Constellation Elements in Use

Any institution’s constellation stretches across three domains – educational strategies, organizational foundations, and interactions with the institution’s wider worlds.  What do those three terms mean?

Here are examples from each domain. Most seemed important to the success of one or more institutions in the study. 

Which are already in use at scale at your institutions? Which might you implement in the future?

Educational Strategies for 3Fold Gains

  • High-impact practices, developing student capabilities and motivations for engaging in selected HIPs at scale. These have been shown to advance quality, equitable access, and affordability.

  • Additional uses of collaborative and other kinds of active learning in assignments and other course work.

  • Learning pathways are developed to systematically develop student motivations, capabilities, and achievements: help students connect their aspirations with their current curricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular work.

  • Redesigned courses that previously had persistently high DFW rates in order to improve quality and access in affordable ways.

  • ePortfolios for curricular, co-curricular, and outside program, and outside institution: reflection, development of critical thinking, formative assessment, summative assessment

  • Universal design for learning (UDL) means making materials and learning activities available to selected groups of students who might otherwise be excluded.

  • Mixed mode (hybrid) academic programs that improve quality while extending access to students who need to do more their learning online.

  • Use trained undergraduate learning assistants to coach students and facilitate group work, enlarging options for educational strategies in the course.

  • Rely more on Open Educational Resources (OER) useful for helping courses embody inclusive excellence (help many kinds of students achieve at a high level).

Organizational foundations for 3fold gains

·       Office of Student Success: Leaders plus infrastructure needed to stimulate, support, and coordinate institutional efforts to advance TL and make 3fold gains.

·       Growing fraction of all faculty enlarging their palettes of teaching and learning principles and tactics; discussing and debating the strengths and tradeoffs needed for each.

·       Appropriate learning spaces, scheduling, and other support services for learning-centered educational strategies

·       Infrastructure that scales up online and mixed mode learning as part of the institution’s strategies for 3fold gains (e.g., faculty development for online that the same faculty later use in campus courses),

·       Growing culture of collaboration plus policy changes that encourage faculty and staff collaboratively improve student success, e.g., improving academic program outcomes.”

·       Integrated (cross-silo) planning.

·       Assessment-related services that provide data, help others develop their own skills of inquiry, and works with relevant units to respond to the findings from such inquiries.

·       Re-examine faculty personnel policies and practices to encourage investing time in student success in their academic programs and courses.

·       Leadership development and continuity: Look for leaders, experienced and novice, who are learning-centered, good at implementation, experience in using judging innovations by their performance, etc.

Wider world interactions

·       Attracting pool of potential students attracted by institution’s educational strengths; develop onboarding that prepares incoming students for full participation from day 1 in courses that may be unlike any they saw in high school (homework demanding, course geared to help all students success, lots of collaborative learning; etc.).

·       Attract new faculty and staff in part by giving them a sense of what the institution has achieved already and its aspirations. Appropriate onboarding. This should include attracting, onboarding, and support for part-time faculty.

·       Make the institution more transparent to outside pressures and trends; this includes culture change, among other things. Examples: (1) impact on tuition-driven institutions of the demographic cliff; (2) need for all institutions such as this one to actively counter skepticism from across the political spectrum about the value of degrees.

·       Learning-centered transcripts and other academic records

·       Participating in the larger OER ecology.

·       Use interactions with accreditors, rating agencies, prize-giving programs, and other external entities to advance the institution’s pursuit of 3fold gains.

·       Alumni support enhanced by increased bonding that the integrative paradigm can foster.

·       Educating external funders, journals, and others about the importance of achieving 3fold gains; occasionally this might include creating journals.