Category: Assessment & Badges

  • Building a Better Course Evaluation Form: Here’s a Template

    Building a Better Course Evaluation Form: Here’s a Template

    It’s course evaluation time.  Most student evaluation forms look as bureaucratic as the one in this photo. Do we really need to make our course evaluations as inhumane as a bubble test?  No, we don’t. At the Futures Initiative, we think we can do better–and, below, you will find the questions we ask students and […]

  • Easy Ways to Enliven Any Classroom, Any Size

    Easy Ways to Enliven Any Classroom, Any Size

    It’s 8 am. Half the class is asleep, the other is staring into a cell phone. How do you turn such a dispiriting lecture class into a site of engaged, active learning?  Well, you engage the students, for starters!  Here are 33 ways that various faculty in the humanities and social sciences have found to […]

  • “Entry Tickets”: The Best, Easiest Way To Focus a Class, a Group

    “Entry Tickets”: The Best, Easiest Way To Focus a Class, a Group

    How do you focus attention again after an event, a disagreement, a stony silence, an exam, or a break?  We had a President’s Day holidays between weeks three and four of our course, right in the middle of Group 1’s superb presentation on the extraordinary, little known, posthumous novel by Chester Himes, Yesterday Will Make […]

  • Black Listed: What We Will Do on Day #1

      Welcome to Day 1  “Black Listed: African American Writers and the Cold War Politics of Integration, Surveillance, Censorship, and Publication”  English 80300, IDS 81630   S 2018 Tuesdays, 6:30-8:30pm  (Begins Tues, Jan 30, 2018)  ROOM 3207 Prof Cathy N. Davidson, Graduate Center; Prof Shelly Eversley, Baruch College; Assistant Instructor Allison Guess, Futures Initiative Fellow and […]

  • This Is How We Change the World

    Every day, since the Sept 5 publication of The New Education, I have received 5-10 emails from people who are changing their universities– or are hoping to do so.  In the latter group, a comment I’m asked often asked is:  “How can you be such an optimist?  How can you believe higher education can change?”  […]

  • Ten Learning Outcomes That Inspire–Not Police—Learning #neweducation

      This is a post about “Learning Outcomes” and you’ll be surprised to hear it isn’t a rant.  I’m no big fan of the whole “outcomes” language and mentality–or I wasn’t until the day I thought to myself, “Why not ask students to write them and see what they think are good outcomes.”  As usual, […]

  • Sky, Water, Earth: Final report

    Sky, Water, Earth: Final report

    First of all, our team wishes to thank the DML Competition for the opportunity to explore and play. We have already learned lots from the development phase. I expect to gain more insights and develop additional best practices as we move to the maintenance phase of the project. I’ve pulled key points from our full report that may be […]

  • Final Project – Syllabus and Curricular Arc for Anti-racist Course

      Writing Your Way to a New Theory of Race and Racism   In this class, you will use reading and writing to challenge your assumptions around race, to investigate your relationship to race, and to design a new cognitive paradigm around race and racism. The overall goal of the class is to empower you […]

  • DML Competition Final Report

    DML Competition Final Report

    The Chicago Architecture Foundation is grateful for the grant provided through the University of California, Irvine Human Research Institute in support of DesignLaunch, as part of the Digital Media and Learning: Competition VI initiative. Below, please find our answers to the questions posed.  1) Who were you addressing with your design objective?  DesignLaunch is CAF’s first-ever […]

  • Art and Science of Vision: Reflections

    Art and Science of Vision: Reflections

    Who were you addressing with your design objective? The Art and Science of Vision team design objective worked to address San Diego-area learners, ages 13-18. The team specifically sought average students–not failing, but not entirely sure of their future academic or career paths. What are the three essential questions the field needs to answer to […]