Hi Jackson- You nicely and succinctly capture what isn’t working and also the uphill battle towards changing the system. I definitely agree that change should be strategic and iterative, having had to manage change in organizations. That said, do you consider leadership to be an important part of teaching, becoming part of an institution, and modeling for students? There is inertia in the current system, but students, colleagues, and administrators respond to counter forces as well — something which requires no small amount of leadership and foresight. Can we also not use science to drive decision making? How can we expect to teach students if we don’t stand up for what’s possible and shown to be better than the status quo? Thank you for bringing your perspective to the discussion.

You have raised a number of excellent points in your blog this week. Your points about the Digital Media video and Setting Students Minds on Fire video were especially well made, and nicely interrelated. The emphasis on shifting students from needing to wanting to learn, and incentivizing learning through competition, teamwork, problem solving, and games are in line with bright spots in education at all levels.

I’m curious what you think about learning opportunities on campus that occur outside of formal coursework that involve gamification, competitions, and applying concepts such as the Solar Decathlon (http://www.solardecathlon.gov/) or the SpaceX Hyperloop pod competition
(https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-hyperloop-competitions-teams-2017-1)? Could these be offered for credit? Could they be interwoven with a course or series of courses from different disciplines?

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Hi Jasmine,

You have raised a number of excellent points in your blog this week. Your points about the Digital Media video and Setting Students Minds on Fire video were especially well made, and nicely interrelated. The emphasis on shifting students from needing to wanting to learn, and incentivizing learning through competition, teamwork, problem solving, and games are in line with bright spots in education at all levels.

I’m curious what you think about learning opportunities on campus that occur outside of formal coursework that involve gamification, competitions, and applying concepts such as the Solar Decathlon (http://www.solardecathlon.gov/) or the SpaceX Hyperloop pod competition (https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-hyperloop-competitions-teams-2017-1)? Could these be offered for credit? Could they be interwoven with a course or series of courses from different disciplines?

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Hi Jasmine,

You have raised a number of excellent points in your blog this week. Your points about the Digital Media video and Setting Students Minds on Fire video were especially well made, and nicely interrelated. The emphasis on shifting students from needing to wanting to learn, and incentivizing learning through competition, teamwork, problem solving, and games are in line with bright spots in education at all levels.

I’m curious what you think about learning opportunities on campus that occur outside of formal coursework that involve gamification, competitions, and applying concepts such as the Solar Decathlon (http://www.solardecathlon.gov/) or the SpaceX Hyperloop pod competition (https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-hyperloop-competitions-teams-2017-1)? Could these be offered for credit? Could they be interwoven with a course or series of courses from different disciplines?

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Thank you raising the point about inequality in education. Driving home yesterday evening from class there was an APM story (https://wamu.org/story/18/08/30/apm-reports-still-rising/) on a student named Mario who was the first in their family to go to college and he explained how he struggled in a math class where the other students seemed to understand the concepts being discussed. Mario spoke with them after class, and one student said that he’d learned the topic in math camp. This was inexplicable to Mario, who did not know such things existed and never had the opportunity to attend something like that.

It seems like you agree that technology can actually help bridge the gap for students who have different educational, economic, and family statuses? Do you feel the same way about storytelling?

Hi Sarah,

You emphasized three excellent points in this week’s blog:
1) the importance of story telling or framing;
2) the importance of connecting the course to individual students; and
3) the need for students to be able to fail.

For your first point, I think about Melissa Marshall’s TED talk “Talk Nerdy to Me” that helps scientists and engineers communicate with lay audiences. Similarly, a lot of what professors are trying to communicate is cool, but isn’t explained in a way that clicks.

With respect to taking classes in different disciplines, I had an innovation professor who said “innovation happens at the interface between two disciplines.” Connecting courses to student backgrounds is important to building interdisciplinary thinkers. Professors can help students see the applicability of their course, but also engage their students with relevant examples.

Your last point is not written or said enough. People have phobias around failure, but we learn from failure and frankly in the world outside of class students need to be resilient. If getting a bad grade seems bad now, how will students deal with giving a presentation to their boss only for it to fall flat, or getting a bad performance review, or… the list goes on. Learning how to fail, learn, and keep going is a skill that every student needs.

Thank you for raising these points.

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Hi. You make an excellent point, writing “Instructors should ask the question of their course: do the assignments teach more than just the assigned topic, and can I put my course topic in real-life contexts?” Vox had a great article several years ago about how we’re teaching economics wrong. As in many things, the applicability of a topic or concept in a real world example is missing from many courses — especially at the undergraduate level, but not restricted to it by any means. The other piece of what you wrote lends itself to the idea of teaching interdisciplinary. Beyond the classroom, this is the real skill that is needed for virtually all teams and projects. Thank you for your blog and I look forward to reading more throughout the semester.

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Hi Farha, I appreciate your question how many times can a student fail, and similarly to students being heterogeneous, programs can also be highly idiosyncratic with their views on failure and what qualifies as successfully crossing a hurdle. Some programs have a higher appreciation of failure and some seemed more designed for students to fail. Do you feel like the other students are in similar positions? Do you feel like your colleagues in other departments/programs are fairing differently? I feel that my experiences in Engineering were more similar to yours, but that in my Public Health program and in Planning things are different. Failure is also very much a part of the work world, and learning how to fail and recover is a skill, so in some ways the programs that don’t encourage and support students through failure are almost certainly setting some students up for this outcome when they leave the walls of our campus. I look forward to seeing how your questions evolve over the course of the semester.