Tag: Events

Guide Outlines Change Management for College Course Scheduling
Timely college completion has benefits for both the student and the institution. Learners who graduate on time—within two or four years, depending on the degree program—hold less debt and have greater earnings potential because they’re able to enter the workforce sooner.

National data reveals that only 17 percent of students at public two-year colleges complete a degree in two years, and 40 percent of students at public four-year institutions graduate on time. While a variety of personal challenges can limit students’ timely completion, institutional processes can also have an impact. According to the course scheduling software provider Ad Astra’s 2024 Benchmark Report, which included data from 1.3 million students, 26 percent of program requirement courses were not offered during the terms indicated in pathway guidance, leaving students without a clear road map to completion.

A new resource from Ad Astra and Complete College America identifies ways institutions can reconsider class scheduling to maximize opportunities for student completion.

What’s the need: Students report a need for additional support in scheduling and charting academic pathways; a 2024 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab found that 26 percent of respondents want their college to create or clarify academic program pathways. An additional 28 percent want their institution to introduce online platforms to help them plan out degree progress.

Nontraditional students, including adult learners, parenting students and working students, are more likely to face scheduling challenges that can also impede their progress. A 2024 survey of online learners (who are primarily older, working and caregiving students) found that 68 percent of respondents considered time to degree completion a top factor in selecting their program and institution.

But making the switch to a better system isn’t exactly a cakewalk for higher ed institutions, and establishing strong top-down policies can create its own hurdles. “Because leadership changes in organizations and institutions, because we get more and more students enrolling and registering, we still have to continue to reiterate this message about how important academic scheduling is,” said Complete College America president Yolanda Watson Spiva. “But we’re happy to do it because it still remains one of the best levers for helping students to persist and complete college.”

Becoming a student-centered institution with predictable and flexible scheduling also benefits the institution because it means continuous enrollment, Watson Spiva said

“Whether it’s Uber or Amazon, all these things are meant to make life easier, and yet for some reason, in higher ed, we haven’t caught up to that, that convenience is a major factor” in improving student enrollment and retention, Watson Spiva said. “Until we change our mindset in terms of embracing students as agents of change and having agency in and of themselves, I think we’re going to continue to grapple with this pervasive issue.”

The new report is a playbook of sorts to help institutions prepare to make change, said Ad Astra’s president, Sarah Collins. “This is one of the next big things that institutions really need to get their arms around, I think, because it’s so culturally difficult and very big, very hairy and scary,” Collins said.

How to make change: For institutions that want to do better and overhaul current practices, Ad Astra’s report provides starting points that administrators can consider, including:
- Assessing the institution’s readiness for change, including current scheduling practices, faculty concerns and priorities, as well as the institution’s context, such as previous efforts and resource constraints. Administrators should identify existing inefficiencies, as well as resources and staff capacity, to implement and sustain change.
- Being aware that making adjustments requires more than technical training; it also demands capabilities to engage in change leadership practices and sustained support to ensure changes are embedded into the institutional culture.
- Celebrating and recognizing positive changes. Data and storytelling can measure impact as well as affirm how practices make a difference in student success.
Evaluating the organizational structure of the institution is one key piece, Collins said, because colleges tend to be designed around a strategy rather than a student. Institutions should also prioritize data collection and distribution, because that’s a frequent sticking point in change-management practices.

“Making sure that the data tells a story, convincing people to believe the data, making sure that the things you’re trying to measure are the things that actually matter and they actually map to the bigger thing you’re trying to accomplish,” Collins explained.

Additionally, prioritizing the student voice in conversations about course scheduling can ensure that the institution is centered on learners’ needs. “It should not just be the traditional-age student,” Watson Spiva said. “It should also include post-traditional students—working learners, parenting learners—because their scheduling needs are going to be very, very diverse.”

We bet your colleague would like this article, too. Send them this link to subscribe to our newsletter on Student Success.
Source link
September 3, 2025
AI Companies Roll Out Educational Tools

Fall semesters are just beginning, and the companies offering three leading AI models—Gemini by Google, Claude by Anthropic and ChatGPT by OpenAI—have rolled out tools to facilitate AI-enhanced learning. Here’s a comparison and how to get them.

Each of the three leading AI providers has taken a somewhat different approach to providing an array of educational tools and support for students, faculty and administrators. We can expect these tools to improve, proliferate and become a competitive battleground among the three. At stake is, at least in part, the future marketplace for their products. To the extent educators utilize, administrators support and students become comfortable with one of the proprietary products, that provider will be at an advantage when those students rise to positions that allow them to specify use of a provider in educational institutions, companies and corporations across the country.

Anthropic, the company that makes the series of Claude applications, announced on Aug. 21 “two initiatives for AI in education to help navigate these critical decisions: a Higher Education Advisory Board to guide Claude’s development for education, and three AI Fluency courses co-created with educators that can help teachers and students build practical, responsible AI skills.”

The board is chaired by Rick Levin, former president of Yale and more recently at Coursera. Anthropic notes in the announcement, “At Coursera, he built one of the world’s largest platforms for online learning, bringing high-quality education to millions worldwide.” The board itself is populated with former and current leading administrators at Rice University, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas at Austin and Stanford, as well as Yolanda Watson Spiva, who is president of Complete College America. Anthropic says the board will “help guide how Claude serves teaching, learning, and research in higher education.”

The three AI Fluency courses that Anthropic co-created with educators are designed to help create thoughtful practical frameworks for AI integration:

“AI Fluency for Educators helps faculty integrate AI into their teaching practice, from creating materials and assessments to enhancing classroom discussions. Built on experience from early adopters, it shows what works in real classrooms. AI Fluency for Students teaches responsible AI collaboration for coursework and career planning. Students learn to work with AI while developing their own critical thinking skills, and write their own personal commitment to responsible AI use. Teaching AI Fluency supports educators who want to bring AI literacy to their campuses and classrooms. It includes frameworks for instruction and assessment, plus curriculum considerations for preparing students for a more AI-enhanced world.”

The courses and more are freely available at the Anthropic Learning Academy.

Earlier last month, Google unveiled Guided Learning in Gemini: From Answers to Understanding: “Guided Learning encourages participation through probing and open-ended questions that spark a discussion and provide an opportunity to dive deeper into a subject. The aim is to help you build a deep understanding instead of just getting answers. Guided Learning breaks down problems step-by-step and adapts explanations to your needs—all to help you build knowledge and skills.”

The Google Guided Learning project offers additional support to faculty. “We worked with educators to design Guided Learning to be a partner in their teaching, built on the core principle that real learning is an active, constructive process. It encourages students to move beyond answers and develop their own thinking by guiding them with questions that foster critical thought. To make it simple to bring this approach into their classrooms, we created a dedicated link that educators can post directly in Google Classroom or share with students.”

Google announced an array of additional tools for the coming year:

“We’re offering students in the U.S. as well as Japan, Indonesia, Korea and Brazil a free one-year subscription to Google’s AI Pro plan to help make the most of AI’s power for their studies. Sign-up for the free AI Pro Plan offer.

Try new learning features in Gemini including Guided Learning, Flashcards and Study Guides. And students and universities around the world can get a free one-year subscription to a Google AI Pro plan.

AI Mode in Google Search now features tools like Canvas, Search Live with video and PDF uploads.

NotebookLM is introducing Featured Notebooks, Video Overviews and a new study panel; it’s also now available to users under 18.

And to help students get the most out of all these new features, we’ve announced Google AI for Education Accelerator, an initiative to offer free AI training and Google Career Certificates to every college student in America. Over 100 public universities have already signed up. We’re also committing $1 billion in new funding to education in the United States over the next three years.”

That brings us to OpenAI, which announced ChatGPT Study Mode on July 29, 2025. Noting ChatGPT’s overall leadership and success, OpenAI added, “But its use in education has also raised an important question: how do we ensure it is used to support real learning, and doesn’t just offer solutions without helping students make sense of them? We’ve built study mode to help answer this question. When students engage with study mode, they’re met with guiding questions that calibrate responses to their objective and skill level to help them build deeper understanding. Study mode is designed to be engaging and interactive, and to help students learn something—not just finish something.”

The Study Mode function is available now in the Free, Plus, Pro and Team versions of GPT products providing an array of features:

“Interactive prompts: Combines Socratic questioning, hints, and self-reflection prompts to guide understanding and promote active learning, instead of providing answers outright. Scaffolded responses: Information is organized into easy-to-follow sections that highlight the key connections between topics, keeping information engaging with just the right amount of context and reducing overwhelm for complex topics. Personalized support: Lessons are tailored to the right level for the user, based on questions that assess skill level and memory from previous chats. Knowledge checks: Quizzes and open-ended questions, along with personalized feedback to track progress, support knowledge retention and the ability to apply that knowledge in new contexts. Flexibility: Easily toggle study mode on and off during a conversation, giving you the flexibility to adapt to your learning goals in each conversation.”

I encourage readers to visit each of the sites linked above to become familiar with the different ways Anthropic, Google and OpenAI are approaching providing support to educational institutions and individual instructors and learners. This is an opportunity to become more familiar with each of the leading AI providers and their apps. Now is the time to become experienced in using these tools that collectively have become the foundation of innovation and efficiency in 2025.

Source link

September 3, 2025
Why Area Studies Matters (opinion)

Area studies, the interdisciplinary study of region-specific knowledge, is under threat in the United States. Some area studies programs are facing immediate dismantling by red-state legislatures. Others, at private universities or in blue states, are more likely to experience a slow decline through dozens of small cuts that may leave them untenable. While most area studies programs are small, their loss would ripple through a wide range of disciplines, impoverishing teaching, research and scholarship across the humanities and social sciences.

Most contemporary area studies departments were developed and funded in part to meet perceived U.S. national security needs during the Cold War. Nonetheless, area studies programs have, from the outset, reached far beyond policy concerns. They should be saved, not (just) out of concern for the national interest, but because they are fundamental to our modern universities. Area studies have helped to pluralize our understanding of the drivers of history, the sources of literary greatness and the origins and uses of the sciences, enabling scholars to challenge narratives of “Western” normativity.

As the second Trump administration has thrown federal support for area studies into question, some scholars have come to the field’s defense from the perspective of U.S. security and national interests. They have noted that cutting government funding for programs such as the Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships will linguistically and intellectually impoverish future cadres of policymakers. But in the present political landscape, in which the Trump administration has demonstrated little if any interest in maintaining the trappings of U.S. soft power, it seems unlikely that the federal government will restore funding for language education and the development of regionally specific knowledge. Their ability to contribute to U.S. soft power will not save area studies.

The future of area studies lies beyond state security and policy interests and instead with the core mission of our universities. If we are to save area studies, we must admit—and celebrate—the fact that the benefits of area studies have never been just about U.S. national interests. Indeed, area studies have decisively shaped how scholarship and education are practiced on U.S. university campuses.

Since the 1950s, area studies programs have quietly informed disciplinary practices across the humanities and social sciences, changing education even for students who never take courses offered by formal area studies departments. In part, this is because scholars educated through area studies programs teach in history, anthropology, political science, religious studies and a bevy of other programs that require a depth of linguistic and regional knowledge. These scholars introduce global, regional and non-Western knowledge to students at colleges and universities that may not host their own area studies programs, but that rely on the cultivation of regionally specific knowledge at institutions that have invested in and embraced the area studies model. Some of these scholars undertook area studies as their primary field of research. In other cases, including my own, they hold Ph.Ds. in other disciplines but would not have been able to conduct their research without access to the language and regionally specific courses offered by area studies programs at their universities.

The influence of area studies stretches beyond this immediate impact on scholars and their students. Area studies scholars have insisted that there is just as much to be learned within Middle Eastern, Latin American or sub-Saharan African literature, histories and cultures as there is in Western European or the modern North American Anglophone traditions. At their best, area studies have reminded us that none of these formations or knowledge traditions exist in isolation, that there are no “pure” or untouched civilizations and that ideas and practices have always circulated and shaped each other, whether violently or peacefully. Certainly, many scholars knew and studied these realities well before the advent of the contemporary area studies model. Nonetheless, the presence of area studies in many prominent U.S. universities from the 1950s onward enabled a quiet but certain reckoning with historical scholarly exclusions and helped to internationalize U.S. campus communities.

Federal and state cuts and institutional austerity are now reshaping university departments and programs across many disciplines. But area studies programs are especially at risk in part because they are excluded from some calls for the defense of the humanities or liberal arts that take an older, pre–area studies view of our shared cultural and historical knowledge. Even more troublingly, the far right is eager to claim and weaponize the humanities for itself. Its vision of the humanities, and of the liberal arts more generally, is one that not only rejects area studies, but also seeks to undo critical approaches to European and Anglophone literature and history. The far right portrays the humanities in triumphalist civilizational terms, imagining a fallacious pure Western (white) tradition that justifies contemporary forms of dominance and exclusion.

Scholars within the fields that have seen increased interest from the far right are fighting their own battles against these imagined, reactionary pasts. But those of us within area studies—and fields that have been enriched by area studies—also have our part to play. We must refuse to concede to narratives of human history, literature, culture and politics that write out the experiences and contributions of non-European, non-Anglophone or nonwhite individuals and communities.

The most extreme current threat to area studies, like many threats to the humanities and social sciences more generally, comes from hostile red-state legislatures. I completed an area studies M.A. in central Eurasian studies at Indiana University, a program that hosts languages such as Mongolian, Kurdish and Uyghur, which are rarely if ever taught at other institutions in North America. That program, like many of Indiana’s other vaunted area studies degrees (and many other programs) is currently slated for suspension with “teach-out toward elimination.”

Yet even institutions seemingly removed from such direct political pressure seem poised to reduce their engagement with area studies. I am now an assistant professor in South Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago, a program that has produced renowned scholars of South Asia globally and offers languages ranging from Tibetan to Tamil. The university has proposed decreasing the number of departments within its Division of the Arts and Humanities and limiting offerings in language classes that do not regularly attract large numbers of students. These policies could result in significant cuts to relatively small area studies programs like my own. And none of these proposals are unique. Whether rapidly or slowly, universities across the country are walking back their commitments to area studies, especially the study of non-Western languages.

There are actions that we, as area studies scholars, can take to ensure the longevity of our work. As we revel in the complexities of the regions we have chosen to study, we sometimes forget how unfamiliar they remain to many American undergraduate students. Unfamiliarity, however, should not mean inaccessibility. The Shahnameh or the Mahabharata may be less familiar to many of our students than The Iliad and The Odyssey, but there is no reason they should be less accessible. The study of modern sub-Saharan African histories or Southeast Asian languages is not intrinsically more esoteric than the study of modern North American histories or Western European languages. Our goal must be to welcome students into topics that seem unfamiliar and to share in their joy as what was once unfamiliar slowly becomes part of their system of knowledge.

Likewise, one of the most significant challenges stemming from the Cold War foundations of area studies is that the discipline is often organized along a mid-20th century, U.S.-centric understanding of global political fault lines and cultural boundaries associated with nation-states. These boundaries, as many scholars have shown, do not always reflect how people experience and understand their own cultures and histories. Yet scholars in area studies have become increasingly adept at working beyond these boundaries. Many of us use the framework of area studies to challenge understandings of regional borders as natural, identifying forms of mobility and connectivity that upend assumptions built on the locations of modern lines on modern maps.

Even as we make area studies more accessible and more reflective of transregional cultural worlds, area studies programs will never be moneymakers for U.S. universities. As the novelist Lydia Kiesling, a beneficiary of area studies and specifically of FLAS funding, noted in Time, “The market will never decide that Uzbek class is a worthwhile proposition, or that it is important for a K–12 teacher in a cash-strapped district to attend a free symposium on world history.” And so, in the absence of federal funding for these programs, any defense of area studies must ultimately come down to asking—begging!—our universities to look beyond the financial motives that seem to have overtaken their educational missions.

Ultimately, area studies allows us to embrace, even revel in, cultural, social and linguistic particularity and specificity and, through understanding these differences, recognize our shared humanity. At their best, area studies programs help students and the public dismantle cultural hierarchies through knowledge of non-Western traditions that have depth and heterogeneity equal to that of their European and Anglophone counterparts. In our present moment, as a dizzying range of university programs are destroyed by right-wing legislatures or threatened by aggressive institutional austerity, it may seem futile to call for the preservation of this seemingly small corner of the U.S. intellectual universe. Yet in an era when governments, both in the U.S. and abroad, seem beholden to narrow and exclusionary nationalist interests, fields of study that center the pluralism within our shared global histories and cultures are needed in our universities more than ever.

Amanda Lanzillo is an assistant professor in South Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago.

Source link

September 3, 2025
Is Your Idea Op-Ed Ready? Here’s a Test to Find Out
You have expert insights—plenty of them. You give impromptu lectures in office hours, debate podcast guests midrun and readily join boisterous debates over dinner. Maybe you’re even drafting a book that builds a careful case from your expert point of view. But when it comes time to write your own op-ed? That sharp idea can start to feel too complex, too niche or—let’s be honest—too wordy for 800 words aimed at a general audience.

That’s not a failing; it’s a feature of your training. Academics are trained to distill ideas for their peers, not for nonspecialists. You argue carefully, if not compactly. You cite meticulously, not conversationally. But public writing demands something different—skills to illuminate complex concepts in a way that an intelligent lay reader can follow, feel and act on.

Before you spend an afternoon translating your expert insight into an 800-word article you pitch to a newspaper or magazine, run your idea through this op-ed readiness test. It won’t replace compelling writing, but it may help determine whether your idea is ready to leave the seminar room and live, persuasively, on the opinion page.
1. Who cares? It’s a tough question, but not a cynical one. Just because something fascinates you doesn’t mean that it matters to the broader public. That’s not a judgment of your topic. It’s a reminder to find the resonance. What’s at stake beyond your personal experience or corner of the discipline? You don’t have to write about what’s already dominating headlines. In fact, if your idea surfaces something overlooked or offers a fresh lens, it may be exactly what public discourse needs. Urgency is not always about volume; it’s often about insight.
So ask yourself: Who, beyond academia, might find your idea clarifying, challenging or useful? Who might see their own experience differently—or see someone else’s for the first time? Who, if they read what you have to say, might think differently about something that affects their life, work, vote or values? If your answer is, “Well, maybe more people should care,” you might be onto something. But part of your task is to show them why.
1. Why now—or why always? Editors love a good news hook. If your idea connects to a breaking story, an upcoming decision or a public debate gaining steam, then run with it. But run fast. In journalism, “timely” means submitting within hours or a day or two, not weeks. If something is happening right now and you have a fresh angle, start writing.
Of course, not every op-ed needs a news peg. If your idea speaks to an enduring question or a slow-burning issue—and does so with clarity, urgency or surprising insight—it still has a shot. Just know that in an editor’s crowded inbox, a time peg can help your piece stand out. An “evergreen” op-ed may need to work harder and land stronger to compete.
1. Can you make your case by paragraph two? You don’t have to dumb down your argument, but you do have to speed it up. Public readers and their editors have strong opinions about long, slow windups. Spoiler: They don’t like them.
Try writing a working headline for your piece that’s under 60 characters. Then distill your argument in one or two crisp, compelling sentences—no acronyms, no jargon and no “hence” or “thus.” (Also, no “as Foucault reminds us.”) These sentences should appear early, ideally by the end of paragraph two. At first, this mandate can feel reductive. But being concise isn’t a betrayal of complexity. It’s a tool for focus. You’re not flattening your idea; you’re making it easy to find. If your piece needs detailed footnotes or a literature review, it’s probably not (yet) an op-ed.
1. What’s the aha? Your op-ed should offer insight that readers haven’t already heard several times this week. If your takeaway is “what you’ve heard, but with citations,” then it may still need sharpening. Some of the best pieces offer a twist such as an unexpected data point, an odd-but-illuminating comparison or a perspective that flips conventional wisdom on its head. You’re trying to make an intelligent reader think, “I hadn’t thought of that.”
2. Are you writing to connect—or to impress? You’re not writing to prove you’ve done the reading; you’re writing to help someone else think differently. Your op-ed should feel like an intelligent conversation over coffee, not a cautious explanation in a lecture hall. You don’t have to be breezy or punchy (unless that’s your style), but you should sound like a real person with a distinct voice. This isn’t about being casual for its own sake. It’s about being readable.
If your draft feels like it could be suitable for peer review, try loosening the syntax. Ask yourself: How would I say this to a smart friend who doesn’t share my training? Readers want active verbs, not hedges. When you write like someone who wants to be understood—not just cited—you don’t dilute your thinking; you make it land.
1. Will a reader remember it tomorrow? A good op-ed doesn’t just inform, it lingers. It leaves a mark, even a small one, on a reader’s thinking. That might come from a vivid image, a well-turned phrase or a question that unsettles something they thought they knew. If your argument is technically sound but leaves no lasting impression, it’s worth asking: What do I know that will stay with the reader? What might echo later, in a moment of uncertainty, over a dinner-table debate or in a voting booth?
If your idea for an op-ed makes it through these six questions, chances are it’s ready to leave the seminar room. From there, it’s all about shaping the piece—tightening the structure, sharpening the language and leading with your point. An op-ed doesn’t need to say everything you know on your topic. It just needs to make one point well, in a way that readers will remember.

Not every idea belongs on the op-ed page—but yours might. Ask the questions, trust your instincts and, when you’re ready, write it, shape it and send it.

And if you’d like more help along the way, sign up for my monthly newsletter. You’ll get notice of each new article in “The Public Scholar,” plus practical writing tips, behind-the-scenes insights from my work and inspiration from other academics finding their voice in public spaces. Your expertise is hard-won. What might happen if you shared what you know more broadly?

Susan D’Agostino is a mathematician whose stories have published in The Atlantic, BBC, Scientific American, The Washington Post, Wired, The Financial Times, Quanta and other leading publications. Her next book, How Math Will Save Your Life, will be published by W. W. Norton. Sign up for Susan’s free monthly newsletter here.
Source link
September 2, 2025
Therapy Dogs Boost Graduate Student Well-Being
Time spent with animals can boost feelings of well-being for students at all levels.

Laura Fay/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Therapy dogs are often touted as a way to give students a reprieve from busy academic schedules or remind them of their own pets at home, but a recent study from Chatham University found that engagement with therapy dogs can instill a sense of social connection for students at all levels.

An occupational therapy student at Chatham who researched how weekly therapy dog interactions could impact graduate students in health science programs found that the encounters produced benefits for students’ social and emotional health.

The background: Past research shows animal interventions can mitigate homesickness for first-year students who miss their pets and academic stress for nursing students. Students who participate in “dog office hours” also experience increased social connection and comfort. Shelter dogs can also motivate students’ physical well-being, as demonstrated by the University of South Carolina’s canine fitness course.

Graduate students in health science programs, in particular, report high rates of anxiety, depression and stress, according to the study.

Regardless of their program of study, graduate students also tend to be removed from general campus services and activities due to physical campus layouts, residing and working off campus, or a misalignment of schedules between resources and their responsibilities. Therefore, identifying services specifically for graduate students can improve their access and uptake.

How it works: Twenty-five students were recruited to participate in the study, meeting weekly to engage in activities with a group of therapy dogs, including petting, playing with, brushing, holding and walking the animals. Students could interact with the dogs for up to two hours over the course of the seven weeks. Before and after each puppy playdate, participants completed pre- and post-test surveys to gauge their feelings and the effects of the animal intervention.

Survey results showed students were less likely to report feeling stressed and more likely to say they felt happy after engaging with the dogs.

“I’ve really enjoyed this experience,” one participant wrote. “I feel like this has positively impacted my mood and well-being overall. I always leave feeling more relaxed and happier.”

In open-ended questions, students said the dogs made them feel happy, loved, calm, relaxed, motivated and connected. Many said they also appreciated the opportunity to engage with their peers, noting that the regular cadence allowed them to socialize and meet new people, including the therapy dogs’ owners. Students indicated they wanted the visits to continue in some way if possible.

The average student spent around 30 minutes with the therapy dogs during the trial, and, if they had the opportunity, a majority said they would participate in therapy animal groups on campus three to four times per month.
Other Comforting Canines

Chatham University students aren’t the only graduate students learning to destress from dogs. Here are some other examples of animal-assisted interventions across the country:

At Virginia Tech, graduate students at the Innovation Campus receive love and cuddles from Allen, a therapy dog who is co-handled by Barbara Hoopes, the graduate school’s associate dean for the region.

The City University of New York’s School of Public Health has hosted a therapy dog visit from the Good Dog Foundation to encourage graduate learners to relax and take a break during their week.

The University of Cincinnati featured therapy dogs at their Graduate Student Appreciation Week in April, honoring the hard work students do and helping them break their usual routines.
Source link
September 2, 2025
Instructional Designer at Springfield College

High-quality educational experiences are best created when professors partner with instructional/learning designers. This is true for in-person, hybrid and fully online courses. If you are searching for an instructional/learning designer, I would like to highlight that opportunity in this Featured Gig series.

Today, we are talking with Chris Hakala, director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship and professor of psychology at Springfield College, about his instructional designer search.

Q: What is the university’s mandate behind this role? How does it help align with and advance the university’s strategic priorities?

A: The College is invested in continuing to grow its online presence. We have recently had a number of our instructional designers leave for positions that offered them different flexibility or that allowed them to move into other positions, and this current position is to backfill that space and to support our faculty both in the online space as well as the in-person teaching as faculty continue to learn how to best leverage their LMS to benefit their students.

It aligns with our strategic priorities with regard to providing faculty with resources to best leverage our digital resources to align with our pedagogy.

Q: Where does the role sit within the university structure? How will the person in this role engage with other units and leaders across campus?

A: The instructional design team sits in the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship (our teaching center) and reports to the director. In that capacity, the Center engages with faculty in all formats of pedagogy and supports both the face-to-face and online pedagogy as well as the digital resources that engage learners. The new ID will work with the team in the center to align practices but will also engage extensively with faculty as subject-matter experts to best design digital resources for their particular style of pedagogy.

Q: What would success look like in one year? Three years? Beyond?

A: Success would be the continued growth of utilization of digital resources such that there is more consistency in what is available for learners in the digital platform. In three years, we’d like to grow our footprint on campus so that we are working alongside faculty in all areas to maximize learning.

Q: What kinds of future roles would someone who took this position be prepared for?

A: As a comprehensive teaching center, we encourage our instructional design team to learn about educational development writ large. Thus, we hope that over time our instructional designers engage in all manner of educational development, leaning into digital resources but also aligning pedagogical practice with creating effective assessments and further ensuring that they are appropriate for the learning outcomes of the courses. We expect our IDs to be well-versed in a variety of areas of educational development, including science of learning, so that our center speaks with a common voice.

Please get in touch if you are conducting a job search at the intersection of learning, technology and organizational change. If your gig is a good fit, featuring your gig on Featured Gigs is free.

Source link

September 2, 2025
A Teaching Mantra for the New Year (opinion)

As professors, we naturally talk a lot about teaching—and I’ve certainly benefited from public discussions at workshops and panel presentations. But we can also have more intimate moments of instructional insight, private moments we may initially keep to ourselves until over time we come to appreciate more fully their value.

Here’s my hitherto secret bit of pedagogic wisdom.

It’s my teaching mantra. For many years before teaching each class, I took a moment and silently repeated to myself: Be clear. Be engaging. Be honest. Be kind.

As a beginning teacher, it was a simple tactic to calm my nervousness before class. But as philosophers since Aristotle have recognized, daily choices become persistent habits that evolve into enduring character. It worked. As I strove to embody these values, they enabled me to bring the self I hoped to become into the classroom.

Clarity. Engagement. Honesty. Kindness. Simple teaching virtues, yet I’ve come to believe they have a larger salience in the turbulent academic world of today.

Be Clear

Students today are coming to college with their own share of inner turmoil. Unsettled by the disruptions of COVID, facing an uncertain job market, and inundated with social media skepticism about the value of college, there’s a vulnerability to them that’s new.

With their perceptions of a topsy-turvy world, students are understandably looking for clarity, elusive though it may be. Well-designed syllabi and clear directions help, but the clarity they’re looking for is something more than straightforward course formalities. The clarity they’re looking for is a more deeply rooted certainty that they can count on you.

Thus, providing the clarity students are hoping for today involves the self you bring to the classroom. It is more a matter of character than of course planning. Are you someone they can depend on, confide in and trust? Demonstrating these personal qualities hinges on the kind of outreach you make to students from the start.

Be Engaging

Tentative and uncertain as they often are, I can’t expect students to come to me. Personal outreach today means I have to make the first move. It also means doing so by beginning wherever they are. Only by beginning wherever they are can you hope to take them where you might want them to go.

While I dearly love my students, I don’t expect them to be like me. In my teaching, it has been important to remind myself of this as effective engagement depends on knowing your audience well. Particularly as I’ve gotten older, I’ve had to ensure my cultural references, case choices and even language use have a resonance for students decades younger than I am. I am regularly grateful to my daughter, a recent college graduate, for exposing me to the current lingo of “crashing out,” the delights of matcha and the talents of Billie Eilish.

Be Honest

Honesty is hard as a teacher, particularly when reading students’ less-than-laudatory evaluations. I’ve certainly had my share of such evaluations and they can discourage extending yourself in personal outreach. But I’ve taken heart from an entrepreneur friend who has counseled openness on my part. See such student comments simply as information, he said, just as he does in reflecting upon investor critiques after pitching a business plan.

Honesty is especially hard when enduring criticism of an unfair or even hostile nature, something that in the classroom can be especially painful. But taking criticism as simply information, as a source for developing my own deeper reflection and critical faculties, enables a self-honesty that I’ve come to realize I need not fear. In teaching law, I am regularly reminded of John Stuart Mill’s insight: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”

Be Kind

Sometimes, the personal outreach you offer matters more than even the latest teaching strategies you might employ. Kindness toward students can make a decisive difference. Once, while suffering from a bad cold and struggling with a lecture, I noticed that a student coughing in the front row was struggling with her own respiratory ailment. While continuing with the lecture, I offered her a few throat lozenges from the packet that was giving me relief. From the thankful look she gave me, I saw that simple unplanned gesture had a greater impact on her than any of the legal theories I espoused that day.

The turmoil of students’ inner lives mirrors the unsettled state of professors’ professional lives today. Many external forces are currently upending the established norms of academic life. From politicians who act to defund us to AIs that threaten to replace us to a public that increasingly distrusts us, the traditional foundations of academic culture are at risk. With such larger external threats to these traditional foundations, little tips for strengthening our relationships with students may appear to have negligible relevance or sway.

But such little ideas do matter, even if only because of the way they contribute to the cultural resilience colleges will need in the coming days. In a deeper sense, we as individual professors are the academy’s foundations, the strength in which its future resides. And the future begins with the values embedded in the teaching choices we make each day.

Jeffrey Nesteruk is an Emeritus Professor of Legal Studies at Franklin & Marshall College. He has published widely in the areas of law, ethics and liberal education and may be reached at [email protected].

Source link

September 2, 2025
Let’s Talk About Proxies and Admission (opinion)
The Trump administration has stepped up government scrutiny of college admission. Settlements reached with Brown and Columbia Universities each included a requirement that they pursue “merit-based” admission policies. On Aug. 7, President Trump issued a memorandum requiring colleges and universities to submit data to IPEDS (the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) demonstrating that they are not considering race in admission decisions. The Department of Education has since published in the Federal Register details about the planned data collection, with the public having 60 days to comment. And Attorney General Pam Bondi has entered into the fray by publishing a memo outlining what constitutes unlawful discrimination.

I will leave it to others to rail against the unprecedented federal attack on higher education and the incursion into admission policies at individual institutions. I would prefer to examine some of the issues and underlying assumptions suggested by these documents.

The Aug. 7 Presidential Memorandum

Trump’s memorandum calls for increased transparency to expose practices that are “unlawful” and to rid society of “shameful, dangerous racial hierarchies.” For some reason, it doesn’t say that all racial hierarchies are shameful and dangerous. Is that an oversight or a meaningful omission? The memorandum also asserts without explanation that race-based admission policies threaten national security.

The call to get rid of “shameful, dangerous racial hierarchies” is ironic. It is easy to imagine previous administrations using the same phrase to defend the very race-based admission policies that the executive order now seeks to abolish. “Shameful” and “dangerous” are in the eye of the beholder, and may not be color-blind.

What is not clear is how the administration intends to collect and analyze the data, given its efforts to gut the Department of Education. As Inside Higher Ed has reported, the National Center for Education Statistics had been decimated, with a staff of more than 100 reduced to a skeleton crew of three employees.

The Bondi Memo

Attorney General Bondi’s July 29 memorandum offered guidance to federal agencies about practices that may constitute illegal discrimination at colleges and other entities receiving federal funds. A lot of it is rehashed, targeting popular straw men/persons like DEI programs and transgender athletes (and bathrooms).

What is interesting is Bondi’s take on what she calls “unlawful proxy discrimination,” defined as the use of “facially neutral criteria” that function as “proxies” for race or other protected characteristics. Per the memo, examples in higher education may include things like requiring diversity statements in hiring or essay questions asking applicants to reflect on their unique identity or to write about obstacles they have overcome.

On a surface level, Bondi is right that those can become back doors to identify an individual’s race. At the same time, knowing the obstacles an individual has overcome is essential to understanding his or her unique story, and race would seem to be one of the factors that can heavily influence that story.

Where Bondi goes off the rails is in maintaining that what she calls “geographic targeting” may constitute a potentially unlawful proxy. She is suggesting that recruitment or outreach in schools and communities with high levels of racial minorities may be illegal. That is preposterous. Trying to expand access to education through outreach is in no way comparable to reverse engineering an admission process to arrive at a desired class composition.

Taken to its logical extreme, Bondi’s guidance would prevent colleges from recruiting not only at inner-city schools with a large percentage of Black students, but also at suburban schools with a large percentage of affluent white students. Both could be examples of what she calls “geographic targeting.” For that matter, colleges might be in violation for asking for an applicant’s address, because ZIP code information can be used as a proxy for determining race and socioeconomic status.

New Data Collection Requirements

As for data collection for IPEDS, the administration has proposed a new “Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement,” or ACTS. ACTS will require targeted colleges and universities to report data in the following categories, disaggregated by race and sex:
- Admissions test score quintile
- GPA quintile
- Family income range
- Pell Grant eligibility
- Parental education
It will also ask for information to be broken down for early decision, early action and regular admission as well as institutional need-based and merit aid. What’s missing? Legacy status and athletic recruits, both categories that benefit white applicants. At some of the Ivies, between 10-20 percent of the undergraduates are athletes, many in “country club” sports where most of the competitors are wealthy and white, and the proportion of athletes is even higher at the highly selective liberal arts colleges that make up the New England Small College Athletic Conference. Discovery in SFFA v. Harvard revealed that recruited athletes had an 86 percent admit rate. You don’t have to have had an uncle who taught at MIT to know that is substantially higher than the overall admit rate.

ACTS will apparently apply only to “all four-year institutions who utilize selective college admissions,” which the administration maintains “have an elevated risk of noncompliance with the civil rights laws.” That may at first glance seem to be singling out elite, “name” colleges, and that’s probably the intent, but it also reflects a recognition that the vast majority of institutions couldn’t practice race-based admission even if they wanted to because they are too busy filling the class to worry about crafting the class.

The focus on selective institutions will both make it easy to score political points and hard to derive meaning from the data. Selectivity, especially at the 5-10 percent level, makes it impossible to know why any individual is or isn’t admitted. Admission deans at the highly-selective (or rejective) universities report that they could fill several additional freshman classes from among those applicants who have been waitlisted or denied.

Merit-Based Admission

The real target of the push for “merit-based” admission may be holistic review. A holistic admission process allows colleges to take into consideration nuances in an individual’s background and life experiences. It can also be frustrating for applicants, since different individuals are admitted for different reasons. The government may be pushing consciously or unconsciously for a more formulaic selection process.

But would that be any better? Even if you focus only on grades and test scores, should you put more weight on a three-hour test or on four years of high school? How do you compare applicants from schools with different grading scales and levels of academic rigor? Should a test score obtained after thousands of dollars in test prep count the same as an identical score without coaching?

How do we distinguish between merit and privilege? Those who have strong test scores may be more likely to believe that test scores are a measure of merit, and yet test scores are strongly correlated with family income. Those who are born into wealth and privilege may come to believe that their good fortune is a proxy for merit, buying into a perverse and self-serving interpretation of John Calvin’s doctrine of the elect. They may see themselves as deserving rather than lucky.

Proxies in Admission

We need a larger discussion about proxies in college admission. Advanced Placement courses are a proxy for a rigorous curriculum. GPA is a proxy for academic accomplishment, and yet means little without understanding context. Similarly, SAT scores are often seen as a proxy for ability, despite the fact that the College Board long ago abandoned the pretense that the SAT measures “aptitude.” The U.S. News & World Report college rankings have always relied on proxies, such as alumni giving as a proxy for alumni satisfaction when it may be more a measure of the effectiveness of the development office. Selectivity is a proxy for academic quality—feeding into the belief that the harder a place is to get in, the better it must be. Are proxies for race any more problematic than these other proxies?

The larger question here is what should the selective college admission process be a proxy for. Should we seek to reward students for past performance? Predict who will earn the best grades in college? Identify those students who will benefit the most from the college experience? Or predict who will make the greatest contribution to society after college?

I’m waiting for an executive order or memo or even a discussion among college admission professionals about what the selective admission process should represent and what proxies will support those goals.

Jim Jump recently retired after 33 years as the academic dean and director of college counseling at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, Va. He previously served as an admissions officer, philosophy instructor and women’s basketball coach at the college level and is a past president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. He is the 2024 recipient of NACAC’s John B. Muir Excellence in Media Award.
Source link
September 2, 2025
Chancellors Playing Footsie With Authoritarianism

It is hard not to feel at least occasionally helpless these days trying to operate between the twinned pincers of a Trump administration steamrolling our democracy and an AI industry pursuing its goal of automating all means and matter of human expression.

It seems like, combined, they can take away just about anything: our grants, our international students, our jobs, our freedom.

Things get worse when those of us toiling away as laborers see those in positions of leadership at the institutions that should be bollards blocking the path of antihuman, antifreedom movements instead lying down so as to be more easily run over.

(Looking at you, Columbia University.)

Arguments about how we should consider some measure of accommodation (to fascism, to AI) abound, and some are even reasonable-sounding. These are powerful forces with their hands around the throat of our futures. Certainly no one can be blamed for doing what it takes to nudge those hands back a few millimeters so you can get enough air to breathe.

Those with the power to do so can seemingly take just about anything they want, except for one thing: your dignity.

Your dignity must be given away by an act of free will. Maybe I was naïve to think that more people would be protective of their dignity in these times, but I see so many instances of the opposite that I’m frequently stunned by the eagerness with which people are willing to hurl their dignity into the abyss for some perceived benefit.

The worst examples are found in the members of Donald Trump’s cabinet, who are occasionally tasked with a public performance of sycophantic fealty to their dear leader. It is amazing to see accomplished people treat the president of the United States like a toddler in need of a level of affirmation that would make Stuart Smalley blush. I think I understand the motives of these people: They are wielding power at a level that allows them to literally remake society or even the world.

If it is your life’s goal to shield chemical companies from the financial responsibility of cleaning up the “forever chemicals” that cause cancer and miscarriages—which The New York Times reports is the apparent mission of some monster named Steven Cook—maybe it’s worth it to slather Trump in praise.

But the decision to jettison one’s dignity made by the New York Times writer who looked at these displays and decided they are an example of leadership via reality television host rather than aspiring authoritarian is tougher for me to figure. While the article correctly identifies some of the lies conveyed during the spectacle, the overall tone is more of a “can you believe he’s getting away with this shit?” approach, rather than a “shouldn’t we be concerned he’s getting away with this shit?” approach, which would be far more accurate to the occasion.

I can believe he’s getting away with it when the paper of record continually covers Trump like a novel spectacle practicing unusual politics rather than an authoritarian.

I don’t know how one maintains their dignity when writing a story about Trump deploying the United States military in the nation’s capital that gives any credence to a “crackdown on crime” given that this is transparently BS, and yet the Times reflexively characterizes what is happening as a “crackdown” (see here, here and here), rather than, I don’t know, an “occupation.”

In other jettisoning of dignity for strategic gain news, I have been, to a degree, sympathetic to the pre–Trump II stance of Vanderbilt chancellor Daniel Diermeier and WashU chancellor Andrew D. Martin’s views of higher ed reform anchored in institutional neutrality.

I disagreed with that view as a matter of principle and policy approach, but this is a debate over principles.

Now that we find ourselves in the midst of the overt Trump II attempts to destroy the independence of higher education institutions, I found their answers to a series of questions from The Chronicle’s Megan Zahneis about an apparent dispute between them and Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber about higher ed’s stance in relationship to Trump astounding as a performance of willed ignorance.

This debate is taking place at a time when, obviously, the Trump administration has taken aim at higher ed. Are either of you concerned about this debate weakening the sector’s sense of autonomy?

Martin: I would say the fact there is a public debate about the future of American higher education has no relationship whatsoever to what actions that the administration is taking.

So you don’t see debate between leaders as detracting from that autonomy?

Diermeier: I’m not 100 percent sure what we do about that. We have a point of view. We’ve had the point of view for a long time. We’re going to continue to argue for a point of view, because we think it’s essential. Now, if people disagree with that, I think that’s their decision. That’s the nature of civil discourse. We think that it’s important to get this right. We don’t think that the alternative, to hide under the desk, is appropriate.

These answers would make Hogan’s Heroes’ Sergeant Schultz proud: “I know nothing! I see nothing.”

Earlier in the interview, both chancellors make it clear that they are seeing a benefit to their institutions in the current climate, potentially enrolling more students who have been turned off by the turbulence being visited on their elite university brethren of the Northeast.

They have apparently decided that they now have an advantage in the competitive market of higher education by their willingness to wink at an authoritarian push.

Speaking of their fellow institutional leaders, Diermeier says there that there has been “no despising or disrespect or hatred among the sets of colleagues we’ve been engaged with,” and while I’m not a colleague of these gentlemen, let me publicly register my strong disrespect for their performative cluelessness in the interview.

Let me also suggest I can’t imagine someone who respects themselves following that path, and I’m grateful to the institutional leaders like Christopher Eisgruber who are willing to express reality.

I don’t know what the future holds. It’s possible that WashU and Vanderbilt are positioning themselves as the favored elite institutions of the authoritarian regime, ready to hoover up that federal cash that Trump is threatening to withhold from the schools that will not bend to his will.

I’m genuinely curious if that scenario is worth one’s dignity.

Source link

August 29, 2025
Later Wake-Up Call for Inside Higher Ed’s Daily News Update

Loyal Inside Higher Ed readers who wake up to our daily newsletter will soon have an easier time finding each day’s edition in their crowded inboxes.

Starting Tuesday, Sept. 2, the Daily News Update will arrive between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m. Eastern, several hours later than the current 3:15 a.m. This may upset the morning routines of the handful of souls on the East Coast who rise before the sun, but for most readers, we hope this change means our newsletter is there at the top of your inbox when you log in, ready to inform your day.

Thank you for waking up with Inside Higher Ed.

Source link

August 29, 2025