I started working full-time at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) in January of this year when I accepted the position of Program Chair for Information Systems Management (IFSM) within the Undergraduate school (cleverly named The Undergraduate School, TUS).
As the Program Chair, I have responsibility for both:
- logistics issues: hiring adjunct faculty, ensuring classes have assigned faculty, dealing with problems/complaints that come up during each semester, and
- academic results: how to ensure we provide the best and most valuable experience within the IFSM major.
My introductory course, IFSM 201, is required for almost all students at UMUC to graduate. It is part of the General Education requirements for TUS, sometimes called a Gateway course since it is a ‘gate’ to the rest of the undergraduate majors.
One of the issues that we have faced is a disproportionate number of students do poorly in Gateway classes. As a result, with funding from grant money, we put in place a partnership with Carnegie Mellon to utilize software they had developed under a project they refer to as the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) which we have been using in our IFSM 201 class.
OLI provides a way of providing material for students which hopefully will make it easier for them to learn. It also focuses on using data analytics taken from how students used the software to adapt the classroom (thus the term Adaptive Learning) to maximize student results.
Last week I presented a summary of what we had learned thus far based on the use of OLI at an academic conference in Philadelphia. The conference was sponsored by an organization called UPCEA, a trade group for academics interested in professional, continuing and on-line education. Hopefully you can access my presentation here: My Presentation.