IUPUI´s newly revised mission statement re-affirms the IUPUI commitment to excellence in teaching and learning, within the context of our role as the urban public university in Indiana"s largest city and with a strong emphasis on professional education and the health sciences. The new strategic plan (PDF) further defines four key performance objectives within this commitment:
- Attract and support a better prepared and a more diverse student population
- Support and enhance effective teaching
- Enhance undergraduate student learning and success
- Provide effective professional and graduate programs and support for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows
This special emphasis self-study focuses on the second and third of these strategic goals: "Support and Enhance Effective Teaching" and "Enhance Undergraduate Student Learning and Success." While newly restated, these goals emerge from commitments integral to our mission from the institution"s founding.
These commitments bring with them significant challenges. IUPUI"s students and campus environment bear scant resemblance to traditional paradigms of higher education. We are a commuter institution serving largely working, first-generation, financial aid-eligible students in a state ranked 50th in the proportion of adults over age 25 with college degrees. Many students arrive on campus without any clear sense of what to expect from college. While admission and enrollment statistics show that our beginning students" preparation for college is rapidly improving, more than half of entering freshmen in Fall 2001 and slightly less than half in Fall 2002 were "conditional admits." That is, they were considered under-prepared for college-level work by virtue of class rank, SAT/ACT scores, or high-school coursework. Moreover, most students are extensively engaged in pursuits other than college study; a majority work 30 or more hours a week, for example, and many have family and community commitments outside school.
Research on higher education shows that academic preparedness for college and time and attention devoted to college studies are among the most influential predictors of undergraduate retention and performance. From this perspective, IUPUI faces even greater challenges than our peer urban universities do. According to research carried out in collaboration with peer institutions, the dual challenges of student under-preparation and significant off-campus work commitments are substantially greater at IUPUI. For example, our beginning students, on average, spend over 60 percent more time working off-campus as students at peer institutions. In addition, they enter higher education with comparatively lower scores on standardized tests and fewer college preparatory courses completed in high school.
Alexander Astin has noted that for many students at commuter campuses like IUPUI, higher education is a disruption in their lives, in contrast to students at residential institutions, whose lives and identities are focused on their student status. Our student satisfaction surveys confirm this; for example, availability of parking, ranks higher among our students" pre-eminent concerns than many academic issues, such as being able to take courses in appropriate sequence or the availability of library materials. Family needs, job pressures, and other responsibilities not faced by full time, residential students make it more difficult for commuter students to focus on learning the skills needed to succeed in college.
In addition, the "New Majority" students who typify IUPUI undergraduates rarely follow traditional college attendance patterns or timelines; most attend multiple higher education institutions successively or even simultaneously. According to the most recent study of "Degrees Conferred" at IUPUI, approximately two-thirds of our baccalaureate degree recipients begin their undergraduate studies at another institution; our most recent "Non-Returning Student Survey" report tells us that about one-third of non-returning students transfer to non-IU institutions. (These students are counted as "non-retained.")
Given these circumstances, it is at the same time critically important and extremely difficult for IUPUI to engage students deeply in learning, provide them with intellectually coherent educational experiences, and retain them through graduation. Much of our work on teaching and learning has focused on developing, implementing, and assessing strategies for addressing these multiple challenges in order to serve our student population and the Central Indiana region as well as possible. This special emphasis self-study takes stock of these strategies with an eye to revising or augmenting them where evidence indicates a need for change. Ultimately, our purpose is to chart a course for pursuing Excellence in Teaching and Learning in ways that will best serve our particular student body and our particular mission as Indiana"s urban public university.
Teaching and Learning at IUPUI: A Historical Perspective
By virtue of the campus"s mission and student demographics, effective teaching and learning have historically been at the forefront of IUPUI"s concerns. Much of the focus of the campus"s early years, however, was on merging IU and Purdue academic and administrative units and on winning "undergraduate autonomy"-i.e., gaining IUPUI faculty control over academic matters for undergraduate students. Since the early to mid-1980s, however, and especially over the past ten years, our strategies for pursuing effectiveness in teaching and learning with our student population have evolved rapidly. The document on Milestones in teaching and learning at IUPUI provides a condensed overview of the development of major initiatives and offices supporting teaching and learning over the campus"s 33-year history.
Our early efforts and strategies aimed to encourage improvement and innovation in teaching. During the mid-1980s, the campus established an Office of Faculty Development, which, among other activities, encouraged faculty, through internal grants and other mechanisms, to experiment with innovative approaches to teaching that would be effective with IUPUI"s urban, career-oriented student body. As a campus, IUPUI was also an early adopter of the use of instructional technologies to promote access and improved teaching and learning in higher education.
In the late 1980s, IUPUI established the Council on Undergraduate Learning (CUL) to provide campus-wide leadership for student learning in our predominantly decentralized campus environment and with our specific student population. The founding of CUL was part of a shift in focus from teaching to learning and, over a period of years, led to the development of the Principles of Undergraduate Learning, which encapsulate the campus"s vision for general education.
Campus work on both teaching and learning accelerated in the early 1990s with the opening of an Undergraduate Education Center (UEC), a merger of three advising centers: the University Division, serving primarily traditional-aged students; the Adult Education Coordinating Center, serving mainly returning adults; and the University Access Center, serving under-prepared students. Many of the efforts of the UEC were designed to implement recommendations made in the Involvement in Learning report issued in 1984 by the U.S. Department of Education. That report stressed the importance of engaging students in their learning and with one another, an idea strongly supported by research on undergraduate learning.
Other efforts of the late 1980s and early 1990s also focused on serving the needs of nontraditional learners both on and off the campus. During this period, IUPUI developed articulation agreements with Ivy Tech State College, becoming the first four-year institution in the state to accept Ivy Tech credits, and started a campus chapter of Alpha Sigma Lambda, the national honorary society for part-time adult college students. A Community Learning Network project, initially funded by the Annenberg Foundation, has since evolved into a major community outreach unit serving individual learners, community groups, and corporate clients through online and correspondence courses, programs offered at sites throughout the Indianapolis area, customized training packages for local businesses, and a Weekend College.
Another key development was the 1993 opening of the new University Library (UL) described in the 1988 development plan. At the time, the library was probably the most technologically sophisticated academic library in the country; it has since served as a model for many other academic library buildings. It was among the first academic libraries to deploy large numbers of computers (and now includes nearly 250 public machines), to combine library resources with word processing and other productivity software, and to use World Wide Web protocols as the basis for the interface to library resources. It was a pioneer in use of electronic reserves and deployment of full-text electronic resources. Its catalogue currently includes records for nearly 8,000 electronic books.
Teaching and Learning at IUPUI: A Current Perspective
Today, many of these fledgling initiatives of the late 1980s and early 1990s have been institutionalized as key campus-wide and school-based academic units, offices, and features of IUPUI, as we continue working to address the challenges of providing effective teaching and learning for our New Majority students. For example, the 1998 establishment of University College (UC), which grew out of the work of the UEC, CUL, and other earlier initiatives, represented a major commitment of resources to an effort to enhance new students" engagement with their education, to increase and centralize support for learning, and, ultimately, to improve student persistence and academic achievement.
The Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), initially a collaboration between University Information Technology Services (UITS) and University Library, was founded in 1995 to help faculty develop and use pedagogically sound applications of technology to higher education. Subsequently, the CTL broadened its focus to include innovation and good practice in teaching and learning more generally.
A more recent milestone was the 1999 reorganization of faculty development efforts and initiatives, including CTL, under the umbrella of a new Office for Professional Development (OPD), one of the most extensive such offices in the country, offering programs and faculty forums on teaching and learning, assisting faculty in using technology to enhance learning, and, with UC, providing campus-wide leadership in addressing such key challenges as helping our students succeed in large introductory courses. A new Office of Student Life and Diversity (SLD), also initiated in 1999, seeks to expand co-curricular learning opportunities, to ensure that IUPUI"s commitment to diversity informs both the formal curriculum and the co-curriculum, and, working with OPD, UC, and other units, to improve the physical environment for learning on campus.
The development of these new offices and initiatives has been accompanied and shaped by systematic campus-wide planning, assessment, and improvement processes spearheaded by the Office of Planning and Institutional Improvement (PAII), established in 1992. Under the auspices of PAII, a campus-wide Program Review and Assessment Committee (PRAC) was launched in 1993 with faculty representation from every IUPUI school, as well as from administrative units with responsibility for supporting student learning and success. PRAC oversees campus-wide and school-based assessment of student learning, focusing especially on the core abilities defined by IUPUI"s Principles of Undergraduate Learning (PULs). It is the principal campus group working on the development of this special emphasis self-study, which is based in part on the assessment work in which the PRAC representatives and their schools or offices have been engaged over the past ten years.
With the advent of the Community College of Indiana (CCI) in 2000, IUPUI has very recently begun to see changes in enrollment patterns and student demographics. CCI has assumed responsibility for part of IUPUI"s access mission and draws on a portion of our customary student base; in turn, IUPUI has tightened its admission requirements. Over the past two years, the proportion of traditional-aged and full-time students has increased, preparation of entering students has improved, and overall enrollment has increased, due in part to growth in retention. It was in anticipation of such changes that the Future Group was formed in 1999 to consider the impact of CCI on IUPUI"s mission, priorities, and goals. In 2000, the Future Group began work on revising IUPUI"s Mission, Vision, and Values statement and developing a new strategic plan (PDF) for the campus.
This special emphasis self-study emerges from the Future Group"s campus-wide planning effort, examining the efficacy of current practices and initiatives and identifying areas where our efforts may need to be enhanced or rethought. It begins by considering student learning at IUPUI and goes on to address the ways in which we have sought to ensure that teaching effectively advances learning.
Go on to: Enhance Undergraduate Student Learning and Success
