By Susan Marshall

One aspect of online teaching that I feared would make it less enjoyable for me as an instructor is that my students and I wouldn’t get to know one another as well as we do in our in-person courses.

I thought that it would be difficult to replicate the interaction and dynamic atmosphere of a classroom where we all exchange ideas, participate in thoughtful discussions, challenge each other’s beliefs and positions, develop an understanding of and respect for one another, and come to care about each other as fellow humans.distorted overhead view of laptops and phones at a table

As I have developed new courses and adjusted and redesigned old courses, though, I have found that creating a real sense of community is possible. To do that, I keep coming back to three general areas. I use them from the start of my online classes, but they apply just as well in a class that is moving online midterm, as we all are doing now.

These are easy to implement, are viewed positively by students, and can even help to reduce the grading burden on the instructor in some instances. Additionally, these techniques do not take away from the time and attention needed for students to interact with the course content in a fast-paced term. In fact, the engagement that results benefits students’ processing of the material as they interact with their classmates.

Establish early contact with students

Reach out to students as soon as possible  and  encourage them to familiarize themselves with the course components, and establish an expectation that they will be involved in your online class community.  It is important that students “hit the ground running” on Day 1 and this early admission into the online course allows them to get ready for what can be a busy and demanding few weeks.  It also establishes that you expect them to do a little work up front to be prepared to participate in your course and to interact with you and with their classmates.  Here are some examples of how I encourage this early participation and preparation by my students:

  • Welcome email: When I turn on the course, I post an announcement and send an email that welcomes students to the course.  This email gives them the basic information about how to get started by accessing the course website and where to go from there.  I also express my enthusiasm about teaching the course and getting to know them. There is plenty of room for policies and procedures in the course website and syllabus. Use this first contact with students as an opportunity to be friendly and approachable, not to warn them about all the pitfalls of not being prepared or doing the coursework.distorted overhead view of laptops and phones at a table
  • Getting Started section: Once students log into the course website, it is important that they have a detailed roadmap for what you expect them to do before Day 1. Taking the time to build this roadmap for your students will ensure that they are prepared and understand your expectations.
  • Welcome video: Making a welcome video seems somewhat unnecessary from a course content perspective but it can go a long way toward students’ seeing you as an approachable, real-life person who wants to engage with your students. This may not be possible in the short time you have to make your class available online this semester, but look for ways like this to remind students that the same person is running the class.

Have an assignment due soon after the course goes online

This assignment is not about the course content.  Rather, it is a chance for students to re-introduce themselves to you and to each other. It also helps them become familiar with some of the tools you will use on Blackboard.

Create your own example to share with your students about yourself.  Students then get a feel for the people they are interacting with.  They can share pictures and learn about families, interests, backgrounds, and jobs.  They can see connections between themselves and the life experiences of the people with whom they are enrolled in the course.  They can even comment or interact with one another as a way to say hello.  Here are two ways that this would be easy to implement and also might allow students practice at using a system or technology that you use later on for actual coursework:

  • About Me slide: This version of the assignment asks students to create a slide where they share information and pictures about themselves with you and their fellow classmates.  I have used PowerPoint to create my example slide for my courses, but some students simply paste pictures into a Word document.  For my example, I include pictures of my family on vacation, pictures of pets, lists of hobbies and interests, and background information about my life.  I post my slide as an example with the assignment description.  Students can post their slides to a discussion board and then might be required to introduce themselves to another classmate or even find some similarity with a classmate to ensure early interaction.
  • VoiceThread introduction: Instead of creating a static slide with pictures and text information, you could use VoiceThread for these early introductions.  This method would be especially useful if you plan to use VoiceThread as a course component as it would allow practice with the technology.  Students could introduce themselves to one another using their computer webcam.  They could show pictures and talk about interests, family, and experiences without it being time-consuming to build.  This format also has the potential to increase student involvement.  Students might be more likely to watch their classmates’ videos because it is easier than clicking through and reading individual slides for each person

Create smaller communities within your online class

Thus far I have focused on how to set the expectations for engagement early on.  Maintaining that feeling of community and requirement for engagement is the focus of this last area.

Many students take online classes because they want to work independently and learn the content in a way that is most efficient and flexible given their life circumstances. However, learning in isolation is not always the best way to fully master and understand the content. Therefore, it is my job as the instructor to build this engagement between students into the course design. I have found that creating smaller communities within an online class can be very effective. Students can get to know a subset of their classmates and participate in assignments and discussions with the same people throughout the semester. This can be accomplished by forming groups or teams of 6-10 students.  Assignments that require peer interaction can then be designed to work within this smaller group as opposed to on a class-wide scale.  Here are some ways I have used this approach with different assignments in my courses:

looking down on table of laptops, phones and hands
Marvin Meyer, via Unsplash
  • About Me slide. I have students share their About Me slide only with their smaller discussion group and not with the class as a whole.  This feels like a more intimate introduction and helps to establish this smaller team from the beginning.
  • Written assignments with peer review. We all want our students to practice sharing their thoughts about the course content in written form.  However, reading and providing feedback on weekly written assignments can be a very big time commitment for the instructor.  Instead, it can be useful to have students peer review each other’s assignments.  This system helps to ensure quality without the instructor having to read every assignment every week.  Even better, students not only receive very timely feedback on their assignment but they also get to experience what a classmate thought about that week’s topic.  This engagement with one another is like having a conversation in class where they can agree or disagree on some topic.  Students then can write a reflection that highlights those similarities or differences that they identified.  This system can be introduced at the smaller discussion group level, which ensures that students are interacting with the same group of classmates and that those feelings of community can be strengthened and maintained throughout the course.
  • Group discussion assignments. Another option for creating engagement with the smaller community is to have weekly discussion topics or prompts that all students must answer within their group.  Students must respond to the instructor’s discussion topic(s) by an early due date within that week’s schedule.  Group members must then return to the discussion board later in the week to respond to and engage with a classmate about the topic.  Again, doing this in a smaller group setting allows for a sense of community, and students get to know one another better than if it is designed to encompass the entire class.
  • Afterthoughts assignments. An important goal in my classes is for students to connect the content to their daily lives. I have also used this smaller discussion group setting to get students to make these connections and to decide, as a group, what example might be the best that is presented in a given week among their members.  Students are required to post an “afterthought” about the topic(s) we are covering that week on their group discussion board.  This post could be a picture or video that illustrates a concept.  It could be a link to something they came across on the internet.  It could be a text description of something that happened to them.  Students must post their “afterthought” to their discussion board and then all group members must return to vote on which one they think is the best example presented that week.  They also comment to justify why they voted for a given post.  In this way, the smaller group can come together to make a decision about what post might be one that is highlighted by me to the rest of the class.

I feel like I am constantly searching for new ways to engage online students.  I want this engagement to benefit their learning and experience in the class and also to make teaching online classes more enjoyable for me.  In that search, I have tried many different techniques and some have failed miserably.  The ones I have discussed here, however, have stood the test of time and have lived on in various forms, in a variety of courses, and have been useful for different types of content.


Susan Marshall is a lecturer and academic program associate in psychology and a member of CTE’s Online Working Group.

By Doug Ward

This is what teaching online looks like.

That’s not quite right. This is what planning for teaching online looks like after a week and a weekend of long days and an early meeting on Monday morning.a look down at feet with mismatched boots

About noon, I looked down and realized I was wearing mismatched boots. Some people wear mismatched socks. I wear mismatched boots.

Rather than hide them, I showed them to everyone I met on what was probably the last day of in-person meetings for quite some time. I emailed the photo to colleagues and to my students. Everyone needed the laugh.

“We’re not really laughing at you,” Diana Koslowsky, the administrative officer of the School of Public Affairs and Administration, said after I pulled my feet from beneath a conference table and held them up. “It’s just …”

“We know what it’s like,” said Ward Lyles, an associate professor in the school and a faculty fellow at CTE.

I held up my hands.

“It’s all right,” I said. “Laugh. We all need it.”

Tensions are high right now as the corona virus spreads and instructors scramble to put their courses online. Anxiety lurks on every surface. Encounters with others are awkward as we maintain a distance but still try to be social.

Despite the turmoil, we can’t lose our sense of humor. Laughter is important for maintaining a bond of shared humanity. It’s important for pushing aside the tension, if only briefly.

So laugh at yourself. Laugh at the absurdity of the circumstances. Laugh at Michael Bruening from Missouri University of Science and Technology as he sings “I Will Survive” online teaching. Laugh at my mismatched boots.

I want you to know, though, that even in mismatched boots, I was able to get done everything I needed to get done. My boots may have looked absurd, but I at least put them on the right feet. Mismatched or not, my boots still pointed forward.

Online, nobody knows …

In 1993, The New Yorker published a Peter Steiner cartoon with a caption that said, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

The cartoon captured the doubts about a growing online culture and the anonymity it represented.

With apologies to Steiner, I offer a remake of the original. I’ll let you decipher it for yourself. I will say, though, that when you teach online, nobody laughs at your boots.

jayhawk sits at computer and tells a dog, "When you teach online, nobody knows you are a god."


Doug Ward is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

jayhawk in matrix suit with quote from morpheus

By Doug Ward

Take a deep breath. You are about to launch into an online adventure.

Yes, I know, you didn’t want to take this trip. The corona virus – and the university – made you do it. Like it or not, though, we are all on the same trip, one that will take us deep into the uncharted territory of a quickly deployed online teaching and learning matrix of enormous scale. This involves not just the University of Kansas, but hundreds of colleges and universities around the world.

Despite the less-than-ideal circumstances, you can still help your students learn online. Despite your wariness of the medium, you can succeed as an online teacher. I’m not trying to be Pollyannaish. (Maybe a little.) Rather, I see this as an opportunity for all of us to break out of ruts we get into in the classroom, examine what we want our students to learn, and consider new ways of accomplishing those goals.

We also have an opportunity to model the types of behavior we want our students to adopt in the face of adversity. They will encounter many challenges in their lives, just as we have, and they are looking to us for guidance not only on college-level learning but on coping with the realities of a global pandemic, economic turmoil, social distancing, and sudden isolation in a world that had been growing more closely connected.

Are you up to the challenge?

Many students don’t think you can do it. . Here’s what one of them had to say last week on Twitter.

“You’re telling me my professor who can’t stop the YouTube autoplayer from playing the next video is going to teach classes online? This should be good.”

screenshot of twitter post

That post has been retweeted more than 100,000 times and had drawn nearly 600,000 likes by the weekend. It also attracted a slew of similarly frustrated students who poked fun at their teachers’ technical inadequacies with online grade books, YouTube, web browsers, volume controls, email, and seemingly anything that worked with bits and bytes. (My favorite: The instructor who uses Yahoo to search for Google so he can search for something he wants to show the class.)

“I have no expectations for ANY of my teachers,” one student wrote.

“Pray for the IT department,” wrote another.

Teachers fired back with their own zingers. One wrote:

“You’re telling me my students who can’t pay attention for 2 minutes even while I practically hold their hand through new content are going to have to learn on their own time? This should be good.”

‘We’re all trying really hard’

As the number of zingers grew, though, the tenor of the conversation began to shift. More instructors and instructional designers began to chime in. Many of them had their own doubts about whether this enormous online experiment would work.satiric movie poster titled the online teaching matrix

Some talked about the overwhelming task of moving classes online at the last minute. An adjunct who teaches at several schools, each with a different online system, said she was struggling to figure out how to get her classes up and running. Retired professors expressed compassion for their former colleagues, with one saying the reason he retired was that he was no longer up to the technological challenge. Others pleaded for patience.

“We’re all trying really hard,” one instructor said.

Instructional designers wrote about putting in long days to try to make the switch possible. One wrote: “You’re the reason I do this work. I promise I’m doing my best for you.”

A time for compassion

In a single Twitter thread, you see nearly all the directions the next few weeks could take: humor, anxiety, sniping, denial, helplessness, surrender, bitterness, resolve and, yes, even hope.

“Oh, have a heart,” said Jenna Wims Hashway, a law professor at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island. “We’re doing the best we can. I say this as someone who is absolutely certain to screw up this technology that I’ve never used before. But I’m willing to try anything and look like an ass if it means I can teach my students what they need to know.”

No one has all the answers you are looking for as you try to figure out how best to transfer your classroom work online. (There is lots of help available, though.) Students are just as worried as you are about what this will mean for their classes, their learning, their degrees, their graduation, and their lives.

It’s up to you to model what you want to see in your students. If you complain, they will complain. If you show a sense of humor, many of them will still complain. Expect that, and move beyond it.

What you can do

We are taking on what The Chronicle of Higher Education called “the great online-learning experiment” as we are being told to distance ourselves physically from others. That’s intimidating and mentally taxing for instructors and students. Here are some ways you can break through that.

Don’t let the physical distance become mental distance. Campus is strangely silent. The hallways in our buildings are empty. Many of us are working from home. Many of the regular social activities we rely on have been shut down. All of that isolation can take a mental and emotional toll if you let it. So remember to engage with colleagues and your students. Share your feelings. Ask for help when you need it. Join the many workshops we will have on campus and online this week or the many online communities that have popped up to help with online teaching. And take a walk occasionally. Spring is nearly here. Your teaching has become virtual, but you still live in a physical world.

Give yourself a break. One of the challenges of online teaching is that it can feel like class is always in session. You have to set boundaries and establish new routines. Decide when you will engage with class work and when you will do other things. Tell students when you will be available and when you will not. And set aside time for yourself. Don’t let the things that keep you mentally and physically agile slip away.

Work at creating community. This is perhaps the most important thing you can do in any class. Students need to feel that they are part of a learning community. They need your trust and your guidance. They need to know you have a plan – even a tenuous one – to make this work. They need to know that a human being is paying attention beyond the glow of the computer screen. So communicate with students often through whatever means works best for your class. Keep them apprised of your plans. Tell them to expect lots of twists and turns. Tell them that you will be flexible with them and that they should be flexible with you. And remind them not to let the physical distance become mental distance – and to give themselves a break.

jayhawk in matrix jacket with quote from trinity and neo

Where to find assistance

Remember, you don’t have to do this alone. There is an abundance of resources available and many people to offer assistance. The best teaching and learning happens as part of a community, and CTE, the Center for Online and Distance Learning, and KU Information Technology are working to bolster that community. We have planned several workshops over the coming week (with more to follow). You’ll find those, along with many other resources to guide you into online teaching, on a new website we created last week.

If you haven’t visited the site, you should. It’s a great place to start if you’ve never taught online before, and it’s a great place to get new ideas if you have. If you need help, the site provides contact information for those of us who can help. We will continue to add material and update the workshops we are planning over the coming weeks. I will also be providing advice through this blog, trying to address myths about online teaching, offer ways to create community in online classes, and suggesting tools you might try to   Also let us know what you want to know about online teaching so we can provide the types of materials you and your colleagues need.


Doug Ward is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

By Doug Ward

Distilling hundreds of comments about the future of the university into something manageable and meaningful is, in understated terms, a challenge.

The university’s department of Analytics and Institutional Research accomplished that, though, creating a 73-item list that summarizes ideas from a fall planning session and from comments submitted through an online portal. That list, titled What We Could Do at KU, was distributed to the 150 or so university employees who gathered last week for a second strategic planning session. Presumably, Provost Barbara Bichelmeyer and Chancellor Doug Girod drew on those in creating another document that listed vision, mission and values statements, along with their institutional priorities. The priorities they laid out – student success, healthy and vibrant communities, and research and scholarship – offer a good sense of where they want the university to go in the coming years.

word cloud from strategic planning document
The larger the word in this word cloud, the more the idea was mentioned by university employees.

I have a few thoughts about those priorities – namely a lack of any mention of teaching – but I want to focus on something else first.

I found many connections among the 73 suggestions on the What We Could Do list, and I wanted a way to get a better grasp on those ideas. That’s because they provide a broad look at what employees around the university see as important.

I started by creating a spreadsheet, combining and paring the 73 suggestions into 68 words and short phrases. Think of it as a summary of a summary, which has both benefits and drawbacks. I then used those to create the two word clouds that accompany this article.

I wasn’t able to get all 68 words and phrases into a single word cloud, so I eliminated those that were mentioned by fewer than five people. I also created a separate list of 11 verbs that were used in the summary statements. Most describe a need to do more or less of something. This by no means indicates a consensus of ideas from around campus. Rather, it represents the opinions of those who were willing to take the time to attend a planning session or to submit comments online. (I was one of those people.)

Collaborate and communicate

There’s nothing startling on the list, but I was nonetheless surprised by the prominence of collaboration and communication. I agree with those wholeheartedly, and I’m glad others put them at the top of the list.

In far too many cases, departments and offices work in isolation (or in siloes, another word on the list) and even compete against one another for students, resources and attention. To improve as a university, we must find more ways to work together and see ourselves as part of a singular effort rather than as a collection of competing entities. We need to find more ways for our students to collaborate with faculty and with one another. We also need to collaborate with other colleges and universities, and with communities in Lawrence, Kansas City and across Kansas.

verbs used in strategic planning document
These are the verbs used in the summary of what KU employees saw as important in strategic planning.

Doing that requires better communication internally and externally. We have to make sure potential partners around the university know what we are doing, and we need to tell our story (another prominent term) to students, families, businesses and communities. They need to understand that we are part of – not separate from – them.

Another frequently mentioned issue, financial stability, ties into other needs like maintenance, retention, accessibility, professional development, degree cost, campus beauty, mental health, morale, accountability and transparency.

Three other prominent terms on the list – diversity, mental health and generational needs – tie closely together. The diversity of the student body has increased over the last decade, but the student population at KU is still predominantly white. The faculty and staff are even less diverse. The current generations of students are more diverse and have different needs from previous generations.

Not surprisingly, most of the comments from around campus called for an increase in something, including diversity, revenue, accountability, prestige, student and faculty retention, and, of course, collaboration and communication. After years of underfunding and a few rounds of budget cuts, there are many unmet needs.

What about teaching?

If the What We Could Do at KU list represented the opinions of faculty and staff, a document called Jawhawks Rising gave a clear sense of where university leaders want to go. It’s a good aspirational document.

Strangely missing, though, is any mention of teaching. The document uses phrasing like “community of learners,” and “student engagement” and “educate leaders.” It lists “student success” as one of three core institutional priorities.

Teaching doesn’t show up anywhere, though. That’s discouraging and disturbing. You can argue that “educate” involves teaching. It does. But without a clear strategy for improving and elevating the importance of teaching, any attempt to improve student success will fall short. And without the involvement of faculty in student success, the vision, the mission and the values of the institution quickly become hollow.

All of this is a work in progress, and encouragingly, Bichelmeyer gave teaching an important nod in remarks she made at the start of the strategic planning session last week.

“We’re learning about how we teach and how our students learn,” Bichelmeyer said, referring to the use of analytics to examine curricula and student movement through curricula. “There are lots of ways where we can start to unpack the individual student from the crowd through watching and knowing that they need a nudge to say, ‘It’s really important for you to get to the first week of class’ or ‘It’s really important that you don’t turn your homework in late.’ ”

She added: “We’re not teaching little widgets on an assembly line where we hold time constant and let achievement vary or we think about our work as production.”

She also pointed to the need to change our approach to engaging students, many of whom work 20 or more hours a week and have family responsibilities. They also see technology as an important part of who they are.

“Students would rather have a lecture on YouTube than sit in a class with a thousand students where they can’t see the professor and they can’t see what’s on the board and they maybe can’t hear,” Bichelmeyer said. “And they don’t have to pay for parking, and they don’t have to get a babysitter, and they can do that at night.

“So when we think about unbundling the elements of instruction, we have to understand that what we do well at the University of Kansas that nobody else can do is we engage students,” she added.

Unbundling and rethinking

Additionally, she said, digital technology is leading to the separation of teaching from certification. That is, students no longer need a university credential to get good jobs. They can learn from many online providers or gain skills from short-term coding camps and other intensive sessions that don’t require a four- or five-year commitment and cost far less than a university degree.

“So we have to think about what it is that only we can do really well and how we think about the educational experience from the students’ perspective in order to help them think about why it’s worth it for them to be at KU,” Bichelmeyer said.

Think collaboration, communication, diversity, generational needs, networking, accessibility, engagement, cost and other terms from the campus list. But also think teaching and learning, which is why students come to the university in the first place.


Doug Ward is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

By Doug Ward

WASHINGTON – As colleges and universities prepare to encounter what has become known as a cliff in traditional student enrollment, they are looking for ways to reach out, branch out, and form partnerships that might once have been unthinkable.logo of Association of American Colleges and Universities

That desire to branch out was clear from the sessions I attended at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. For instance, speakers at the conference urged colleagues and their universities to:

  • Do a better job of working with community colleges, whose lower cost is appealing to students, most of whom want to continue at four-year institutions.
  • Reach out to high school students and introduce them to liberal education before they choose a college and a major.
  • Draw in older adults, reintroduce them to learning as they move into a new phase of life, and draw on their expertise in classes and career development.
  • Create stronger partnerships with other colleges and universities.
  • Create better strategies for telling the story of higher education.

There’s no secret about why branching out is important. At a session titled “Responding to the Crisis in Higher Education,” Elaine Maimon, president of Governors State University in Illinois, said “crisis” had appeared in AAC&U session titles nearly every year in the decades she had been attending the conference. (Maimon was facing her own crisis back home.) Even so, she said:

“I’m ready to say the revolution is here.”

‘Stop rehearsing our dilemmas’

photo of Mary Dana Hinton
Mary Dana Hinton

I’ve written considerably about the idea of “revolution” in higher education, about the need for universities to adapt and change, and about the plodding approaches that higher education as a whole has taken to the broad challenges.

In short: The number of traditional students is declining, especially in the Midwest and Northeast. Demographic shifts have created what one AAC&U participant called “a new student majority” made up of first-generation students, students of color, adults, and military veterans, and many of those students start at community colleges. State and federal funding has plummeted. And digital technology has created what Maimon called “an epistemological revolution in terms of ways of knowing.”

Mary Dana Hinton, president of the College of Saint Benedict, said colleges and universities needed to stop “stop rehearsing our dilemmas” and work at making changes.

“We know what our problems are,” Hinton said. “We need to change, and to invest in our faculty, our staff and our leadership so that we create environments and spaces where every student on our campus can see themselves, can feel appreciated, can be challenged and transformed, and that we as institutions are transformed by the students who come to us.”

The sort of transformation that Hinton referred to has many components.

Working with community colleges

Scott Jaschik, editor of Inside Higher Ed, emphasized the importance of making connections with community colleges because “that’s where the students are.”

Most Americans who earn a bachelor’s degree start at community college, Jaschik said, and four-year institutions need to make transfer easier and create welcoming environments for community college students. Some states are also making community college free, he said, an idea that has transcended political ideology.

Al Newell points to screen with takeaways from his presentation
All Newell of EAB talks about conclusions of his presentation at AAC&U.

Cost is playing a big part in students’ decisions. Al Newell of the education research company EAB said that the lower cost of community colleges had great appeal to Generation Z, which he described as thrifty and frugal. More than 40% of students whose families earn at least $250,000 a year are considering community colleges, Newell said, with some looking at college as a seven- or eight-year investment if students go to graduate school.

Twenty years ago, he said, students aspired to attend the best school they could get into. Now, he said, students’ mindset is that they will go to the best school that they can get into and that their families can afford.

An announcement last week underscored the importance of community colleges. Southern New Hampshire University, a large provider of online education, offered students of Pennsylvania’s community colleges a 10% tuition discount, a move that is expected to draw students away from the state’s four-year institutions.

A different approach to adult education

A new model for bringing adults into college courses has begun to emerge.

Colleges and universities have offered continuing education classes for adults and retirees for many years. Since the early 2000s, KU and many other universities have been involved in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, which focuses on adults age 50 and older. What’s different this time is that universities are creating longer and more intensive programs for older adults, integrating them into traditional classes and activities, and using their expertise to enrich discussions and career preparation.

Longevity is changing workers’ outlook, and many of those in the baby boom generation are looking for new paths after they retire, Kate Schaefers, executive director of the Advanced Careers Initiative at the University of Minnesota, said during an AAC&U panel discussion. Minnesota is one of several universities that have created programs for late-career or retired professionals. Many of those are modeled on Stanford’s Distinguished Careers Institute, which brings in a small cohort each year and helps each participant shape an individual curriculum built on their interests. It integrates them into traditional classes but also creates separate seminars, colloquia and other events. That approach has been successful enough that Stanford is planning to create a non-profit organization to help universities create similar programs, participants at an AAC&U panel said.

Organizers use words like “transformative” to explain the rich opportunities these new programs provide and the powerful bonds they create. The programs are also expensive: often $60,000 a year or more. Most programs offer financial aid for a few fellows, but organizers say the cost reflects the need to be self-sufficient.

Reaching out in other ways

Conference panelists talked about the need to reach out to many other constituencies, including businesses, rural students, low-income students, students of color, non-traditional students, and international students, whose numbers have declined over the past few years.

Colleges and universities start sending promotional material to prospective students early in high school. Later on, they encourage families to tour campuses and to talk with advisors. Those approaches help get a school’s name in students’ mind and help students get a sense of a school’s atmosphere. What they fail to do, though, is to help students understand what happens within a particular discipline.

Picture of Andrew Delbanco
Andrew Delbanco

Andrew Delbanco, president of the Teagle Foundation and a professor at Columbia, said universities needed to create opportunities to bring high school students – especially those from underserved populations – to their campuses for a week or more and engage them in intensive humanities seminars that explore the depth and breadth of liberal education. That approach, which Teagle has been funding, helps students “learn that college is not only about getting a job.” It also helps faculty members, graduate students and undergraduates better understand the perspectives of underserved students.

“We all agree in this room about the value of liberal education,” Delbanco said. “But we have a problem. You cannot explain the value of liberal education to someone who hasn’t had one. You can’t do it. … You cannot convey the taste of honey to someone who hasn’t tasted it.”

The importance of that type of approach was reinforced by statistics at Newell’s session. A survey of 5,200 students at Chicago public schools found that in ninth grade nearly all students aspired to college. By the 11th grade, that dropped to 72%. By 12th grade, 59%. In the end, only 41% enrolled in college.

He cited many reasons for the drop-off: lack of role models who have gone to college; exclusion from advanced placement classes; lack of understanding of the enrollment process; failure to take required courses; and lack of money.

“The reality is that the way we do business is going to have to adapt,” Newell said.

He gave several examples of how colleges and universities were adapting. One of the most prominent is through partnerships with or acquisitions of other institutions. In some cases, university systems are requiring consolidation. In others, a university acquires a nearby struggling institution in what Newell describes as a “goodwill grace merger.” In still others, the acquisitions are pure business deals, or “strategic capital asset acquisition,” as Newell described them. (Think of Purdue’s purchase of Kaplan.)

We also need to keep lobbying skeptical legislators and talking more to a skeptical public, Delbanco said — and working more closely with local communities.

It’s a daunting challenge, but AAC&U sessions seemed far more upbeat than they have been in the past few years, even as Delbanco summed up an admonition that was repeated by several others:

“Colleges and universities must serve young people – and not only young people – beyond their gates more effectively,” he said.


Doug Ward is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

By Doug Ward

Jennifer Roberts doesn’t hold back when describing her first attempt at active learning in a large lecture course.

“It was a train wreck,” said Roberts, a professor of geology who is now chair of the department. “It was bloody. Students were irate.”

students gather around a round table, with the instructor facing forward. A screen with a PowerPoint slide is behind her.
Jennifer Roberts works with students in Geology 101.

This was in Geology 101, a required course for geology majors and one that typically draws a large number of engineering students. Starting in 2013, Roberts worked with a post-doctoral teaching fellow, Kelsey Bitting, to transform the class. They cut back on lecturing and devoted more time to group discussion and guided inquiry, with worksheets and in-class problem-solving. They introduced weekly reading quizzes and in-class questions to gauge understanding. They had students do more out-of-class writing. They also adopted two-stage exams and eliminated multiple-choice questions.

Essentially, she said in an interview in 2014, they made “this a class about the work students put into it and not necessarily about who had the old test that they memorized or just who was good at taking tests.”

Geology 101 is just one of hundreds of classes that have been transformed over the past few years as the university has emphasized the importance of retaining more students and helping them graduate. It illustrates, though, the hard work that has gone into raising retention and graduation rates at KU.

This fall, 86.2% of last year’s freshman class returned, compared with a low of 77.8% in 2008. That’s a phenomenal accomplishment made possible by the work of everyone from instructors like Roberts who have adopted more effective teaching practices to advisors who have helped students make better choices to administrators who have created new support programs and allocated money and resources to address a collective problem. These changes have helped shift the culture of teaching to one that emphasizes learning for all students.

instructor kneels at table and talks with students
Noah McLean helps students work through an assignment during a 2015 class.

Geology 101 also illustrates the importance of shared responsibility and community building in the success of students. For instance, Roberts’ remake of the course involved a teaching fellow, a second instructor, graduate teaching assistants and several undergraduate teaching assistants. The second instructor has been crucial for maintaining continuity because that person becomes the lead instructor in the ensuing semester. Noah McLean, Andreas Möller and Craig Marshall, among others, have been instrumental in maintaining that continuity and in continuing the evolution of Geology 101.

Having multiple instructors and teaching assistants in a classroom allows for group work, makes it easier for students to ask questions and get help with challenging course material, and makes large classes much more personal. New classrooms in the Earth, Energy and Environment Center and the LEEP2 engineering building have improved the atmosphere, too. The rooms in those buildings are in high demand, largely because their layout promotes interaction and makes large classes feel smaller than those in the stadium-style seating of Budig Hall.

McLean, an assistant professor of geology, said that the traditional layout for large classrooms intimidated many students and dissuaded them from asking questions. In active-learning classrooms, “you’re only looking at eight other people, and it’s much easier to bring students in and have a class-wide discussion,” McLean said.

‘Equity between men and women’

The series of changes made in Geology 101 has worked. Despite student complaints, more started getting C’s rather than D’s. Underrepresented minority students made substantial gains, with the number receiving D’s or F’s or withdrawing falling 5.6% between 2009 and 2016 even as more underrepresented students took the class.

instructor leans over table to talk to students
Andreas Möller consults with students during a 2015 class.

More impressively, women in the class began performing significantly better in that same metric (a decline of 9.5%). Roberts said that women often accounted for 80% of the students who withdrew from the class or received D’s or F’s. In 2017, she said: “We now have equity between men and women.”

The work isn’t done, either in Geology 101 or in other classes across the university. In many ways, it has only begun, and we have a long way to go to achieve the type of widespread equity and achievement we hope to see. We should definitely celebrate, but we still have to keep pushing.

A year after remaking Geology 101, Roberts offered this reflection:

“The advice I have been giving the people who have started, especially in designing courses from scratch with this, is to make sure that they are choosing topics that they are really excited about because this can be a grind,” Roberts said. “And if you’re not really excited about going to class and sharing that information with the students, I don’t think you’re going to do it very well.”


Doug Ward is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

By Doug Ward

I’ve been doubtful about the emergence of a Generation Z. Strangely, Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen, along with some reassurances from Pew Research, have me reconsidering.

Before I get to Hogwarts and District 12, though, I need to provide some background.

A few years ago, two of my students, eager to look behind the hype of marketers who claimed to see into the minds and habits of a post-millennial generation, came away frustrated. After semester-long research projects, they both asked the same questions: Who can really define a generation? And is “generation” just a convenient label that older people apply to younger people they don’t understand?

A baby boom generation made some sense because it was part of a demographic shift, the students said. Yes, today’s students are certainly different, but the “generation” labels that have been applied seem more of a put-down than an amalgamation of meaningful, or valid, characteristics.

3 students with laptops talking around a table
The characteristics of Generation Z have many implications for higher education. Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Michael Dimock of the Pew Research Center explained some of the haziness of generational labels earlier this year when he wrote that Pew researchers were adopting the Generation Z category in their work. He wrote:

“Generational cutoff points aren’t an exact science. They should be viewed primarily as tools” for analyzing views on things like work, education, social issues and politics. Pew defines Generation Z as anyone born in 1997 or after. Others see Generation Z as starting earlier, and some place the starting point as late as 2005. By most definitions, though, traditional college-age students now consist solely of Generation Z, and the oldest in that group have already graduated.

What does that mean?

I thought about my students’ search for Generation Z as I listened to speakers at the Educause 2019 conference in Chicago recently. My students’ questions were – and still are – valid. Their search for a Generation Z may just have been a few years premature, though.

The racial and ethnic diversity of this generation — and how that diversity shapes views and expectations — has rightly received considerable attention. At Educause, though, the father and son team of David and Jonah Stillman made a case for “generational personalities,” which they said formed from experiences in adolescence. Many of those experiences are tied to significant economic and cultural events. Here are a few of the characteristics that the Stillmans said separated millennials from Generation Z.

Millennials

  • Came of age during an economic boom.
  • Parents, mostly baby boomers, told them they could do anything.
  • Went through childhood during what the Stillmans called “the self-esteem movement,” when everyone got a trophy just for participating.
  • Parents preached a message of college at any cost – apparently even to themselves – and told their children they could change the world.
  • Jobs were about seeking meaning and changing the world.
  • Technologically minded but with a clear separation between online and in person.

Generation Z

  • Came of age during and after the 2007-2008 recession, when their parents’ net worth plummeted and they saw seemingly unsinkable companies barely able to stay afloat.
  • They are realists. Their parents, mostly from Generation X, emphasized the need to compete and win. (If you doubt this, just do a search for “TikTok famous.”)
  • Watched as millennials took on enormous debt to pay for college, even as many employers started to emphasize skills rather degrees.
  • Jobs are about money. Full stop.
  • See few boundaries between physical and digital. (Think Pokemon Go.) They even saw online companies begin to create physical stores, another case where they see “no line at all” between online and in person.

Even popular culture icons offered competing messages. Millennials read about and watched Harry Potter, a young wizard with a tight group of friends who grappled with the meaning and purpose of their magic powers. Generation Z read about and watched Katniss Everdeen, a young rebel in a dystopian nation who is chosen for a fight to the death in The Hunger Games. The message: one against the world; win or die; children are expendable.

This is all a broad-brush picture, of course, but I find that much of it rings true. After all, enrollment in business schools has soared as enrollment in the liberal arts has declined. Many students are working 20-plus hours a week to help pay their college bills. They want flexibility in their schedules and access to technology always. Most students and parents still see value in college, but they look closely at price and consider their return on investment.

So what does this mean for higher education? The Stillmans offered these observations and suggestions:

Get on their radar earlier

Many of these students are trying to make college and career decisions much earlier than previous generations did. They crave certainty and security in their careers. Universities that tap into that desire for a clear pathway have a better chance of reaching those students than those that wait. Relatedly, these students want to know what universities have to offer. They seek out winners and opportunities, and they want to see that reflected in their schools.

Group work is harder

This generation is competitive. They want to stand out and they resent others who tag along in group projects and don’t work as hard as they do. That means they dislike group work, even though the ability to collaborate is among the top skills that employers seek. That means, the Stillmans said, that educators will have to work harder to help these students learn group skills.

So is traditional communication

Older adults complain that this generation is illiterate, David Stillman said. He argued, though, that today’s students are writing more than ever. They post on social media and in online forums. They chat via instant messages and games. They are in constant conversation. Much of that may be in the form of “lol” and “omg,” Stillman said, “but who are we to say that’s not writing?” They also learned to communicate with emojis before they communicated in words, he said. That approach creates more ambiguity and leaves more room for interpretation, he said. So students need help understanding how to communicate in a professional world. Even so, he said, “professors need to understand emojis.”

Emphasize the tangible

Promoting vague “experiences” and learning for learning’s sake doesn’t work for most of these students. Rather, they want to see the practical application and individual benefit of their school work. That means instructors and advisors need to explain why students are learning what they are learning and how the various disciplines, activities and assignments fit together and help lead to good jobs. Additionally, universities, departments and classes should partner with businesses, David Stillman said. Bring professionals from various fields to campus so that students can learn about pathways and make connections between what they are learning and what they might do on the job.

Allow customization

A higher percentage of Generation Z was home-schooled, and many of their parents are entrepreneurs. They are open to alternative paths to learning, and they value customization. After all, Amazon and Netflix know what they want and make frequent suggestions about what they should buy or watch. Why shouldn’t their college? Iowa State, which caught on to this earlier than most universities, sends out video announcements for each student. These videos include a “breaking news” announcement by a CNN anchor, a message from the college president and the football coach, a shot of a banner with the student’s name, and footage of thousands of students cheering and celebrating. (Some students apply to Iowa State just to get a video, the Stillmans said.) Other schools have allowed students to create custom majors, a strategy that all schools need to adopt, the Stillmans said.

Improve online courses

Students still prefer in-person courses, but they want the flexibility that online courses provide. That flexibility is critical for a generation that is putting in more hours on jobs to pay for college. They also expect online courses to have the same quality and the same outcomes as in-person courses. The culture, the feel, the layout of an online course should be the same as an in-person course, the Stillmans said. Everything should be seamless.

Be flexible with technology

Students in Generation Z “don’t see the difference at all” between the physical and digital worlds. Technology is simply part of who they are. It connects them. It informs them. They expect it to be there. Universities that demonstrate technological sophistication will have an advantage, the Stillmans said. That doesn’t mean Generation Z is impressed by technologically advanced campuses. That is simply an expectation. These students take that expectation into the classroom, too. Instructors who ban this technology simply stoke students’ fear of missing out on something online. So rather than take that technology away, help them learn how to use it to learn.

Those are just a few of the few of the student characteristics we need to pay attention to. Yes, these are broad generalizations that don’t apply to all students, but they help us understand some of the challenges we face as educators. College used to have a Harry Potter-like magic in attracting students, but it has entered a world much more like The Hunger Games. We can still be suspicious of labels like Generation Z – I still am – but we need to adjust to the reality of the changes.


Doug Ward is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

By Doug Ward

Enrollment at Kansas regents universities declined again this year. I say again because enrollment has declined each year since 2011.

The decline – 5.7% since 2011 — is relatively small, but it illustrates the challenges of a state university system that has become increasingly dependent on student tuition dollars to finance operations. It also illustrates the challenges that regents universities will face in the next decade as the number of traditional college-age students flattens after a post-recession “baby bust.”

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The National Center for Education Statistics projects that undergraduate enrollment nationwide will increase about 3% by 2028, but that national average blurs regional differences. Institutions in the Midwest and Northeast are especially vulnerable. Many smaller colleges have faced growing economic problems, with some merging and more than 20 closing.

KU isn’t in any immediate danger from those trends, but the regents system as a whole is. Given the current political climate, it seems likely that Kansas will face some of the same pressures that states like Wisconsin and Alaska have faced to close or merge campuses.

In Kansas, Wichita Area Technical College merged with Wichita State two years ago, a move that made sense given their proximity. It isn’t much of a stretch to imagine financial concerns forcing additional mergers – mergers that would be much more painful than the one in Wichita. Eleven of the state’s community colleges have had double-digit enrollment declines over the past five years, and three – Cowley, Allen and Highland – have seen enrollment fall by more than 20%. Even Johnson County Community College, the largest in the state, isn’t immune from this trend. Its enrollment has declined 7.8% over the past five years, although there was a slight uptick this year.

I’m not trying to predict impending doom. Rather, I see the numbers as a clear signal of the need to move quickly with innovative approaches that better meet the needs of a changing student population. Colleges and universities can no longer expect student applications to simply flow in with regularity. They must find niches that set them apart, form partnerships across disciplines and institutions, do more to reach out with online courses, and develop new approaches that make a college education more of an ongoing process – and one of individual renewal – than a degree-and-done-forever approach.

The numbers at KU

KU’s full-time equivalency enrollment fell slightly this year. As you can see from the chart above, though, there has been only slight movement over the past six years. That’s mostly good news, especially because retention rates have increased. This fall, 86.2% of last year’s freshman class returned, and retention of freshmen has increased substantially since hitting a low of 77.8% in 2008.

That’s a phenomenal accomplishment made possible by the work of everyone from instructors who have adopted more effective teaching practices to advisors who have helped students make better choices to administrators who have created new support programs and allocated money and resources to address a collective problem.

The university did a good job of highlighting other aspects of this fall’s enrollment report, so I won’t go into those. I would like to touch on some other trends I saw in the enrollment figures. These figures come from various reports and public dashboards on the site of Analytics and Institutional Research. Wherever possible, I have used full-time equivalency figures rather than headcount. The regents and the federal government have shifted to full-time equivalency because it cuts down on possible distortions from part-time enrollment and allows for a better comparison across universities. The university tends to prefer headcount.

Troublesome long-term trends

Combined enrollment at the Lawrence and Edwards campuses has been mostly stable over the past few years. The longer-term trends aren’t as positive. Enrollment has declined 10.5% since 2007 and 13% since a peak in 2008.

For KU as a whole, those declines have been partly offset by a growth of 11.2% at the medical center since 2014. Enrollment at the Edwards Campus has grown in each of the past four years but is 11% below where it was in 2011.

Not surprisingly, the largest decline in the student population has been in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. It still has the largest number of students by far of any college at KU, but undergraduate enrollment has fallen 21.6% since 2010, and graduate enrollment has fallen 18.2%. The largest percentage gains in undergraduate enrollment since Fall 2010 have been in business (up 122%) and engineering (up 46.3%).

Interestingly, the largest percentage increase overall was in non-degree-seeking students, whose numbers have risen 181% since 2010. There were 491 of those students this fall. That’s a small number in the overall enrollment picture, but it clearly shows an interest among a group that is rarely discussed when we talk about enrollment.

Shifting gender balancechart showing decreasing percentage of male students

Men accounted for 46% of KU students this fall, the lowest percentage of the decade. The number of men enrolling at KU has declined from 49.2% in 2010, reflecting a national trend of fewer men going to college.

The number of students not reporting gender spiked this year to 524 from 75 in Fall 2018, 53 in Fall 2017 and 25 in Fall 2016. This reflects a national trend of students more willing to identify as gender fluid, transgender or non-binary.

Interestingly, the vast majority of those who did not report gender were graduate students. The breakdown of graduate students this fall is 50.6% women, 40.4% men and 9% not listing gender.

Other changes in student demographics

Several other changes in the characteristics of students are worth noting:

  • Declining number of transfer students.Transfer students have never made up a large percentage of the student population at KU, but their numbers have fallen significantly during the past decade. In Fall 2010, the Lawrence campus reported 1,404 transfer students, compared with 1,024 this fall. That is a decline of 27%.
  • Declining number of graduate students. The Lawrence campus has 5,570 graduate students this fall, a decline of 9.5% since 2016 and 13.5% since 2010. This is largely a result of a smaller number of students pursuing a master’s degree (down 19.8% since 2010), although the number of doctoral students has declined 9.1% from a peak in 2013.
  • Declining number of international students. The number of international students fell for the fourth straight year and is now 14% below a peak of 2,363 in Fall 2015. This again follows a national trend.
  • Rising number of Hispanic students. The number of Hispanic students attending KU has increased 65% since 2010, with growth in every year this decade. Hispanic students now make up 8% of the student body. This again reflects national trends.
  • Rising number of part-time students. The number of part-time students on the Lawrence and Edwards campuses surpassed 4,000 for the first time this fall. Part-time students now account for 16.3% of the total student population, the highest percentage this decade and up from 13.7% in 2012.

Changes at Edwards CampusChart showing growing number of undergraduates at edwards campus

KU’s Edwards Campus has traditionally been reliant on professional master’s programs for its enrollment. That has begun to shift toward more of a balance of graduate and undergraduate programs.

Undergraduates now account for nearly 41% of students at the Edwards campus, nearly double the percentage of a decade ago. That is an enormous shift in mission and mentality. The campus is still heavily reliant on working professionals who attend evening classes, but it has increased its online offerings, partnered with Kansas City-area schools and businesses, and drawn undergraduates to programs like information technology, molecular biosciences and exercise science.


Doug Ward is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

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