Career-Oriented Course Design with Greg Edwards

Years ago I was involved in a project at Vanderbilt University to offer less commonly taught languages to our students. Vanderbilt partnered with Duke University and the University of Virginia to offer online courses in languages like Kʼicheʼ Mayan and Tibetan. These are language courses that wouldn’t make at any single campus, but across the three institutions there was sufficient interest to run the courses.

At the time, the big challenge with these courses was making synchronous class sessions possible when students were split among three different campuses. This was well before the pandemic and the rise of Zoom for this kind of teaching. In fact, after a few years battling the telepresence technology used in this initiative, the instructors moved their classes to Zoom, and these were maybe the first Zoom classes I heard about.

Not only did this initiative pool student interest in these less commonly taught languages, it also pooled instructional resources. We didn't have anyone on the faculty at Vanderbilt who could teach Tibetan, but one of our partner schools did, so the project meant we could offer those courses to our students. Even at relatively large research universities, there are only so many subjects that a faculty body can teach.

I started thinking a lot about this old project when I learned about the work of Rize Education. Rize is a for-profit company that works with a consortium of over 135 colleges and universities to help them quickly launch new, career-oriented majors and other programs. This group is called the Lower Cost Models for Independent Colleges Consortium, or LCMC for short, and it consists largely of small liberal arts colleges.

LCMC institutions are schools that might have trouble starting up new majors in data analytics or digital marketing or public health. There are, after all, only so many subjects that a faculty body can teach, especially when that body is relatively small. The LCMC partners with Rize, which can provide half a dozen core online courses for these majors, sourced from the consortium, that layer on existing courses at the home institution to get these new programs up and running in a semester or two.

The institutions Rize is working with are often small and heavily dependent on tuition. They have an existential need to continue enrolling sufficient students, and that means offering majors that students want. Vanderbilt wasn't going to lose many students by not offering Tibetan, but these small colleges can't afford to have many students turn them down for lack of major options.

Does this consortium model offer a way forward for small institutions? That remains to be seen, but this week on the Intentional Teaching podcast I talk with Greg Edwards, head of learning at Rize Education. We don't get much into the economics of the consortium model, but we do talk a lot about the challenge of designing online courses that meet the needs of multiple colleges within the consortium and that prepare students for career success.

To listen to our conversation, search for "Intentional Teaching" in your podcast app or listen on the podcast website. And if you have thoughts about this consortium approach or the larger question of preparing students for a changing workplace, I would love to hear them.

Course-Level GPTs and AI-Enhanced Polling

Over on my Agile Learning blog, I started my coverage of the 2023 POD Network conference with a couple of ideas for using generative AI in teaching and learning. POD stands for Professional and Organizational Development, and it’s the big professional society in North America for teaching center staff like me. POD held its annual conference in Pittsburgh last month, and it was great seeing old colleagues and friends I hadn't seen in person since my 2019 conference attendance.

The concurrent sessions at the conference were fantastic this year, with lots of tough choices in each time slot about which session to attend. I felt obliged to attend at least one session on generative AI, and I picked a good one. The session was titled “Forecasting How AI Could Change the Work of Teaching Centers,” and it was facilitated by Marc Ebenfield and Karl Carrigan from the University of New England. They took a futurist approach to the topic, walking us through a tool called signals and drivers to hep us imagine possible futures for AI in education.

Our discussion of future possibilities was interesting, but on my blog this week I shared a couple of possibilities raised during the session that are already here. You can read about course-level GPTs and learn about one that's currently available via Top Hat, and you can see my experiment with using ChatGPT to summarize responses to an open-ended polling question, something I'll try live during the next workshop I facilitate! Expect to see helpful(?) AI assistants in your favorite polling software very soon.

Around the Web

This is the part of the newsletter where I link to things that I find interesting in the hopes that you do, too.

• ​The Forgotten Video Game about Slavery - You've probably heard of Oregon Trail, the 80s computer game where players take on the role of settlers heading west that too often die of dysentery. The company that made Oregon Trail made another historical game about a challenging journey, a game called Freedom! In the game, players take on the role of escaped slaves attempting to reach safety and freedom at the end of the Underground Railway. The Decoder Ring podcast did a recent episode about Freedom!, and it's a fascinating exploration of the challenges that can come with teaching through games. And if you find this topic interesting, you should read Dan Thurot's review of a more recent game, the cooperative board game Freedom: The Underground Railroad, which tackles the same subject from a very different direction.
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• ​Writing as a Tool for Teamwork - My University of Mississippi colleague Liz Norell has a guest post on John Warner's Inside Higher Ed blog about the value of reflective writing for helping teams function well. She notes that she's never been part of a unit our teaching center where most of the staff write regularly, and she argues that the kind of writing we do, reflective writing, helps create a kind of psychological safety that supports the team. I hadn't heard the term psychological safety before reading Liz's post, and it's a useful one. That's the kind of working environment I tried to create at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, and I think we were fairly success at doing so.
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• ​Academic Success Tip: Broaden Office Hours Across Disciplines - Also on Inside Higher Ed is this profile of an office hour initiative at Virginia Commonwealth University. As we've discussed here on the newsletter, students don't always understand what office hours are for and getting them to seek the help they need through office hours can be a challenge. At VCU, an Inclusive Excellence grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute led a group of faculty and staff to launch "student hours," which IHE describes as "a daily communal working space for multiple faculty to meet with students across the STEM disciplines." I love this initiative, and I'm reminded that office hours often function best as a communal activity. I asked on Bluesky if other campuses have similar initiatives, and former podcast guest David Clark responded, "I organize faculty office hours in a common study space for math majors. We only sometimes overlap, but having multiple faculty all use the same room helps set the tone that it's a good place to be to study and find help."

Thanks for reading!

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