Starting a Common Book Project

UW Madison is initiating a common book program, Go Big Read and we started a little late in the year so it’s a scramble to get this major initiative up and running. I would describe my role as “project manager,” since it’s an initiative of our new Chancellor, but the library is really getting things started. Here are some interesting things about the program:

• Since we made a campus announcement and put a web form up to initiate an abbrieviated selection process, we have 600 suggestions. The Chancellor will be choosing a book in early April.
• We’re very interested in curricular integration, so I’ve been going around to meetings with the directors of large-enrollment first-year courses with the Director of the Center for the First Year Experience and the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning. It’s been interesting to “get on the same page” with such a group.
• Everyone has lots of ideas that they’re very tied to and everyone is interested in participating or helping out in some way.
• Should be interesting.

I’m not tied to any one book selection, which makes this whole thing less stressful, so far. I’d be interested to talk to librarians who have had this role in a campus common read project, if that’s you please get in touch!

IT Strategic Planning: Early Priorities for Teaching/Learning and Outreach

August 11, I attended the IT Strategic Planning event on Teaching/Learning and Outreach.  It would be great to see more librarians at these events so that we can share our perspectives and report back.  You can also participate by visiting the web site and giving your feedback.

This meeting was to provide feedback on an initial set of priorities; the full list will be posted on the web site in the notes section.  Items that are most related to information literacy include a focus on student and faculty technology competencies.  The purpose of the meeting was to provide feedback on an early draft of priorities related to teaching/learning and outreach.  The draft priorities for technology literacy on the flip chart read, “develop and support the technology skills of students/faculty and instructional staff,” but the handout for the session included some more nuanced language including technology literacy and competencies.

The discussion touched on models for accomplishing this and whether competencies could be defined at the campus level.  We discussed the Report of Raccreditation Team 4, which addresses competencies for global citizens and leaders and includes a section on information literacy written by a group of librarians.  Their team discovered that 80% of students take four courses in their freshman and sophomore years, so there’s an opportunity for integration there.  Although I can guess what those courses might be, I need to reread their report to be sure.

We also talked about “leveling the playing field” by providing a basic level of support/resources for teaching and learning across departments, as well as local access to support.

Who has responsibility for learning experiences outside the classroom?

The Chronicle of Higher Education has published an article about the debate about who has ownership over learning experiences outside the classroom.  The trend has been that Student Affairs professionals and other campus groups manage these experiences, but the National Association of Scholars has issued a statement that faculty should reestablish ownership.  On our campus, you can see the great things student affairs professionals have done (often in partnership with faculty and other groups) in the new Center for the First Year Experience.  The library participates in the planning and delivery of these programs in a variety of ways, and I would say that student affairs people are doing an amazing job leading and delivering these key, large-scale programs.  If you’re interested, the debate is raging in the comments area of the online article.

IT Strategic Planning Session on Teaching and Learning

At this session we discussed four themes: instructional technologies, student learning, staffing/support, and classroom/learning spaces. There is a web site for the IT Strategic Planning that includes all the notes.

One topic we discussed in the Student Learning group was establishing a set of technology literacy competencies for students, enabling students to learn about and adopt new technologies.  We discussed curricular integration strategies such as making sure technology literacy is included in gen ed discussions and finding exemplar courses for teaching with and enabling technology literacy. This, of course, has interesting parallels to the strategies we use for information literacy, and we have some hard work ahead to pursue alignment/collaboration with these efforts (rather than being in competition).

Bringing Information Literacy into the Reaccreditation Process

Many campus committees are engaged in preparing information for the reaccreditation process. Library staff also serve on several of the “Theme Teams” that were charged to explore six themes. Emilie Ngo-Nguidjol convened a small task force of librarians (Eliot Finkelstein, Steve Baumgart, Phyllis Weisbard, Emilie, and myself) to draft an early report on information literacy for Team 4, “Preparing Global Citizens and Leaders of the Future.” Our work is evident in both the Executive Summary and Team Report. Here’s a quick excerpt from the summary:

“Globally-prepared citizens and leaders will acquire or understand the importance of learning new skills, knowledge and values that enable communicating with and understanding others different than oneself. They will understand the importance of sustainable living and possess global information literacy—the ability to know what information is needed, where to find it, and how to evaluate and reflect on contradictory sources of information in an increasingly open, rapidly changing, and complex global
information environment.”

I’m really happy that Emilie led this effort and interested to see where else information literacy (and other related literacies) appear in the process and results.

Teaching and Learning Symposium 2008

The Teaching and Learning Symposium was last week. The first thing I want to share is that the presentations will be archived online. The archive site is still a little glitchy, so I’ll send out a link once the presentations are all there. A few highlights from my perspective:

- In the opening plenary, Adam Nelson talked about three teaching/learning examples in UW-Madison’s past. From a library perspective, the most interesting was the debating societies in 1890s, which engaged important issues of the day, conducted a year’s worth of primary and secondary research, produced substantial published reports, and were extremely prestigious. These were extracurricular clubs that were more popular than football in their heyday. Also included were Meiklejohn’s 1920s Experimental College “Athens-America” curriclum and Otto’s “Man and Nature” philosophy course. Adam was very gracious in thanking the archives for helping to find the really interesting primary sources he shared.

- A Learning Circle on the “Essential Learning Outcomes” we talked about How/where/when we can engage the outcomes. We talked about how to make more explicit what courses and curricula do and what kinds of evidence we can look at to see if students have done this. We agreed that we can’t address all skills (or even one skill comprehensively) in a single course, but students move through the curriculum in many different ways so it’s difficult to build a sequence of experiences. So we’ll need to develop a collection of strategies that allow us to gather the necessary data and students to be more intentional about their college experiences.

- In the closing plenary, John Wiley discussed big forces that will impact the future of higher education: demographics, outcomes assessment, degrees and credentials, productivity of the educational enterprise, and technology. Outcomes assessment was the most interesting to me: Wiley pointed out that we rarely “apply our research prowess to our teaching” to analyze our effectiveness in promoting learning. His conclusions were that “we should be interested” in this question, and that comprehensive outcomes assessment is prohibitively expensive, perhaps doubling the cost of education. It’s hard to make a good decision about how much assessment is enough, in my experience, so it was useful to hear that perspective from the top.

The library was, as in past years, heavily involved in the planning of the symposium and the program. Sheila Stoeckel and I were on the planning committee and the Library was involved in two programs and two post-conference workshops that I’m aware of. I’ll try to share more about these once we have the information in the archive. I would be interested to hear what others found valuable.

Voluntary System of Accountability Report

I learned last week that UW-Madison is participating in the Voluntary System of Accountability and created a College Portrait of Undergraduate Education.

In November, 2007, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article on the system (subscription, also in Lexis-Nexis and other online databases): “In one of the most sweeping responses yet to calls for accountability in higher education, a public-university association has adopted a template, called the College Portrait, that will allow institutions to share with outsiders online data about such matters as students’ academic progress.  Use of the portrait will be voluntary, but its approval this month by the Board of Directors of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges marked the beginning of a formal effort by the association to encourage institutions to use it.”

The short portrait includes data on the campus, as well as data related to student learning outcomes from three standardized instruments.  Perhaps more significantly, it includes data on how UW Madison intends to measure student learning outcomes locally.   For those who have been following the ongoing struggle over accountability measures in higher ed, this represents institutions’ push to be proactive in defining and controlling their own measures of student learning, rather than having something imposed from the outside.   Here at UW, the effort to supplement long, scholarly reports on student learning outcomes with shorter “nuggets” to share with the public is a very important campus effort.

ComETS Program – “The Millennial Instructor”

This half-day, ComETS program was sponsored by the Libraries and DoIt.   Dr. Carl Berger shared research done at the University of Michigan and a university in Australia to take results from technology surveys to begin to identify characteristics of particular groups of users (e.g. faculty who are digital natives).  The presentation focused on the characteristics of “millennial instructors,” or individuals who have both a teaching and learning role on college campuses (TAs, instructors pursuing additional degrees).

I found a few aspects of Berger’s research particularly interesting:

• students and faculty were given identical questionnaires so that comparisons could be conducted across groups.  Berger’s presentation provided a variety of comparisons across groups that I hadn’t seen before.
• Most faculty felt proficient using technology in their research, but relatively few felt proficient using technology in their teaching.   What can we learn from the use of technology in research that we could use to promote use of technology in teaching?

The breakout groups considered examples of instructors we worked with to consider a central question: ours was about how to share innovations (pedagogical and effective use of technology in the classroom) across courses.  The notes from the breakouts will be available on the ComETS web site.

University Academic Planning Council

One problem with writing here about committee meetings is finding out what information can be shared. At the end of the University Academic Planning Council discussion of essential learning outcomes for UW Madison Students, Provost and UAPC Chair Pat Farrell said, “Share these documents with anyone who might be interested…. no secrets here!” So I’m happy to be able share the documentation I have from the meeting:

• Essential Learning Outcomes (infolit-l only)
• 2008 Preface to the University Assessment Plan
  
• Convergence (now available electronically! infolit-l only)

The purpose was to make UAPC part of the conversation while outcomes are still being shaped, at the ground level, and discuss how an articulation of learning outcomes can be helpful in decision-making. This is a very influential group of deans and administrators who oversee academic programs and centers across the university.