Calls for instructional innovation in higher education assert that the current system suffers from one or more of the following problems: access constraints that stymie social and economic mobility, spending norms that over time inflate cost relative to value, and student outcomes that fail to adequately encourage citizenship and enhance…

Students, especially marginalized students, struggled to juggle online learning with the financial and personal stresses of COVID-19. No one would have wished for this pandemic to serve as the impetus to finally elevate and amplify students' voices. In addition to the pandemic, the national attention focused on race relations and disparities…

College learning in Asian countries has been highly structured and mandated. For example, students are asked to complete a series of required courses, attend weekly face-to-face lectures, and take summative midterms and finals. However, traditional practices are unlikely to prepare self-directed learners to meet future challenges. Partly supported…

Making sense of change and how to think about change has never been more important. In the United States alone, 50 of 80 million total enrolled school-aged children and young adults (preschool to college) must adapt to the shift of formal education online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And what were once leading disruptors, the Internet and…

Over the past decade, campus-based digital liberal arts projects have extended high-impact undergraduate research across disciplines and beyond the traditional print medium for the production and dissemination of knowledge. But many small- to medium-sized liberal arts colleges, and especially public liberal arts colleges, often lack the…

In the current educational climate, where clearly articulated learning objectives are required, it is clear that the spontaneous teachable moment still has its place. Authors Ann Williams and Thomas Davinroy think that instructors from almost any discipline can employ Google Earth as a tool to take advantage of teachable moments through the…

Is it possible to build a virtual community for teaching and learning where students have opportunities for instructor and peer interaction? In this article, Wendy Cowan and Mark Gale describe such a community at Athens State University, where the college of education faculty designed a set of courses so that students had multiple choices for…

Providing college credit for prior learning is nothing new. The American Council on Education's Credit Recommendation Service (CREDIT), the largest national program making credit recommendations for workplace and other training, dates to 1974. Several colleges that specialize in the practice--Excelsior and Empire State in New York, Thomas Edison…

In this article, the author shares what life is like at Kaplan Higher Education and discusses the strengths of a proprietary institution like Kaplan. The author used to work at the Community College of Vermont, California State University, and the UNESCO. He mentions that as a professional and a citizen, he wants to be part of an effort to…

When colleges turned to online learning, they opened the door for a number of students who might have only dreamed of pursuing a degree or credential. In 2006, the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS) surveyed prospective adult students without a college degree and discovered that they were three times more likely to enroll in…