Life-long learning is a reality for all of us, placing a heavier burden on an already overloaded higher education system. These are some of our most pressing challenges. It is not possible for us to meet these needs, let alone the continuing needs of our current student population, by building more classrooms and hiring more faculty. Several important points, in my opinion. The following conclusions set the framework for innovative solutions to our teaching and learning needs in the next few years.
Lectures are ineffective forms of transmitting information.
The UC Davis campus has a great many effective lecturers and professors who inspire their students, present complex facts clearly, and draw on their own vast experiences to bring these facts to life. We are learning new ways to make lectures even more entertaining and motivational. Interaction between students and between professor and students is virtually absent in the lecture hall, yet that interaction is what is most needed to support an active learning process. Ask twenty people how they define distance learning, and fifteen will respond that it is television-mediated instruction. The remaining five will perhaps include courses on the Internet, without distinction as to how this material is organized and presented or how student progress is evaluated.