The authors, using research and a long record of practice on the campus, outline a set of challenges and proposed solutions to elevating teaching excellence and promoting learning on campus.
The authors call for leadership and funding support for an initiative to establish biomimicry as a central concept of teaching and research at CU Boulder.
The authors maintain that language study – with a wide variety of cognitive benefits and skill developments – should be an important part of the curriculum at CU Boulder.
The authors cite the need to revisit incentives and strategies for educating graduate students across disciplinary lines as well as professional specialties.
The authors submit that an international educational experience should be available to all CU students, and offer a five-point roadmap for how this might be achieved, as well as reviewing current foundations for such a roadmap.
The authors argue that academic art museums, as centers for learning, have the potential to impart skills across disciplines, modeling applications of "transfer learning" where knowledge gained in one domain is applied to another.
The authors discuss the role of museum staff as learning providers, how their efforts shape the student experience, and what awareness of the value of informal learning suggests in terms of future research and innovation at CU Boulder.
The authors center their arguments in STEM education reform, arguing for better support for faculty who occasionally team teach by giving them full teaching credit and (2) support for graduate students by incorporating flexible ‘breadth’ course requirements into STEM graduate curriculum.
The authors believe that moving away from the notion of motivating students to one of engaging students in learning environments could have profound effects on CU’s school culture and its ability to create and sustain learning and participation in STEM fields.
The author argues that the campus consider ways to consolidate gains made in digital scholarship and the use of digital assets by faculty. Suggestions include funding to mold sustained 1 programs (with possibly additional technical support staff and e.g. improved options for web hosting) and the development of incentives (summer funding, course releases, etc.) to allow faculty new to digital scholarship to get involved.
