Searching for the ‘New University’: Changing Faculty Roles

Although the common structure of higher-education (sequential classes, lectures, note taking and multiple choice testing) was designed to transmit a body of knowledge, today’s world demands that students be equipped with complex skills that go beyond listening, transcribing, memorizing and repeating.  The new ‘learning-focused community’ must emphasize creativity, enterprise, purposefulness, a good sense of community responsibility and collaborative work.  Abstraction, systems thinking (interrelated thinking), experimentation, and collaboration are essential skills for modern students to master.  According to Eaton, in order to gain these skills, undergraduates must become “active participants in their learning, not just passive receivers of knowledge.”  

In the next decade, faculty will relinquish some of their responsibility for delivery of instruction  and become designers of learning environments.  Although some face-to-face teaching will continue to be part of their work, faculty also will use technology to enhance their own teaching and that of their colleagues.  Faculty will assist students’ learning by mentoring individualized learning plans, modeling effective learning strategies, helping students design independent inquiry, cultivating community partners, creating collaborative learning opportunities, and sorting and evaluating the multitudinous resources available through technology.  

Faculty will spend more time helping students discover how to frame meaningful questions and model the thought processes needed to identify problems, to discriminate and analyze important variables, and to create rather than simply accumulate information.  Faculty will also ascertain learner needs and gaps in current knowledge, identify learning opportunities appropriate to remedy these gaps, and re-assess student abilities to see what has been attained and to determine what the next step will be.   

More and more partnerships will development between faulty and students in the research field.  Learning becomes more interdisciplinary, and knowledge is attained by experiencing risk-taking and making mistakes.  Rather than focusing on the right and wrong answers, students must be allowed to explore varied paths toward solutions.   

Technology will allow faculty to be shared between classes, and on-line courses will be used to supplement or even supplant courses offered on the students’ home campus.  Although technology cannot substitute for direct engagement, technology can support and enhance learning in universities with increasingly limited budgets and increasingly diverse student bases. Faculty must help design “new learning environments that marry technology to teaching in a way that enriches learning by enhancing direct contact between faculty and students as well as individualized work with technology.”

Because the role of a professor will be very different, universities also should address new ways to award faculty.  Faculty course loads should allow for mentoring and monitoring individualized learning plans as part of normal operations.  Rather than faculty tenure and promotion systems centering on research productivity, student credit hour generation and teaching evaluations based on in-classroom work, universities must create faculty reward structures that validate the commitment of new strategies for creating learning environments.  The reward structures should “reflect the synergy of teaching, scholarship, and learning.”

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