Accomplishing Our Goals

The recommendations contained in this report demand much of faculty members’ time and talents: to work together across disciplinary boundaries, to integrate different learning experiences into their coursework, and to take an assertive role in guiding students’ progress. By providing relevant tools, support, and incentives, we can both ease these demands and stimulate increased levels of innovation.

Any call for change will require energy to achieve results: energy to overcome resistance and barriers to change; energy to begin moving in new directions; and, most importantly, energy to sustain that momentum over time. The suggestions below address each of these areas, but they focus most on ensuring systemic or structural change.

Recommendations for Accomplishing Our Goals

• Address structural and policy issues related to course scheduling, and require courses in all colleges to adhere to the block system. Recommendations include adopting yearlong scheduling and implementing course schedule distribution requirements.
• Drawing on existing programs in Engineering, create a faculty teaching fellows program to seed innovation, with the expectation that the results of fellows’ work can be adopted and scaled for use in other disciplines.
• Expand upon current initiatives and courses that align with the recommendations in this report. Through our discussions with deans and others, we uncovered many existing activities and new initiatives that fit well with our recommended course of action. We must provide formal forums or workshops where new approaches to undergraduate education can be critiqued, expanded, and adapted.
• Utilize assessment results and budget and planning processes to direct resources towards successful adoption of agreed-upon recommendations.

Previous: Assessment | Next: A Call for Action