tradeoffs

The comments and suggestions made in the survey of student satisfaction conducted as part of the 7-year "AQUAD" review of the Program in 2017-18 reflect how students experience the kinds of tradeoffs present in the program given the resources available and possibilities for effectively meeting the needs of a diverse community of students:

• Having a small program composed of faculty with diverse specialties allows for close interactions among faculty students and allows students exposure to others from a variety of fields and ways of thinking, but faculty specialties still can’t cover the diversity of student interests, making it necessary for students to pull more general course content in the direction of their specific interests and reach out to experts outside of the program.

• Hybrid courses mean that students can take most (but not all) courses in their preferred format, and that courses now regularly exceed minimum enrollment, but both face-to-face and online students have to get used to new ways of engaging with learning as they encounter processes that serve both formats.

• Teaching models that emphasize reflective practice and problem-based learning allow students to define critical and creative thinking in more personal terms and be able to work toward applications and practices directed toward their own fields, but students seeking the theoretical underpinnings of critical thinking and creative thinking in support of direct scholarship in these fields have to reach beyond the coursework at times to explore the related content.

• The program’s support of student personal and professional development provides opportunities for students to pursue their work and life projects and attempts to influence change in highly flexible and customized ways, but there is no built-in path to a specific career change or job promotion nor single common reference point shared by a cohort of students in moving toward a certain professional outcome.

• The program and its courses explore cross-disciplinary tools and processes of critical and creative thinking through hybrid coursework, problem-based learning, and extensive workshop activities where there is some need to experiment with new approaches and be responsive to the interests and needs of the current students, but this means that course content that favors highly-stable, expert-level approaches tied to a single discipline is not always what best serves the students.

• Teaching by part-time faculty with interesting field experience outside of academia offers the students access to perspectives on practice and experiential learning, but participation by adjunct faculty beyond the direct teaching of a course are limited; course redesign and rethinking curriculum get addressed more slowly than what is ideal, given the shifting (hybrid) formats, evolution of technologies, and the varied and changing needs of students.

(Extracted from section II.F of the self-study, which can be viewed in full, together with other documents here.)