UO Productivity Plan -- Part 2

B. Emphasis on Student Success

Attrition is a problem in every field, but it is especially troublesome in sequential subjects such as mathematics, sciences and foreign languages, where failure to grasp early material prevents students from succeeding in advanced work. Initial placement in university-level courses, especially in required subjects, can be a key to student success or to repeated frustration and eventual withdrawal from the University. The Mathematics department plans to reduce attri- tion in its high-enrollment service courses by improving and enforcing placement procedures, so that students who apply themselves can reasonably expect to succeed. Besides yielding the obvious productivity benefit of reducing the number of students who have nothing to show for a term's work in a course, correct student placement will also reduce the amount of class time spent on remedial material.

The Mathematics department is one of several that plan to use mid-course feedback or other strategies to improve the qual- ity of instruction by finding out directly from the students what is going well and what could be improved. Anthropology is setting up a Faculty Teaching Forum for all departmental faculty each fall term, to collectively evaluate teaching approaches and share insights and ideas for improving teaching. The department will also add to its routine faculty/GTF meetings a Graduate Student Teaching Forum with similar objectives. Sociology this year has had a combined faculty/GTF seminar on improving teaching, from syllabus development to more effective teaching in mass classes, the latter assisted by a visit from a "master teacher" designated by the American Sociological Society.

C. Other Initiatives from the Faculty

1. Recruiting

The success of our academic productivity plan depends on attracting and retaining students in our programs. In addi- tion to the recruiting efforts conducted by the Office of Admissions, the University has for many years taken part in activities such as foreign language days and the state high school mathematics contest, to help make prospective students aware of the opportunities for study at the University. We plan on expanding these efforts, not only in the traditional fields of languages and the sciences but also in International Studies and Dance, where we can appeal to a national pool of students.

Many students enroll at the University unaware of the wide range of academic programs available. To help students focus on appropriate degree goals, and to try to match students with available resources, several departments plan to make special efforts to attract undergraduate majors to their programs. Several also propose to put on "Career Days" each year to let students see early in their undergraduate years how their studies relate to a variety of career options. Such days will have the added benefit of calling attention to ancillary skills needed in many contemporary jobs, such as the abilities to use technology and to communicate effec- tively.

2. Advising , Mentoring, and Community Building

A good advising program is an essential component of any plan for improving retention and reducing student time to degree. The experience of several departments shows that combining faculty and peer advising with an undergraduate resource center or "hearth" provides not only necessary advice but also a sense of belonging to an academic community. Some departments have already established such centers, in which career-based academic advising is combined with social inter- action between students and the faculty. Several other departments propose to develop similar facilities or to enhance their present advising programs in order to provide better faculty contact with majors and other interested students. Pressure to teach more students will make it difficult, however, to find the resources necessary for developing a cadre of faculty members with special knowledge about career opportunities.

D. The Freshman Experience Package--An Example

To illustrate how our productivity proposals could come together to enhance a student's total educational experience, we offer the example of a typical entering Oregon freshman a few years from now. 

At the early orientation session several months prior to the start of classes, the student sees an academic advisor to discuss academic goals, go over prerequisites and credit for prior studies, and plan the first year's course work. At that time the student is automatically enrolled in the correct mathematics or foreign language sequence, as determined by intended degree, high school background and placement test- ing, and finds out which English composition course to take and when to take it. The student is given the opportunity to join a Freshman Interest Group (FIG), whose members will have a shared core of classes on which to base a learning commu- nity. Perhaps a faculty-led Freshman Seminar is attached to the FIG; if not, the student can choose one from the list of available seminars.

Classroom instruction in some courses is supplemented by computer assignments, using computers to search databases and academic literature or to solve scientific problems. Assignments can be submitted and returned electronically. Much of this work can even be done from the dorm room, which is wired to the University's fiber-optic backbone network, or from the departmental undergraduate center, where the student gets together with classmates.

Once or twice during the first few weeks the student drops in to touch base with the advisor and note any problems. Midterms begin after a few weeks, and the fall rains start, but the student takes these nuisances in stride, supported in part by a community of friends and classmates. Toward the end of the second term, the student stops in to see the advisor for the mandatory 30-hour progress check, goes over academic plans for the coming year, and gets ready to sign up for classes for fall term.

This hypothetical account is close to an accurate picture of what occurs now for a number of students, and will be closer yet once the advising proposals from the Undergraduate Educational Policy Coordinating Commission are in place. The FIGs exist now, as do the Freshman Seminars. Both programs have been highly successful in giving our students a sense of community, but their availability is limited by resources. The dormitories are in the process of being wired, but much of the computer courseware for the classes remains to be developed, and faculty must be trained to create it and use it. Departments would welcome the opportunity to develop undergraduate centers but converting space, installing equip- ment and providing faculty career advisors all cost money.

The freshman year is a crucial time for students, who must often make the social adjustment associated with leaving home as well as the academic adjustment to the expectations of university-level work Retention from the freshman to the sophomore year correlates strongly with successful continua- tion to a degree; data show that half of the University of Oregon students who do not complete a baccalaureate drop out in the freshman year. As Alexander Astin has shown in What Matters in College? , a sense of community and involvement is the single most important factor in student retention. The University's freshman retention rate is already higher than that at many public universities. Our productivity proposals will improve this rate somewhat at current resource levels. With the additional targeted resources of the Oregon Model Plan, described in the section on Productivity Goals below, we could do even better, by providing more freshmen with the tools and support they need to succeed academically and to feel themselves members of a community.

E. Other Learning Communities

In addition to the departmental undergraduate centers and FIGS, the University also has two institutional learning communities, the Robert D. Clark Honors College and the recently established International College. We plan to increase the enrollments in both colleges, as resources permit, so that more qualified students will be able to benefit from these programs.

These colleges face the problem, common to all course-based learning communities, that small classes taught by senior faculty cost more per student than classes with large enroll- ments. Attempts to increase productivity by enlarging classes may defeat the purpose of having them small in the first place.

IV. INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGIES

A. Context

Computers present new and largely unexplored opportunities for productivity increases. The characteristics of being both interactive and modifiable make computer-based technologies useful in ways that differ fundamentally from such conven- tional technologies as books, television, visual projections, and recording media. The University of Oregon is committed to becoming a leader in the development and implementation of computer-based technologies, to enhance educational produc- tivity, improve the quality of education, and increase educa- tional opportunities for off-campus students.

Educational technology is often used to deliver some part-- perhaps all--of instruction that would otherwise be provided in the classroom. Usage of technology in this way risks paying too little attention to the human dimensions of teaching and learning. Undergraduate success in college is highly correlated with a student sense of being connected to the institution, and it is not at all clear that a computer network connection can provide an equivalent positive effect. While computer-based technologies can be very effective in delivering information and in allowing learners to interact with and modify that information, our challenge is to use them in ways that build on their strengths while avoiding their pitfalls.

As a part of our effort to respond to this challenge, the University has established a coordinating committee to give advice on the development and use of educational technology. After establishing a baseline inventory that describes our educational technology capabilities and our current use, the committee will develop a vision for what the University should aspire to achieve in this area over the next five years, and will propose specific implementation plans to realize that vision.

Although the Educational Technology Coordinating Committee is just beginning its work, the Technology Application and Facilities productivity working group has already made a number of recommendations in this area, and many faculty members and administrators are actively pursuing various initiatives that we will describe in more detail below. One fact is clear--the University of Oregon must make a major investment in educational technology infrastructure over the next three to five years if we are to achieve our productiv- ity goals and play a leading role in the development and use of these technologies. This investment is absolutely essen- tial if we are to provide our students with the kind of education that they will need for success in the twenty-first century. If we are unable to make such an investment, we will find ourselves far behind our peer institutions five years from now, and will become a much less competitive and attractive university to students.

In total, our investment must provide for necessary hardware and software, purchase and development of educational materials, and training of faculty, staff, and students in the use of the technology and materials. Although detailed budgeting must await an analysis by the Educational Technology Coordinating Committee, our best estimate now is that we must invest between $3 and $4 million a year in this area over the next five years. We discuss in a subsequent section how we anticipate obtaining the necessary funds.

The University of Oregon has recognized for some time that leadership in educational technology is critical to the delivery of a high quality education to our students, and we are already committed to a major investment in the infras- tructure necessary to achieve that goal. The University is a founding member and active participant in the regional network NorthWestNet. A fiber-optic campus backbone network has been operational for five years, interconnecting most campus computer facilities. A project to connect every faculty member and most staff members to this network is nearing completion, and a project to provide campus network connections to all students is getting underway. The latter includes an agreement with the local TCI cable company to provide wiring capable of carrying both data and video infor- mation to the dormitories.

University faculty are also participating in a NASA-funded consortium of four institutions associated with the Oregon Joint Graduate Schools of Engineering (OJGSE), to develop a Network for Engineering and Research in Oregon (NERO). This program will provide high-speed, high-bandwidth, asyn- chronous, wide area networks compatible with the National Research and Education Network (NREN) and the NASA networks. NERO's primary goal is the creation of a desktop-to-desktop collaborative computing environment for research and instruc- tion among the OJGSE institutions and industry partners.

In parallel with this networking activity, the University has included examinations of the educational uses of technology, both in its year-long, campus-wide strategic planning effort undertaken in 1991 and in the productivity planning process currently underway. Other examples of the University's commitment to leadership in educational technology include the fully functional electronic card catalogue in the library and the developing electronic library, which gives faculty, students and staff access to many on-line and CD-ROM data repositories throughout the world. With University help, the Lane Educational Services District has become the first public school system in Oregon connected to the Internet.

A number of faculty members throughout the institution are developing new information technology to apply in classrooms. Their work includes courseware development, delivery of courses to local schools and community colleges via computer, and providing a state-wide audience with a shared database of physics problems. Some of these projects have been supported by grants from the Oregon State System of Higher Education aimed at fostering greater faculty productivity through collaboration among OSSHE institutions and with local schools or community colleges.

Two of the products already created by UO faculty, The Great Buildings Collection, an electronic encyclopedia of architec- ture, and Design Workshop, modeling software for architec- tural design in 3D, have been featured by Apple Computer in a 1992 educational marketing video. Our Biology department has created and disseminated several laboratory programs. Demography!, a simulation program, allows students to explore the interactions between population growth, age structure, and social policies. Diversity! is an interactive multi-media package that introduces general biology students to the diversity and history of life through hypertext, computer graphics and video disk materials. The Cardiovascular Construction Kit is a constructionist simulation program that allows students to "plumb" together a cardiovascular system from a set of parts.

B. A Vision for the Year 2000

The University's current level of instructional technology activity is impressive, but it is based largely on individual faculty initiative, and lacks institutional coordination and support. In order to provide a framework for action and to identify areas that require central support, the Educational Technology Coordinating Committee has been charged with developing a vision of where the University should be by the year 2000 in its use of educational technology. Some of the basic principles for developing this vision are:

•  1. Educational technology must be used to enhance education and learning, and to supplement, not replace, direct student-faculty and student-student interactions.
•  2. Information, services and educational media must be available at any time, anywhere within a well-defined geo- graphic area, and all members of the UO community must have adequate access to these services.
•  3. Dynamic group interactions such as student-student, faculty-student, and faculty-faculty must be technologically available at any time within this geographic area.
•  4. Educational technology must facilitate a wide variety of educational modalities, such as lectures, inten- sive interactions, self-paced instruction, laboratories, individual and group research, studios, field work and case studies.
•  5. The use and production of electronic courseware such as electronic books, lecture series and laboratories must have adequate technical support to enable the University to play a leading role in this field.

•  1. Electronic media labs and networks for training, assessment and expertise in using and producing electronic courseware.
•  2. Network access in each office, classroom, laboratory and dormitory, including access to the Eugene/Springfield community and to statewide, nationwide and worldwide networks.
•  3. Adequate access for all faculty, students and administrators to appropriate computers and to training in the use of the new technologies.
•  4. Network availability of services, including libraries, administrative services, campus security, student services, academic advising, bookstore, student and faculty organizations, and community services.
•  5. Availability on line of educational materials such as syllabi, lecture notes, graphics and interactive elec- tronic courseware for all university classes.
•  6. Integrated technological support for existing and new modes of teaching, such as on-line interactive auditoria and laboratories, distance education with intensive interac- tion and cooperation, desk-top to desk-top instruction and conferencing, and satellite classrooms.

The University is actively seeking the support necessary to move towards a technologically intense future. Through the establishment of the Educational Media Laboratories, as recommended by the faculty productivity working group, we are assisting faculty in the development of educational course- ware, videos, and related multi-media materials. A local software company, Dynamix, Inc. (a division of Sierra Systems) is entering the educational software arena and is planning to be a partner in establishing the Educational Media Laboratories. The University has also been approached by a local association of small software development compa- nies that are interested in forming partnerships with us.

In addition to the current networking project, aimed at connecting all faculty to the UO network, the computing center is implementing a project to offer all students-- graduate and undergraduate--full access to electronic mail and to the Internet, and to provide the features currently available through Duck Call in an on-line format as well. An agreement has been reached for TCI Cable to provide optical fiber to all dormitory rooms, which will give us the capabil- ity of connecting the rooms to the campus network. In the process of wiring the rooms, one or two wings will also be wired for full Internet access. This pilot program will enable the Computing Center to evaluate the service and to adjust as necessary, based on experience.

The University and faculty members have submitted three proposals to be considered by the National Science Foundation's National Infrastructure in Education (NIE) program. The first seeks $100,000 in planning funds to support the Educational Technology Coordinating Committee's process, with the aim of developing a proposal for the University to be a testbed for discovering and enhancing uses of educational technology. The intent is to develop and test applications that promote learning and support student- faculty interactions in undergraduate and graduate education both on- and off-campus. The local division of Symantec, a large software company, is developing advanced high-level networking projects, and would like to participate in this planning process, with the intention of becoming a partner in developing the educational infrastructure testbed. If the planning grant is funded and the process is successful, the NIE will be asked to provide up to $1 million per year for up to five years both for installing the infrastructure needed to develop multi-media interactive courseware and for developing and applying a protocol to evaluate the efficacy of such tools in actual teaching and learning situations.

Two other NIE proposals have been submitted. One seeks $350,000 to develop new mentoring triads between middle- and high-school teachers, their students, and University faculty. Using project-enhanced learning centered on problem-solving, groups of students would be paired with teachers who, in turn, would be paired with university faculty in their respective disciplines for in-depth analysis of content information. The program would use a project-based curriculum to be shared over a multi-media telecommunication network. The Fickas/Bothun proposal would connect high school students with University astronomical telescopes, letting students first watch and then perform real-time experiments. Each of these projects would serve as a demonstration of what can be done in the testbed proposed by the University, and thus enhance the likelihood of further funding.

The University is working with Lane Community College, Lane ESD, School District 4J, the City of Eugene, Symantec, and Dynamix to develop the Lane Education Network, which will directly connect the networks of all of these institutions. A proposal is in preparation for submission to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration for partial support of this network.

Over the next five years, these and similar proposals can realistically bring in $5-8 million in external support to the University toward the realization of the educational technology vision. However, each of these, as well as every other opportunity of which we are aware for external support in this area, requires matching funds, usually in the range of 50 percent. Given the major reduction in state funding that we anticipate for the coming biennium, it is not possi- ble to provide our share of these funds from the University's currently projected education and general budget. Section X below describes our plan for obtaining the necessary funding for this investment.

(continued in Part 3) [Submitted by: Charley Wright
Tue, 29 Mar 94 14:55:03 PST] [Copyright 1994, University of Oregon]