Hmm…so you had me until the end since up until then I agreed with almost every sentence. But I slightly disagree with your positive thesis for action. I know the situation you’re talking about (it was my discipline) and rather than the professor marching over to the office to give her a piece of his mind, he should have done something first. Namely, checked to see if the narrative he had was a) accurate and b) true.

If you know some of the nuances of the case, including the topic at hand that day in lecture and the policy the TA had explicated to her class about more or less encouraging a climate not of civility but where topics that *could* instantiate racist, sexist, or the like *conversations* may not be allowed during the class for the reason of climate, then parts of the narrative are dubious at best. It’s not that a few students disagreed, it’s that one posited it as an example of philosophical notion A (which it actually may not even be an example of and, if not, then it could also have been dismissed on those grounds).

Yes, if you’re sure that something problematic has happened then, when possible, reach out to have a conversation and see what can be done moving forward. But you have to make sure that the problematic thing actually happened in the first place.

Hmm, I feel conflicted about moving towards a universal standard. While, on the one hand, it could make things easier in the respect of cross community communications, on whose terms? Who would be the folks that decide and create the curricula and how would this avoid a reinstantiation of, well, I’m worried about colonialism take 4(?). While science and math seems uniform in practice, I wonder if there is something like the Sapir Whorf hypothesis going on for how people learn and practice math and science. If so, then that may give us a means of having a universal standard but one that takes into account culturally structured ways of learning. Maybe.

Agreed. I don’t think we, food safety individuals, could ever contain the innovate atmosphere of the food industry. “New” doesn’t have to be negative per se. I just feel that education has to evolve with the new trends that emerge.

I have honestly never even thought of that. Hearing from students that dropped the course would be beneficial. However, I wouldn’t know the best way of providing that type of information. If you reached out to the professor, they may be hesitant to listen to a student that dropped the course. I did find this resource (below) titled “Student Complaint Resolution Procedures” from Virginia Tech Online. I have never heard of this resource but it looks promising. It says that the complaint can be either formal or informal. But yes, I fully agree that all students enrolled in a course from beginning to end should receive the SPOT eval. However, an eval from a student that dropped a course does not necessarily have to be a complaint which suggests the need for something specific to teaching evals in general.

http://www.vto.vt.edu/details.php?view=resources&show=resources&page=student_complaint

“What I’ve learned” from this is complicated for me as well, and not all of it is coherent enough to put out here. I am both inspired by and concerned about the prospects of liberal learning, which makes it hard to come up with a cogent precis of where I’ve been and where we all might be headed.
But with so many partially-written posts on my dashboard I decided it was worth at least putting something out there. As you say, it’s a place to start. The real challenge ahead, to my mind is how to fulfill the charge of the collaboratives project to “build capacity and a network of faculty.” Potential abounds.Easy answers, not so much.
Thank you, Gardner for asking me to join this project. I’ve learned so much and hope to carry the experience forward to wherever the next adventure leads us. Thanks so much for your vision and leadership — it’s been absolutely essential and I’m counting on you to carry the beacon for the foreseeable future.

[…] dedicated significant time and energy to saving and maintaining a major OER in my field (Soviet History) that is used by tens of thousands of people around the globe annually — most […]

My biggest problem with the SPOT reviews is that they are only available for students who completed the course… which means those who drop the course for good reason never get the chance to say why. It introduces what could be a textbook example of survivor bias.

Say for example you have an interdisciplinary course meant to teach data analytics to statistics and CS majors, and the professor makes it so math heavy it is inaccessible to the CS folks who all drop out, then all the reviews will be almost exclusively from the stat majors, who will probably give it positive marks. The department will never know the difference, or why all the CS students keep dropping out.

The same could be said if the course has a weird schedule that conflicts with people from a certain college (the vet school is always out of sync with the rest of us), or in a much more nefarious case, if the professor created a hostile environment for a certain subset of students. Imagine if the professor makes sexist remarks, not enough to warrant a Title IX investigation but enough to drive away certain students – the only ones giving that professor a review will be the ones who were not offended and stayed in the class.

It seems to me that asking students why they dropped is even more valuable than asking for passing students to evaluate the course. Do they even keep track of the total number of students which drop a course?
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Survivor Bias: –> http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/path-of-a-hero

Tech seems to be doing a good job in this area, though I am disappointed by their lack of any well known MOOCs (like on Coursera). The masters of IT is very well regarded and I have had people from other parts of the country ask me about it.

VT seems to have not yet invested significantly in undergraduate online programs. They offer a few “online” courses to our existing students, but you can’t get an online BS yet. Perhaps this is a mistake as the predatory for-profit schools have clearly shown that there is a huge market for it. Instead of letting these vile companies scam people, well respected schools like Virginia Tech could offer similar programs, possibly with in-state tuition too. The only real problem is how to deal with laboratory courses, as all the science and engineering fields at VT had several courses with attached labs.

In the end, we may be shooting ourselves in the foot by not moving more quickly. I have a feeling that whichever program gets established first will have an advantage in online education for decades. It seems like George Mason University is making significant progress towards online-only programs – VT should not let them corner the Virginian market.

Well said. Obviously the women who need to physically recuperate after childbirth have a greater need for maternity leave, but men should not be left out entirely. The men face another issue. Aside from the fact that many institutions not offering maternity leave or stopped clock programs, the ones that do often do not expect men to take advantage of these programs. It would probably be embarrassing for some men to even ask for this benefit, and they would likely be shamed by some of their co-workers.

This seems to be a significant issue in most other careers too. In virtually all fields, your performance in your mid-20s to mid-30s will define your [first] career (assuming you don’t start over or late, like me). But this is also the most common age for having children. Virtually everyone is faced with this tough decision, kids or career, so you would expect our society to be more accommodating – yet here we are, still fighting the same battle from decades ago…

Marion Nestle makes a good point in one of her books, possibly “What to Eat,” but I can’t fully remember. She notes (and I am paraphrasing) “people often complain that diet trends change too fast, when in fact the prevailing wisdom of the past 100 years has been to eat more fruits and vegetables.” I think your points are spot on in terms of people liking to relate to one another, but I also think people just like new stuff. New trends get press, new products get advertising and shelf space. “New” “superfoods” must work because they are new. For a lot of these problems, a little bit of sound education would go a long way.