By Doug Ward

Financing public higher education has grown increasingly challenging, with state funding for research universities declining by an average of 28 percent since 2003. What were once state-supported institutions have in many cases become quasi-private institutions to which states provide some money but still want full control.

To shore up their budgets, state colleges and universities have increased the proportion of out-of-state and international students, who pay higher rates of tuition. In fact, 43 state flagship universities had fewer in-state students in their freshman class in 2014 than they did in 2004. And out-of-state students made up more than half of the freshman class at 10 of those institutions, the Washington Post reports.Education matters logo: Recent news, research, trends and thoughts about education

Alabama reported the biggest swing from in-state to out-of-state recruits, with out-of-state students now making up 64 percent of the freshman class. The Post says the percentage of in-state students in the freshman class has dropped by more than 20 points at Missouri, South Carolina, Oregon, Arkansas, University of California-Berkeley, Idaho State, and UCLA. Michigan State, Ohio State, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky and Washington reported declines of more than 15 percentage points.

The University of Kansas had a slight increase in the percentage of out-of-state freshman between 2004 and 2014. In 2004, 29 percent of incoming freshmen were from out of state, according to university statistics. By 2014, that was about 33 percent. I say “about” because the Post’s analysis says that out-of-state students made of 37 percent of the freshman class of 2014, and federal data (which is based on university reports) says that 34 percent were from out of state.

10 ways to fail when creating an online program

Joshua Kim of Dartmouth offers an excellent list of potential pitfalls in the development of online programs.  All are worth a look, but two stood out to me, largely because they apply to all courses and degrees, online or not.

  • If You Don’t Put Student Learning At the Heart of Your Online Program, You Will Fail
  • If You Don’t View the Creation Of Your Online Program As A Disciplined Experiment, You Will Fail

You’ll find the full list of 10 at Inside Higher Ed.

What is the future of higher education?

The Atlantic asked seven leaders from various areas of higher education to list reasons for hope and reasons for despair in 2016. Their responses run the gamut from the challenges of technology to the rising cost of college to the growing importance of creativity and ingenuity. A response from the author William Deresiewicz struck me as particularly timely and cogent.

Asked about his biggest concern in higher education, he replied:

The continued dominance of a narrowly “practical” approach at all levels. This is the attitude that says that the exclusive purpose of education is to prepare workers for the labor force. It shows up, among other places, in the overwhelming focus on math and reading in K-12 and the fetishization of STEM fields and universal disparagement of the liberal arts in college. It also underlies the continuing privatization of public education through the promotion of charter schools and other aspects of the “reform” agenda as well as the ongoing defunding of state universities—the idea being that if education serves the purposes of the market, it should be under the control of the market.

Deresiewicz said he saw “a gathering resistance to this mentality,” though, adding: “Students (and their parents) are getting tired of being treated like revenue streams and exploitable resources. But whether we will gather sufficient political strength to oust the entrenched interests on the other side is still a very open question.”

KU’s chancellor, Bernadette Gray-Little, was among the leaders who provided responses to The Atlantic. She offered measured, thoughtful responses, saying:

While I don’t find much that causes me to despair, I do have concerns about the way we invest in our future. If public funding for universities continues to decline, we will need to find different ways to support the way we educate our future leaders and the way we discover new things in our country. So many of our great societal and technological advances happen because of universities, and we need to make sure to protect these efforts from harm.

Asked about a reason for hope, she replied:

I am inspired by the enthusiasm and intellectual capacity of our next generation of leaders. I interact with students each day, which is a great joy. Our students are intellectually curious, and they pursue interesting goals. They’re building faster race cars and more sustainable buildings. They’re looking for cures to the latest diseases. They’re already finding ways to do all these things better than their elders. And they’re also ensuring that we stay focused on issues like economic disparity and racial inequity. The problems of our society will not be getting any easier during the next 50 years, but I’m glad we will have the young people I engage with today to help try to solve them.

Briefly …

Kenneth Bernstein, a recently retired high school teacher, warns college instructors that even advanced placement classes have done little to help the critical thinking of college-bound students. … The Chronicle of Higher Education and Education Week have both make successful and profitable shifts to digital as their print subscriptions have declined, Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute writes. … The entertainment industry has entered the MOOC business in the form of MasterClass, which sells online courses with the likes of Kevin Spacey and Dustin Hoffman (acting), Serena Williams (tennis) and Usher (performing) for $90 each. The creator of MasterClass, New Enterprise Associates, recently raised $15 million in capital from, among others, Robert Downey Jr. and Usher, the Wall Street Journal reports.


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

Two recent education conferences I attended raised similar questions about developing and sustaining high-quality teaching. Things like:

  • How do we measure the success of course transformation?
  • How can we get buy-in from colleagues?
  • How do we gain the support of department chairs and administrators?
  • How do we share ideas among campuses?
  • How do we sustain and grow communities around the idea of improving teaching?

That last question was central to both conferences, one at KU and one at the University of California, Davis.

Participants in the Trestle launch meeting work in a brainstorming session
Participants in the Trestle launch meeting work in a brainstorming session at the KU Alumni Association. From left are Marsha McCartney (psychology), Chris Fischer (physics and astronomy), Dave Benson (chemistry), Natalie Caporale (University of California, Davis), and Sarah Bean (University of British Columbia).

The KU conference in late January helped launch a new CTE-led initiative called Trestle, or Transforming Education, Stimulating Teaching and Learning Excellence. CTE’s director, Andrea Greenhoot, leads the project, which is financed by a $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The goal is to spread the use of evidence-based teaching methods in science, engineering, technology, and math courses across several participating universities.

The conference at UC Davis was called TEA, or Tools for Evidence-based Action. Its focus was on documenting teaching, learning, and curricula, specifically through digital tools that provide data visualizations of student performance and classroom activities.

At both conferences, faculty members shared successes and failures in teaching, and talked candidly about the challenges we face in bringing more people into the fold. By building a community of engaged teachers, we hope to share our experiences in and out of the classroom, improve our approaches to teaching, emphasize the importance of learning, and shape our classes with evidence-based, learner-centered approaches.

Those are buzzwords, yes, but in essence they mean we need to reflect on our teaching and approach it in measured, meaningful ways. By building community, we can all find ways of doing that.

Submit a proposal for our first Teaching Slam

As a way to expand our community of engaged teachers, we are putting on a Teaching Slam.

A Teaching Slam is a fast-paced session in which speakers from many disciplines around KU share their best teaching tips, assessment ideas, or class activities. Instructors in all disciplines are welcome to submit proposals, and we’ll choose the best for presentation on Friday, March 25 from 2 to 3:30 p.m.

We are looking for proposals for two types of presentations:

  • Six + Six. You will have six minutes and six slides to share a useful class activity, an assessment idea, or a teaching tip.
  • Class Demo. You will have 10 to 15 minutes to lead your colleagues (who will act as your class) through a hands-on classroom activity. These sessions must be interactive.

Both types of presenters must provide a handout to help others use the activity immediately.

Deadline for proposals is noon Friday, March 4. We’ll choose the best and let everyone know the results by early the following week.

Interested? Submit a proposal and join our community.


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

Women teach a sizable majority of online courses at KU, even though men make up a sizable majority of the university’s faculty.

Data provided by Laura Diede, the associate director at the Center for Online and Distance Learning, shows that of 171 online courses that CODL worked with in the 2014-15 school year, 60 percent were taught by women.

That’s especially interesting when you consider that of 1,649 faculty members on the Lawrence campus that fiscal year, only 42 percent were women.

I’ve not been able to find comparable data for online courses nationally, so I have no way to know whether the dominance of women in online teaching is unusual or not. In general, faculty members have been highly skeptical of online courses. In a recent survey by Inside HigherEd, more than half of faculty members said they didn’t think online courses could achieve the same level of learning as in-person classes. That attitude makes many long-time faculty members resistant to, if not hostile toward, online teaching.

Still, Diede and I still puzzled over the high percentage of women teaching online courses at KU. We came up with three possibilities:

  • Women are more willing than men to try new approaches to teaching.
  • Women prefer the flexibility that online teaching provides.
  • Men, who are more likely to have tenure, are more likely to refuse to teach online courses.

That last possibility seems the most likely, although there may be factors we hadn’t thought about. Whatever the case, it will be interesting to see whether this trend grows as the number of online courses grows.

Female instructors score slightly higher in online course evaluationsbar chart comparing course evaluations for men and women in online courses

The data that Diede provided about online courses also showed another interesting facet of online teaching at KU: Female instructors score slightly higher than their male counterparts on student evaluations.

This runs counter to a widely publicized recent study (and widespread perceptions) that argued that student evaluations are inherently biased against female instructors. I’m not going to wade into that debate here other than to say that student evaluations of teaching are problematic on many levels. The reliance on them as the sole measure of teaching quality benefits no one.

Fear and loathing about good teachers

The observation below is from Richard M. Felder, a professor emeritus at North Carolina State University. It was reprinted this week on Tomorrow’s Professor. It’s something I wonder about frequently and have talked about repeatedly with colleagues who value high-quality teaching:

“Some departments I know, including mine, have in the past hired faculty members who were exciting and innovative teachers and who didn’t do research. Some departments I know, again including mine, have hired former professionals with decades of practical experience who also didn’t do research. Both groups of faculty members did beautifully, teaching core courses brilliantly and serving as supportive advisors, mentors, and role models to the undergraduates who planned to go into business or industry after graduation. Professors like that are the ones students remember fondly years later, and endow scholarships and student lounges and sometimes buildings in honor of. And yet the thought of bringing one or two of them into a 20-person department faculty instead of hiring yet another research scholar who looks pretty much like the other 18 or 19 already there is unthinkable to many administrators and professors. Why is that?”


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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