”: “Universities will raise all the money they can and spend all the money they raise.” Spending is determined by local revenue history, not by some fundamental truth about how much must be spent in order to achieve a particular level of educational quality. These local spending patterns don't change much from year to year, because budgets are embodied in the skills and routines of the current staff and in facilities.

Parkinson's and Bowen's theories help explain why, at institutions rich or poor, any proposal for dramatic action is likely to greeted by a sincere, “Sounds intriguing, but at the moment I don't have time to think about it, and anyway we don't have enough money.”

Once a pattern of spending is established, it seems a necessary condition for getting the work done. But there's a surprising corollary to Bowen's rule. The conviction that “we can't improve results unless we get new money” can be overcome if the changes are made slowly enough. Therefore major improvement can begin even when budgets have recently been cut and everyone is feeling desperate. In fact, financial duress can be a powerful motive to pull together and move in a new direction. And if the change also offers a way to save time, the effort may attract faculty and staff who would not otherwise give it the time of day.

The first five recommendations below are designed to achieve the kind of educational improvement that could meet these requirements: time-saving in the short term and ultimately beneficial for the “who, what and how” of learning. The final five recommendations are offered to guide campus teams in carrying out such improvements.

Five Recommendations for Improving Teaching and Learning (with Technology)

Recommendation 1: Identify a need so compelling that many stakeholders respond, “We can't not do it.”

Unfortunately, higher education has always suffered from attention deficit disorder. Many academic programs are distracted by new needs and opportunities long before their old needs are actually met. So to achieve improve educational results, the need had better be compelling enough to attract faculty, staff, and benefactor attention over the many years it will take to improve outcomes and then for stakeholders to become aware of the improvement. Such sustaining needs often relate to the program's sense of identity, pride, and economic security.

Some years ago, I talked with a faculty member about how his labor studies department had come to teach its degree program off-campus at union halls. He explained that they'd seen another university's labor studies department do something similar. Once they realized that a competitor was already offering such a program, he said, “We couldn't not do it.”

Recommendation 2: Focus on changes in research methods, creative work, or clinical practice that are technology enabled, time saving for faculty and students in the short term, and transformative in the long term

Until a few decades ago, faculty and students used pens and typewriters to write. Editing was so time-consuming that many students would write only one draft before submitting their work. Then word processing became affordable. It offered enormous time savings in editing.

Moreover, as the use of word processing spread, the nature of writing began to evolve. In many disciplines, that led to changes in teaching. Some faculty began breaking assignments into stages, with students getting feedback at each stage as they revised their outlines and then their texts.

Students learned to refine their thinking through this continual rewriting. At Reed College, for example, by the late 1980s, graduates with four years of experience of rethinking their work seemed to be writing more tightly reasoned senior theses (Ehrmann, 1995). And this kind of critical thinking is one of the most important outcomes of a college education.

Writing is not the only activity to benefit from the three t's of technology, timesaving, and transformation. The nature of research has changed radically as resources have moved online. In statistics, timesaving technologies for calculation have gradually revolutionized techniques for analyzing data. In classics, first-year students can research Greek texts, sculpture, and archaeological data through the multimedia representations at their fingertips, so that their learning can become more multi-modal and interdisciplinary. In biology, sophomores can apply their first lessons in genetics to data gleaned directly from the Human Genome database.

By using the three t's, academic programs can achieve three kinds of improvement simultaneously:

• What students learn: Students use techniques and resources that are closer to cutting-edge work in the wider world.

• How they learn: The research program of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) has uncovered a set of high-impact practices that improve the outcomes of a college education: first-year seminars and experiences, writing-intensive courses, collaborative assignments and projects, undergraduate research, diversity/global learning, service learning and community-based learning, internships, and capstone courses (Kuh, 2008). Almost all of them can be implemented more successfully when faculty take advantage of the three t's to have their students do more engaging projects in research, creative work, or clinical practice.
• Who can learn: these technology-enabled projects and assignments can also attract and retain more kinds of students: place-bound ones, for instance, or commuters.

Because the next two recommendations each rely on a relatively small number of technologies, they too can save money on software and staff development.

Recommendation 3: Share a collection of easy-to-create, easy-to-update, and inexpensive instructional materials from which students can learn as they work on their research, creative work, and clinical experiences

As they each do a course project, student #1 may need to learn somewhat different things, and at different moments, than student #2. Lectures and textbooks alone won't suffice when learning needs diverge. But faculty and librarians can assemble online learning resources to help meet the needs for individualized learning and review: brief tutorials, short video demonstrations, video clips from lectures, online bibliographies, self-quizzes, simple simulations, and so forth.

Acquiring and organizing such resources must be easy, quick, and inexpensive if this practice is to become more common. Tools such as free, customized Google search engines enable faculty to help students find what they need from a faculty-defined set of resources. And because the materials are stored online, students can study and work on their projects day and night, from anywhere they happen to be.

Recommendation 4: Extend and enrich interaction among students, faculty, and others with whom they work and learn

The sophisticated, engaging assignments suggested by the three t's often involve interaction among students: Learning communities (a high-impact practice), team projects, debates, student reports on complementary topics, and peer critique are all examples of this kind of interactive learning. Modern communications technology makes it possible to carry on such interaction when a class is not in session.

More importantly, such technologies can help faculty and students carry on kinds of conversations that couldn't easily have happened otherwise.

• Since the 1980s, Project ICONS at the University of Maryland has engaged undergraduates from different institutions and countries in online role-playing simulations to help them study international conflict and negotiation.

• In the early 1990s, pioneers at the California State University system realized how hard it was to teach about race and class when the students on a campus came from similar ethnic and economic backgrounds. Using the system's interactive video network, such a course could enroll a diverse group of student registered on different campuses and drawn from different parts of California (Young, 1997).
• Today, teams of students living different countries and registered at different universities work together in virtual teams to do projects in global management in a OneMBA Executive MBA Program, a joint offering of five business schools (including the Kenan-Flager Business School at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) on four continents.

Technology can enrich academic conversation in other ways as well. In the early 1990s, a philosophy professor remarked to me, “I never talk philosophy with undergraduates. They just aren't up to that yet. Ah, but email! When we exchange email, they have enough time to think about what they've read and to compose what they want to reply. We can have very productive philosophical exchanges using email.”

In the 1980s, Starr Roxanne Hiltz did research suggesting that, while non-native speakers of English at the New Jersey Institute of Technology averaged lower grades than native speakers, in online courses their grades were the same as those of native speakers. Like the philosophy students, the non-native speakers in online courses had more time to interpret what the instructor and other students had said and then to reply; they wrote just as much as native speakers and could fully participate in the faculty-student and student-student interaction that is so important to effective learning (Hiltz, 1994).

Technology costs need not be prohibitive if the program uses the same tools each year with increasing sophistication. People are accustomed to the idea of a standardized email program that doesn't change every year or two. It also makes sense to agree on tools for document sharing, for scheduling, for conferring and working together on documents from a distance, and so on—a standard constellation of tools for collaborative work that make it easy to include people from outside the institution in conversations and joint projects.

Recommendation 5: Rather than tracking only whether all students are learning the same things, assessment should also attend to divergent learning

The defining question of traditional assessment has been, “To what extent has each person achieved all the learning goals dictated by the program?” This attention to uniform impact assumes that the goal of the program is to teach everyone the same things and therefore focuses only on those attainments.

However, in an academic program that also fosters empowerment, the uniform-impact perspective must be complemented by asking, “What are the most important things that each student has learned, regardless of whether others have learned those same things?” This unique-uses perspective regards the program as an opportunity that different students use in different ways, with qualitatively different and sometimes surprising results (Balestri, Ehrmann, and Associates, 1988).

Faculty members grading student essays or projects engage in unique-uses assessment. First they assess the work of each student, providing feedback and judging the quality of that student's work on its own terms. Five projects may each earn an “A,” but each for a different reason. After each student's work is graded, then a search for patterns across the entire group may begin. Are students excelling (or not) in similar ways? Are there similarities in the errors they make or the problems that they experience? Unique-uses assessment can be improved by having more than one judge, using appropriate rubrics, and collecting student work in portfolios.

Summary comment about recommendations 1–5: Try to address who is to learn, what they are to learn, and how they are to learn simultaneously

Upgrading content, deepening learning, and improving enrollment or retention may sound like three conflicting goals. For example, some faculty members see content coverage and deep learning as conflicting priorities. And some assume that any effort to increase enrollments is, by definition, a threat to excellence, or vice versa.

But long ago books and printing presses had that triple impact: compared with earlier times when learning occurred only through conversation, demonstration, and experience, each reader could learn from many experts, living and dead, and each expert could reach more learners across space and time. Meanwhile, publications helped those scholars include more in their teaching. Today, as we've seen, digital technologies are being used in similar ways to produce a similar triple benefit.

Corollary to recommendations 1–5: Distance-learning programs often aspire simply to make their quality comparable to that of on-campus programs. Instead they should use technologies to improve what and how students learn. By the same token, faculty using digital technologies to upgrade content and improve pedagogy on campus should make some of those courses into hybrids—more of the presentation and interaction online and less time spent face-to-face—so that more students can register.

Five Recommendations for Implementing Sustainable Improvement

Recommendation 6: Help faculty take safe, incremental steps that cumulatively meet an indentified need

Facing heavy demands on their time, faculty are more likely to try something new if it takes very little time to understand, invent, or develop and little time or risk to try. A teaching idea or resource becomes even more attractive if its results are likely to be timesaving and easy to see.

At the TLT Group, we refer to these as low-threshold applications (i.e., technologies) and activities (e.g., assignments, techniques), or LTAs. “Low threshold” is a relative term: a particular resource might be quite easy for one person to adapt in a particular context but “high threshold” for a different instructor with different skills or working in a less supportive environment.

To make the quickest, easiest progress, faculty should search the world for appropriate LTAs. “Not invented here” should be a point of pride, not embarrassment. Faculty shouldn't have to do this alone, however. Librarians and student assistants, for example, can help faculty with the quest for the most timesaving, effective techniques and materials.

Recommendation 7: Encourage peer support among faculty as a way of discovering, adapting, and sharing relevant LTAs

No one should be expected to create most of his or her own teaching ideas and materials. And no institution has enough support staff to provide that aid for every instructor. So for an academic program to improve, faculty must help one another. Here are some ways to facilitate that mutual aid:

• Develop and sustain faculty communities of practice. A typical community might be organized around a course that all its members teach, ideally including faculty from several nearby institutions. By meeting online frequently (and occasionally face-to-face) and briefly, members can share problems, discover remedies, trade experiences, and support one another.

• Identify faculty teaching fellows in each program who are already respected by their colleagues as sources of LTAs. Provide the fellows with extra resources (e.g., travel support, release time) to help them help their colleagues.
• Make it easy for each faculty member to announce occasions when colleagues can visit a course and see a particular teaching technique or technology in action. Kapi'olani Community College has done this for years.
• Use surveys to identify and harvest LTAs from faculty: Just two- to four-sentence descriptions should suffice. Each LTA should include the name and email of the person who has described it so that interested faculty can contact the author of the abstract. Organize the LTAs into relevant categories, as the TLT Group has done with the “Seven Principles: Collection of Ideas for Teaching and Learning with Technology.” Use newsletters, email, online posts, and paper bookmarks to spread such teaching tips to colleagues.
• Help faculty share their ideas by helping them produce flyers, Websites, and short video clips.
• Encourage short (five- to ten-minute) faculty-led workshops about teaching ideas and resources as agenda items in departmental faculty meetings, each introducing a teaching idea or resource (a strategy pioneered by Todd Zakrajsek at Central Michigan University).

All six of these ideas help develop relationships among faculty, within and across institutional lines. When faculty gain experience with each other's teaching suggestions and needs, communication about new ideas becomes quicker, easier, and more credible. For example, when someone remarks, “I've just tried something in my course and it worked for me,” colleagues are more likely to pay attention if:

• The speaker already knows their situation and has made the suggestion specifically to meet a need of the listener.

• The listener already knows that the speaker has been in a situation similar to theirs.
• The listener already trusts the speaker's judgment on teaching and learning issues of this sort.

The interested listener can simply copy what the speaker did originally. That's quick, easy, and should work well enough. Later, if the first try proved rewarding, the new user might spend a little more time adapting the idea. Try (then tweak) is more timesaving than Tweak in order to try.

Recommendation 8: Train, equip, and support all faculty and staff to evaluate their own programs and practices

As used here, “evaluation” is an intentional inquiry into one's own practices with the goal of improving that practice. When a program is groping its way forward, it's important for everyone to discover the effects of what they've been doing so that they can each decide what to do next.

Thomas Angelo and K. Patricia Cross have developed a collection of “classroom assessment techniques” that faculty can use to improve learning day-by-day. And the Flashlight Project has online tools for “Asking the Right Questions” (ARQ), available at http://www.tltgroup.org/Flashlight/ARQ/Index.htm. Each tool is supported with workshop materials, making it easy for faculty to learn to do the research in just a few minutes. Several ARQ tools focus on issues raised by the strategies in this essay (e.g., identifying and lowering barriers that prevent some students from participating fully in online discussion or a virtual team).

It makes sense for academics to evaluate their practices in order not only to improve learning but to save time by reducing burdensome activities. For example, at the University of Pennsylvania, Pope and Anderson (2003) studied the costs of undergraduate engineering laboratories. They assessed the cost of the most burdensome activities (e.g. training students to use equipment), then created ways to save time (and money) on those tasks while also improving education. For example, routine training was switched from the lab to online tutorials. That freed up valuable (and expensive) lab time for teaching engineering. Breakage was reduced as well, further cutting costs. Result: undergraduate labs became more effective and less expensive.

Courses are not the only source of data for discovering how to improve an academic program. Some institutions, for example, have extensive programs of co-operative education. Drexel University is one such institution. Drexel has also defined a set of learning outcomes for its graduates. The TLT Group has begun helping Drexel create an evaluation program that will enable both employers and students to rate the importance of those outcomes in each co-op experience and to assess each student's skills. These reports, summarized across all students in a degree program, should provide faculty with both a measure of the value employers place on each skill and the faculty's success in teaching it. Over time, the evaluations could also provide evidence of programmatic improvement.

Engaging employers in an evaluation such as this also has another crucial advantage: It helps spread the word about the efforts the program is making to improve. Remember, the goal of these ten recommendations is not only to improve a program's outcomes but also to help the wider world realize that they are improving.

Program-wide evaluation of student progress can also motivate faculty and staff to keep inching forward, even when they don't see immediate evidence that their work is making a contribution. First, capstone courses and e-portfolios can shine some light on what students have learned. Second, studying how teaching and learning are changing across the curriculum can provide additional insight into whether all the small improvements are adding up to a cumulative change.

Recommendation 9: Slowly realign the experiences of faculty and staff to the needs of the evolving program

Some curricular reforms have surged, then faded, because not enough faculty had the skills and experiences needed to teach the new courses, especially once the original innovators were replaced over the years. Imagine, for example, biologists and mechanical engineering faculty who three decades ago went straight from graduate school to teaching and who are now asked to teach students for careers in biotechnology.

There are many ways for programs to acquire a new experience base: e.g., formal training, changes in hiring, changes in reward systems, externships, adding adjunct faculty with professional experience, and moving some education off-campus (e.g., through internships).

Recommendation 10: Develop coalitions to sustain the initiative

Implementing these recommendations requires extensive collaboration both externally (with other institutions and organizations) and internally (among faculty, staff, and students).

External coalitions: When several institutions and organizations get together, each partner may gain resources and opportunities. For example, by working with agencies around the world, the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) has created a global network of sites where its students and faculty can work on community projects for months at a time.

Such coalitions can help the outside world recognize that the program's outcomes have improved in important ways. For that and other reasons, the planning team ought to assemble an advisory committee representing the outside groups that have a stake in the program's improvement, groups whose support could guide and support that progress (e.g. employers, government officials, alumni, guidance counselors, and academics from other institutions).

Internal coalitions: Librarians, technology specialists, facilities planners, admissions specialists, and other support staff need to work with faculty to plan and carry out programmatic reforms. Similarly, faculty should be integrally involved in planning changes in technology, libraries, learning spaces, and admissions.

These ten recommendations are an agenda for exploration rather than a set of settled principles. For example, Recommendation 2 asserts that the three t's provide a foundation for a gradual, major expansion of high-impact practices. Can this improvement be made at any time in any discipline, or would it work in only in a few disciplines and only every decade or two? Recommendation 4 calls for enriching online collaborative work. What sort of technology platform is low threshold for almost everyone and yet supple enough to evolve smoothly as the program develops? Recommendation 7 calls for large numbers of faculty to engage in sustainable communities of practice. How can such communities be organized at sufficient scale and low-enough cost? How can they remain an attractive-enough experience so that faculty continue to participate?

Technology has advanced sufficiently to be a critical tool for improving the outcomes of degree programs. In the next decade we ought to test the power and explore the limits of these ten recommendations for making such improvements.

Acknowledgements

I couldn't possibly acknowledge all the sources for the ideas assembled in this paper. But it's important to recognize the long-term, crucial role played by the ideas and friendship of my colleague Steven W. Gilbert. Although I had encountered ideas about incremental, slow progress toward major improvements long ago, for example, Steve's work over the last decade on “low-threshold applications” and “frugal innovation” helped bring these issues to the center of my own thinking.

Resources

1. Angelo, T. A. and Cross, K. P. (1993) Classroom assessment techniques: A handbook for college teachers, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA.

2. Balestri, D. P. and Ehrmann, S. C. (1988) Ivory towers, silicon basements: Learner-centered computing in postsecondary education, Academic Computing, McKinney, TX. Associates

3. Bowen, H. R. (1980) The costs of higher education: How much do colleges and universities spend per student and how much should they spend?, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA.

4. Ehrmann, S. C. (1995, March/April) Asking the right question: What does research tell us about technology and higher learning?. Change. The Magazine of Higher Learning 27:2, pp. 20-27.

5. Ehrmann, S. C. (2010) Asking the right questions: Engaging mainstream faculty in the scholarship of teaching and learning, Accessed January 5, 2010, at http://www.tltgroup.org/Flashlight/ARQ/Index.htm.

6. Hiltz, S. R. (1994) The virtual classroom: Learning without limits via computer networks, Ablex Publishing, Norwood, NJ. (Human-Computer Interaction Series).

7. Kuh, G. D. (2008) High-impact educational practices: What they are, who has access to them, and why they matter, Association of American College and Universities, Washington, DC.

8. Pope, D. and Anderson, H. Ehrmann, S. C. and Milam Jr., J. H. (eds) (2003) Reducing the costs of laboratory instruction through the use of on-line laboratory instruction. Flashlight cost analysis handbook: Modeling resource use in teaching and learning with technology, Version 2.0, The TLT Group, Takoma Park, MD.

9. Young, G. A. (1997) Facilitating difficult dialogues: Diversity, distance and dialogue (CD ROM), California State University, Hayward, CA.

Stephen C. Ehrmann is an associate clinical professor of learning technologies and senior coordinator of special projects in the provost's office at Drexel University. He also serves as senior consultant with the Teaching, Learning and Technology Group, which he co-founded in 1998. Ehrmann was formerly senior program officer with the Annenberg/CPB Project, where he created the Flashlight Program for the Evaluation and Improvement of Educational Uses of Technology in 1992. Previously he was a program officer with the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) and director of educational research and assistance at The Evergreen State College.

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