It will be the faculty and librarians who stand at the forefront of the changes needed in higher education if students of the future are going to succeed. That prediction comes from restructuring expert Alan E. Guskin, president emeritus of Antioch College and a former chancellor of UW-Parkside, who spoke at UWM Feb. 17 in the Union Wisconsin Room. Major restructuring of colleges is inevitable, Guskin says, and college administrators should embrace it by abandoning standardized formats, course durations, school year calendars, and traditional systems of grading. If you and I want to learn a piece of software, we read the manual.
Kids just get on the computer and start playing.
Instead of focusing on how professors teach, reformers should be concentrating on how students learn, Guskin said. Responding to how students learn will mean that faculty will play a different role than they do today, students will be helping each other or working independently more often, and librarians will be more prominent in students' lives. If these predictions seem drastic, it's because they are. In this way, students can intensify their studies and finish earlier. Therefore, assessing competence should become the priority of tenured teaching staff, he said.