Category: Blog

The Bay View Alliance is pleased to welcome the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a new member institution. The Bay View Alliance is an international network of research universities exploring strategies to support and sustain the widespread adoption of instructional methods leading to better student learning. Lorne Whitehead, program director of the Bay View Alliance, says “UNC is an excellent addition to the BVA because of its dedicated efforts to improve inequities in higher … [Read more...]

  Inside Higher Education features a piece by BVA members, Viji Sathy, Kelly Hogan and Calvin Sims from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill entitled, "A Dozen-Plus Ways You Can Foster Educational Equity". An excerpt from the article follows: Recently on social media, we have seen a lot of people posting ways white and non-Black people of color can support the Black Lives Matter movement. Like many of you, we’ve taken these suggestions to heart and taken action in various … [Read more...]

Today, as part of the observance of #ShutDownSTEM and #ShutDownAcademia, the Hub group of the Bay View Alliance, a network of ten research universities in the U.S. and Canada, affirms its commitment to foreground explicit work on diversity, equity, and inclusion. The BVA’s mission is to explore institutional change strategies to support and sustain the widespread adoption of instructional methods that lead to better learning for all students. In fall 2019 we began a transition from a general … [Read more...]

Campuses across the US and Canada are responding to the Coronavirus pandemic by sending students home and moving courses online. This rapid transition to remote learning has tested the patience, good will, and imagination of everyone involved. BVA member universities, like many others, are responding to the challenge by providing resources, training, and mentorship to faculty who are doing their best to support students while shifting gears mid-term from in-person instruction to online. The … [Read more...]

Webinar: Leveraging Learning Science for Optimal Course Design, Teaching Practices, and Encouraging Proper Student Study Practices View the recording of the presentation here Download the presentation slides here ---------- The science of memory is increasingly well understood, but faculty practices are frequently not aligned with emerging understandings about how people learn.  This BVA webinar will explore how principles from learning science can strengthen course redesign efforts, … [Read more...]

See a video of the webinar here. Download a copy of the webinar presentation here: There is an increasing need for building campus leadership capacity to facilitate institutional change that improves undergraduate student learning, retention and graduation in STEM and other disciplines. While the approaches for making these improvements are well-known, their application on campuses is still not wide-spread. To facilitate implementation of these improvements, campus leaders play critical … [Read more...]

Envisioning the Future of STEM Education: The National Academies' Roundtable on Systemic Change in Undergraduate STEM Education Wednesday, December 4, 2019 1:00 pm PT | 2:00 pm MT | 3:00 pm CT | 4:00 pm ET Presenters: Ann E. Austin (Michigan State University), Noah Finkelstein (University of Colorado Boulder), Kerry Brenner (National Academies) The Roundtable on Systemic Change in Undergraduate STEM Education is a group of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine … [Read more...]

by Doug Ward CHICAGO – Call it “a great awakening” of faculty. That’s how one Indiana University instructor described the use of learning analytics to George Rehrey, founding director of the university’s Center for Learning Analytics and Student Success. Rehrey spoke last week at Educause 2019 about learning analytics, which includes such things as student demographics and data about courses, programs and grades, and were until recently the sole purview of program advisors and offices … [Read more...]

Networked Improvement Communities, Complex Adaptive Systems and the Learning Analytics Research Collaborative Download a copy of the presentation here: In this interactive webinar, George Rehrey will discuss the relationship between the theory of Complex Adaptive Systems in Higher Education (Siemens et al. 2019) and the Learning Analytics Research Collaborative (LARC), one of the four Research Action Clusters within the BVA. Led by Indiana University Bloomington, the other BVA institutions … [Read more...]

by: Doug Ward, Associate professor of journalism, Associate director, Center for Teaching Excellence, University of Kansas   Three universities in the Bay View Alliance have helped generate a national conversation about the way teaching is evaluated. The three institutions, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the University of Kansas, are part of a project known as TEval,which is working to create a more nuanced approach to evaluating … [Read more...]