Page 361 - Crisis in Higher Education

Appendix A • 331

teaching experience or pay them more for the first two or three
times they teach to cover start-up costs.
e. Graduate teaching assistants would participate in an assessment
of their communication skills including language, have regular
teaching evaluations, and work with mentors. They would be
carefully supervised as they teach.
2. It is important to identify the capabilities of different faculty types,
know the instructional needs for courses, and match these to get
the best outcomes, meaning both high quality and low cost. This is
summarized in Table 12.1.
3. General education and interdisciplinary core courses tend to gener-
ate substantial surpluses, which are used to subsidize other under-
graduate courses as well as courses in master’s and PhD programs.
State governments should create a HEC to examine these issues.
4. It is vital to improve faculty productivity by investing in sophisticated,
top-quality methods for communicating knowledge and supporting fac-
ulty so they create innovative and efficient ways to disseminate knowl-
edge to students. Universities and faculty must move away from the
notion that a three-credit-hour course requires three hours of face time.
5. Faculty unions have not caused the problems that universities face,
but they are the result of poor relationships between university lead-
ers and tenured and professional faculty. State government, boards of
trustees, and top management must mend these relationships.

A.8 CHAPTER 13: CREATING HIGH-
TECHNOLOGY LEARNING MATERIALS

1. Universities become responsible for paying for all learning materials.
2. Universities must create high-tech reading materials that are interac-
tive and help students identify and address knowledge gaps. These
should have lower cost, better content coverage, enhanced learning
for students, and better outcomes for publishers.
a. Interactive questions, answers, and referrals to the correct infor-
mation make these superior learning tools.
b. Computer-generated problems allows student to learn better
by generating an unlimited number of attempts at the same
problem with feedback about error.