Page 302 - Crisis in Higher Education

272 • Crisis in Higher Education

2. Up-front design: If universities invest, then faculty must be willing to
take the time to create a multifaceted pedagogy that accommodates dif-
ferent learning styles. Universities must support these efforts, keeping
in mind that the goals are twofold: improve learning and reduce costs.
3. Three-credit hours does not mean three hours of face time: Universities
and faculty must understand the circumstances under which students
learn best and work hard to create those circumstances, rather than
churning out three hours of face-to-face lectures each week. The solu-
tion must be more than substituting lower paid instructional faculty for
tenured faculty.

Some readers may brush aside these recommendations as an attempt to
industrialize higher education, and there is truth in their claim. Creating
standardization and taking advantage of economies of scale can improve
learning and cut costs. But industrialization only makes sense when
knowledge changes slowly over time, so the learning infrastructure that
supports education can be created once and adjusted as needed—the
essence of continuous improvement. So industrialization is most appro-
priate in general education courses and should be nonexistent in PhD
courses. Consider the following subjects, which are part of general educa-
tion or disciplinary core: introduction to statistics, college algebra, intro-
duction to sociology, and English composition. It makes sense to invest
time and money to create a sophisticated set of learning tools because the
contents of these courses change slowly, in spite of what book publish-
ers and some faculty may claim. PhD seminars, which focus on cutting-
edge knowledge, still require doctoral students to read the latest research
papers with a critical eye and ultimately to assimilate the best of these
ideas into undergraduate and graduate education.
Administrators and faculty may argue that students taking general edu-
cation or disciplinary core courses, taught using this industrial approach,
miss the opportunity to learn from scholars who are at the leading edge
of knowledge. They believe that these scholars can bring great insight to
introductory courses that instructional faculty cannot. They attempt to
achieve this in one of two ways:

1. Assign the best scholars: In a semester, the best scholar is assigned
to teach one or two of the many sections offered for a particular
general education course with the balance being taught by instruc-
tional faculty and graduate teaching assistants. Depending on the