Tomorrow's Professor Blog

“It seems important then, that teachers provide structures and models of effective work that encourage students to carefully balance their course work and other obligations. To use the common expression, teachers should help students to “work smart, not just work hard.”

This notion is echoed by the former chief executive officer of General Motors, Roger Smith (1987), who believes that “the Liberal Arts may ultimately prove to be the most relevant learning model. People trained in the Liberal Arts learn to tolerate ambiguity and to bring order out of apparent confusion. They have the kind of sideways thinking and cross-classifying habit of mind that comes from learning, among other things, the many different ways of looking at literary works, social systems, chemical processes, or languages.”

We posit that readiness for online learning has less to do with students’ knowledge of technology and digital dexterity and more to do with their knowledge of how to learn and their motivation to engage fully in the process. Therefore, we submit that the introduction of online experiences for students should be consciously engineered to best capitalize on their readiness for independent learning, and that the progression into the online learning environment be intentionally built into the undergraduate curriculum rather than simply offering students an open menu of face-to-face, hybrid, or fully online courses.

She stressed that she’s not abandoning the role of grading, but having students take ownership of the task in a way that shows that “evaluation, in a serious way, is part of collaborative, interactive creativity. Right now, we have an educational system that encourages ‘teaching to the test.’ That’s appalling as a learning philosophy and a total waste of precious learning time and opportunities in the digital age.”

Entering the world of undergraduate instruction can be daunting, enlivening, and everything in between. In our experience, we needed an intellectual hook (the AAC&U initiative), professional legitimacy (the Association for Prevention Teaching and Research’s leadership), an administrative nudge (the mandate to increase enrollments), and resource support (small grants to facilitate collaboration). What we gained were new colleagues across the campus, new opportunities for collaborative research, greater visibility within our institution, and the energy, talents, and twenty-first-century sensibilities of undergraduate students.