The 2015 ELI Content Anchors

EDUCAUSE LEARNING INITIATIVE | FEBRUARY 2015

About the Content Anchors

Crowds can be remarkably smart. A group of intelligent people working collectively toward the same goals can often generate more interesting and imaginative ideas than those same individuals working alone. In 2011, ELI turned to the teaching and learning community for its collective wisdom on the most pressing issues of the day. Those issues, which came to be called content anchors, offer a window into the technologies and developments that the community finds most important for higher education. Each year since then, ELI has conducted a content anchors survey. The results of the survey produce a ranked list of the full complement of anchors for the year, available at the ELI Content Anchors web page.

Two dimensions of the content anchors are of importance. The first is that the content anchors function as navigation points for our work. The broad context provided by the content anchors is a valuable element for framing our day-to-day work and activities. Knowing what issues the community considers its top concerns enables us to prioritize and sync our work against a broader picture. The second dimension is the collaborative nature of this project. Our professional endeavors are a social and collaborative enterprise. By sharing our efforts, insights, and best practices, we work collectively to promote higher education teaching and learning.

This issue of the 7 Things You Should Know series profiles the top 7 content anchors for 2015. We hope that this publication highlights significant areas to the community in each of the anchors and that it serves as a useful reference for ELI areas of focus in 2015.

Seven members of the community contributed to these profiles. Those individuals are identified next to the particular anchor for which they provided their expertise and knowledge. We extend our thanks to them for their time and to the entire teaching and learning community for sharing its collective wisdom for all to benefit.

1 Faculty Development

Susan Hines, Director of the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota

The value of faculty development is often not understood. Return on investment is typically based on the number of offerings and satisfaction ratings. Such measures fail to portray how faculty development is integral to the institutional fabric. To do this, we need to provide evidence that it directly ties to academic issues and results in organizational improvement. A systematic process to design and evaluate faculty development will help an institution realize its potential. The process should identify performance gaps, both for faculty and students, and design programs to close those gaps. A logic model can help determine needed inputs, intended results, and methods for gathering evidence of those results. Technologies such as online surveying and assessment software, learning analytics, e-portfolios, and blogs can increase the feasibility and efficiency of data collection and analysis. Outcomes of faculty development should be communicated broadly to the campus community.

2 Academic Transformation

Holly Morris, Director of Postsecondary Model Development and Adoption, Next Generation Learning Challenges

Higher education is undergoing an important shift, moving from being teaching-centered to learning-centered and from focusing on inputs (enrollment rates) to outputs (graduation/completion rates). This results from budgetary pressures combined with new technologies and ideas. All sectors in higher education are facing an environment that calls for different financial models. Meanwhile, changes in technologies and approaches for how they can be used for learning have led to new models to focus on students and drive outcomes. A growing number of institutions are using the principles of design thinking to listen to and observe students, determine their needs and objectives, and respond with student-success and competency-based initiatives.

3 Working with Emerging Technology

Jude Higdon, Interim Associate Vice President for Information Technology, Minnesota State University, Mankato

The pace and scope of changes in technology present challenges for every institution, but much is possible. Some guiding principles can drive strategy and help develop models for engaging with emerging technologies. Benchmark against peer and aspirant institutions and keep up on current trends by reviewing trusted sources, such as ELI’s 7 Things You Should Know series or The Horizon Report. Understand your institution’s strategic goals and build connections with faculty and students, and leverage their expertise in your efforts. Cultivate a culture of outcomes and evaluation, but be willing to fail fast and smart. Tell compelling stories about how emerging technologies will benefit your faculty, students, and administrators; technology itself is not the goal. Be willing to challenge institutional inertia about what is possible. Don’t take on everything, but work hard and take on much. Reach for the stars and take the moon.

4 Online and Blended Teaching and Learning

Kelvin Thompson, Associate Director, University of Central Florida

Many institutions are approaching 20 years of what some call “traditional” online and blended teaching and learning, while others are just getting started. In either case, online and blended approaches have demonstrated their strategic potential while also catalyzing institutional change. Implementing such programs means addressing some basic questions, including the financial model and measures of quality (rigor, student success, student/faculty satisfaction, and others). Once online and blended programs are a part of an institution’s culture, they catalyze further transformation—a degree program already available online might more readily lend itself to competency-based education or evidence-based digital badging. Understanding the differences between models is important for effective deployment. For instance, the University of Central Florida found comparable rates of student success, satisfaction, and withdrawal in online and face-to-face courses but discovered that blended courses consistently outperform both modalities on each metric.

5 Assessment of Learning

Charles Dziuban, Director of the Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness, University of Central Florida

Instructional technologies create an increasingly blended environment where multiple resources impact learning. The interactivity in contemporary education shifts assessment away from teach-then-test methods, replacing them with approaches appropriate to new ways of learning. Effective assessment requires continuous feedback that covers a broad range of learning objectives. Evaluating student outcomes requires blended assessment that incorporates traditional objective methods with authentic assessment, adaptive learning, competency-based assessment, and other methods. Student assessment in the 21st century must accommodate issues such as changing baselines and the long view of students, immediate information turnaround, learning complexity, and ambiguity. The shift to inclusive models of learning necessitates participatory assessment practices for both students and instructors, making them an integral component of the teaching and learning process.

6 Learning Analytics

Kimberly Arnold, Senior Evaluation Consultant, University of Wisconsin

Learning analytics provides opportunities for learners and educators to make informed, outcomes-driven decisions to reframe learning as a journey rather than a series of courses. LA considers the learner’s needs beyond grade-point metrics and provides new perspectives into the learning process, as well as key insights into the behavioral patterns and academic proficiencies that drive learner success. With effective LA, students can monitor their progress, get just-in-time cognitive scaffolds, develop personal learning networks, and explore effective paths to graduation. Faculty can use LA to leverage learning data to support the continuum of learners and adapt their pedagogy based on empirical measures. LA helps advisors identify at-risk learners, providing personalized interventions early and often to help change their trajectory. Administrators can use LA to monitor course progression to see which paths are most successful for certain types of students.

7 Learning Space Designs

Elliot Felix, Founder, Brightspot Strategy

In The Design of Business, Roger Martin describes how knowledge advances over time from mystery to heuristic to algorithm. We can use this to measure our collective progress in creating flexible spaces that actively engage students, providing top-notch operational support services, and choreographing the organizational changes required to move to new spaces, practices, and policies. Not long ago, successful learning spaces were rare, limited to campuses with access to experts who could unlock these mysteries. Now, there is consensus on active learning, flexibility in furniture, integrating technology, and participatory planning processes that involve end users. Many resources provide planning rules of thumb and exemplars to learn from, including the National Survey of Student Engagement, the Learning Space Toolkit, and FLEXspace. Moving to the algorithm stage requires standardizing space/seat, room types, and technology packages, as well as robust, commonly used quantitative and qualitative performance standards such as ELI’s Seeking Evidence of Impact, CLASSE, and the nascent ELI Learning Space Rating System.

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