Category: Blog

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...]

Collaborative Dynamics in Collective STEM Reform Initiatives Thursday, October 24, 2019 11:00 am PT | 12:00 pm MT | 1:00 pm CT | 2:00 pm ET Presenter: Lucas Hill, University of Wisconsin-Madison Abstract: Reform efforts in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education increasingly rely on collaboration from diverse stakeholders to achieve collective change goals. The basic premise is that initiatives can achieve more collectively than through individual siloed reform … [Read more...]

By: George Rehrey - Since 2015, Indiana University Bloomington faculty from more than 28 different programs have participated in the Learning Analytics Fellows Program. Facilitated by the Center for Learning Analytics and Student Success (CLASS), the program empowers faculty to use student-information-systems data to conduct scholarly research about student success at the course, program and institutional levels. According to an article recently published in a special issue of the Journal of … [Read more...]

This week the Bay View Alliance has expanded its membership to ten universities by welcoming the University of South Florida. Lorne Whitehead, program director of the Bay View Alliance, said USF is an excellent addition to the BVA because of its dedicated efforts to improve student achievement. It has been especially effective in helping a diverse student body succeed even as it has maintained stable tuition rates. Its STEER initiative, funded by the NSF, has focused on creating a culture of … [Read more...]