In light of state cuts to higher education, members of student government and members of the campus community gathered Thursday night to address the future course of the University of Wisconsin.
At Thursday night’s Associated Students of Madison Shared Governance committee meeting, engineering professor Jeffrey Russell presented Interim Chancellor David Ward’s Educational Innovation initiative to attendees at the town hall. Educational Innovation has been billed as a coordinated effort create a campus environment that supports students’ learning while simultaneously generating new resources.
“We need to think about a sustained approach in this changing world and changing economy we’re in where we can really focus on how to maintain student learning while at the same time better utilizing our capacities and in some cases generating new revenue,” Russell said.
He said Educational Innovation is one of four initiatives proposed by Ward to tackle a gap in the University of Wisconsin base budget, which is emerging because of cuts to higher education in the state budget.
Russell said the Educational Initiative does not mean that UW has not been innovative in the past, but rather the university wants to look at long-term solutions in a new way.
Along with Russell’s introduction of the initiative on innovation, the town hall event organized attendees into small groups to brainstorm ways the university can increase its capacities.
UW sophomore Sam Seering, who sits on ASM’s Legislative Affairs committee, said in terms of improvements, the university should foster more cross-departmental connections to create learning opportunities for students. He said his favorite part of his UW experience has been the ability to customize his education and find opportunities outside of the classroom.
“There are support structures established for you if you want to use them,” Seering said. “You can go the full scale; you just have to have the feeling of wanting to broaden your greater academic experience.”
Other ideas brought up by attendees in small group included improving the UW experience included expanding First-Year Interest Groups to other years, having more programs similar to Biocore in other departments and making the Wisconsin Idea Seminar mandatory for students.
Topics addressed in the small group discussions also included what students value about their UW experience, what they think gets in the way of their achieving their goals and how they think these stand to be improved.
Russell said overall, the goal of Educational Innovation is not to have prescribed ideas, but to find new ways to address issues in education. He said by May, he and the others working on the Educational Initiative with Ward hope to have a list of compiled initiatives to work on.
He said the initiative looks to tackle new ways of efficient teaching and learning and could mean increasing capacity by identifying currently unreached sub-sections of students to include in alternate education models.
“We want to listen. We recognize that it’s not easy to do everything but we know collectively; this is Wisconsin and we can shape our own future, and we can think about things in a meaningful and different way moving forward,” Russell said.
