Creating Significant Learning Experiences

Abstract

We won't meet the needs for more and better higher education until professors become designers of learning experiences and not teachers. —LARRY SPENCE (2001) E very year, in the United States alone, more than five hundred thousand col-lege teachers prepare to teach classes, and more than fifteen million students come to learn. Most of us teach four to eight courses a year. As we engage in this task, we have two options. We can continue to follow traditional ways of teach-ing, repeating the same practices that we and others in our disciplines have used for years. Or we can dare to dream about doing something different, something special in our courses that would significantly improve the quality of student learn-ing. This option leads to the question faced by teachers everywhere and at all lev-els of education: Should we make the effort to change, or not? Given the scale of education and its significance for individual lives and so-ciety at large, the response of teachers to this perennial question is of immense importance. What are the factors affecting our response? This chapter and this book will present some ideas on this question. As Spence asserts in the quote that opens the chapter, I too will argue that college teachers need to learn how to de-sign courses more effectively for higher education to significantly improve the qual-ity of its educational programs. The primary intent of this opening chapter is to describe the unusual and ex-citing situation in higher education at the present time. A variety of developments have created an extremely strong need to improve the quality of our educational programs. At the same time a wealth of new ideas on teaching have emerged in Y Fink.Chap1 1/10/03 3:44 PM Page 1 the last few decades that offer college teachers unusual opportunities to make a creative response to this situation. Near the end of this chapter I will present the reasons why course design, in my view, is the right place to integrate several of these new ideas and, at the same time, constitutes the single most significant change most teachers can make to improve the quality of their teaching and of student learning.