A new book out this month, Higher Education Beyond Covid: New Teaching Paradigms and Promise, explores this period through the stories of campus teaching and learning centers. Their experiences reflect successes and failures, and what higher education could learn as it plans for the future.
As Inara Scott, one of the contributors, noted, disruption is now endemic to higher education, whether in the form of changing student demographics, new technologies, or new forms of teaching. “To be successful in their jobs,” wrote Scott, senior associate dean of the College of Business at Oregon State University, faculty “must (like their students) be able to adapt to new environments and expectations.”
That’s a daunting task, of course. But that’s the point of the book: Faculty need ongoing support to adjust their teaching to changing demands. And having a teaching center on campus is an important step. Yet, according to another recent book, Centers for Teaching and Learning: The New Landscape in Higher Education, by Mary C. Wright, only about a quarter of campuses have one.
I spoke to the editors of Higher Education Beyond Covid about their project. They are Regan A.R. Gurung, associate vice provost and executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, and Dwaine Plaza, a professor of sociology, both of whom are at Oregon State University. They said that they wanted to offer a range of experiences, to include stories from research universities, liberal-arts colleges, community colleges, and minority-serving institutions. They also wanted to pack the book with data and surveys that show, for example, how faculty and students responded to pandemic teaching and how the experience has shifted teaching and learning preferences.
“Here’s the map,” said Gurung, “for our next few years in higher education for how to do this better.”
The book is designed for administrators wondering how to best move forward after the pandemic, teaching centers struggling to get more resources, and faculty members who work on campuses that don’t have a center and want to advocate for one.
Plaza said he hopes faculty members will read about the campus experiences and understand “the resilience that comes when you have a united front to attack a problem. You can’t do it as an army of one, and you have to use the resources on your campus that already exist.”
Both said that the experience of editing the book, and more than three dozen contributors, made them optimistic about how adaptable and resilient teaching is and can be.
“Higher education moves at glacial speeds,” said Plaza, “but we’re going to have to move much quicker now.”
How do you think teaching and learning may change in the short term, based on what you’ve seen in the last couple of years? Write to me with your predictions at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, and they may appear in a future newsletter.
Teaching alongside ChatGPT
What has your fall semester been like now that ChatGPT and other generative AI tools are ubiquitous? Are students using them responsibly? Are you seeing cheating with AI on the rise? Have you redesigned your assignments and assessments to either promote or mitigate AI use? Are you talking with colleagues about the issues it raises for teaching and learning?
Whether you love these new tools, hate them, or fall somewhere in between, we want to hear from you. Please fill out this Google form and, with your permission, your experiences may appear in a story we plan to run later this fall.
Asynch vs. AI
Recently I wrote about how instructors are using AI in class. Some are giving assignments they hope will help students cast a more critical eye on generative AI; others are showing students how AI can be used productively.
But how can you appropriately guide students in an online course? That’s what Beth Rapp Young, an associate professor in the department of English at the University of Central Florida, is wrestling with.
She writes:
I find that the AI can solve many homework and test questions in the classes I teach. For example, the AI can “Write a sentence that contains both a nominal clause and an adverbial prepositional phrase” or “Explain whether this sentence [written in Old English] is in SVO, SOV, or VSO order” or “Which of the following passages does NOT follow the known/new contract?” Often the classes I teach are fully online/asynchronous so there is no possibility of moving some of this work to a face-to-face classroom.
Young wants to know how other instructors in similar positions have been responding to this challenge. If you teach an asynchronous course and have found ways to discourage or circumvent misuse of generative AI among your students, write to me at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, and your story may appear in a future newsletter.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
As always, nonsubscribers who register for a free Chronicle account can read two articles a month. Your readership supports our journalism.
— Beth
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