It began with a question: how can we better prepare our students? It’s something that professors such as Daniel Quigley, Brian Taylor and Diane Neff struggle with everyday. What new tools, techniques or ideas can they use to enrich their teaching? Sometimes it’s something as simple as introducing a new piece of technology, and sometimes it means creating an entirely new course from scratch.
Until now, such changes have largely been left up to faculty members, departments or schools. But that’s about to change. NYIT’s 2030 report calls for the creation of an enhanced Center for Teaching and Learning to drive the college’s teaching-improvement strategies.
“What is needed,” according to the report, “are ways to focus faculty talent on the systematic improvement of instruction and better rewards and incentives for so doing. Universities around the world are finding ways to do this without impinging on scholarship or academic freedom. NYIT cannot afford to lag in this critical area.”
An expanded teaching center is exciting news, according to Neff, a professor of architecture. She and Taylor developed an architecture history course last year that introduces a variation on the typical classroom lecture. The class begins in the traditional fashion with students listening to their professor or a guest lecturer. But it’s when the presentation is over that the learning process really begins. The students are divided into groups and provided with a series of ideas or questions about what they just heard. This discussion is often followed by the assignment of a paper requiring the students to further explore the issues.
“We want the students to understand all the other issues involved in architecture in addition to design,” says Neff. “Many of the lectures focus on the current topics up for debate in the architecture community today and are a delivered in such a way that the students are also exposed to the basic concepts of design. We want them to be comfortable exploring other people’s ideas and formulating their own.”
The brainstorming that led Neff and Taylor to create this class is exactly the kind of work the 2030 Steering Committee members want to see carried out in a unified way throughout the school.
The Center for Teaching and Learning will be divided into three areas, the Education Quality Improvement Program, the Laboratory for Teaching and Learning with Technology, and the Faculty Development Facility.
The Education Quality Improvement Program’s personnel will be charged with actively “engaging department and program chairs and faculty in focused conversations about teaching quality and how to improve it,” according to the report. “Such conversations would cover course objectives, how the curriculum furthers these objectives, what teaching methods are used and why, student performance assessment and its relation to the course objectives, and what is increasingly being called ‘quality assurance’ – how the department ensures that its designs and objectives are carried out in a consistent manner.”
Laboratory for Teaching and Learning with Technology
Part of the emerging paradigm for 21st-century education is a shift from teaching-centered courses to learning-centered courses in which the students are active participants in their own education with their professors acting as facilitators. Central to the success of this approach is the use of technology in the learning process.
“The students entering NYIT today are fundamentally different from those of even three years ago,” says Stanley Silverman, director of NYIT’s Technology-Based Learning Systems. “They have seamlessly integrated technology – cell phones, laptops and MP3 players – into their lives. They code and decode information in a whole new way from students of the past.
“We need to ensure that our faculty members are able to understand the very nature of how these students are processing and creating information,” continued Silverman, a proponent of the Laboratory for Teaching and Learning with Technology. “It is essential that we provide faculty the support they need to understand, use and apply technology so that it meets the instructional needs of their students and in their context.”
Previous generations of students were taught technology skills that could be used for years, perhaps throughout their entire careers. Now, technology is changing so fast that students need to be taught new ways of coping with the high turnover. “The whole nature in pedagogical styles is changing – from the blending of face-to-face experience with virtual technology to rethinking what we actually teach,” says Silverman. “There needs to be a shift in our classrooms from teaching specific skills to educating lifelong learners of technology.”
Dr. Ron Portanova, associate dean of educational development and assessment for NYIT’s college of osteopathic medicine, sees the creation of the laboratory and other initiatives as an inventive way to introduce new techniques to professors who still believe that “If I don’t tell the students directly, they won’t know.”
“We have to be consumer-oriented,” Portanova continued, “driven by providing the students with the best possible product, and our product is education. These new resources will expose professors to new ways of doing things, which can be a profound eye opener that students truly can be meaningful partners in their own education.” |
