The Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory

Tammy Sumner - Thoughts and Reactions

DLC/DLI meeting (1/26/99)

Handouts from an earlier presentation define discovery learning at CU Boulder as "an inquiry-based student-centered educational process where the learner develops critical thinking skills, experiences the passion and excitement of original research and engages in problem-solving with other learners in a collaborative, technology-enhanced setting".

Positive Comments

The presentations reveal CU Boulder and Colorado in general to be hotbeds of leading edge research in various highly specialized engineering disiciplines.

Many of these researchers have been successful at founding 'centers' in their areas that attract significant amounts of funding, both from the government and from industry.

Many of the centers had formed innovative partnerships with industry (for student projects or internships, for mentoring, for specialist teaching knowledge) and with other universities (some areas are so specialized, and possibly so expensive, that it is difficult for one institution to do everything).

Small Concerns

Is it a 'rich get richer' scenario? Several of the pitches seemed to make the case that "our center brings in X dollars, put us in the DLC and we'll be able to bring in 2X or even X2 dollars!" While I whole heartedly agree that you want to capitalize on and support your successes, it would nevertheless be troubling if only learners in lucrative disciplines can engage in discovery learning.

Is student participation an 'all or nothing' deal? Many of the presentations emphasized student retention in the programme; i.e., so many went on the work in the field or get PhDs. This, of course, is very good! But, there did seem to be highly differential benefits to students in the sense that the students who benefitted most from the DL programmes were those that decided to make that area of enquiry their life's work.

I did not see any plans put forward that included less enduring forms of student participation. Might not a talented undergrad participate in the DL programmes of several of the centers before settling down to a particular area? Clayton's 'arena' idea might help here.

Bigger Concerns

Is it really just a matter of scaling up our 'research as usual'? None of the presentations that I saw had an explicit plan for supporting undergraduate discovery learning. The implicit operating assumption seemed to be that "we are already experts at doing our research, we do not need to do anything differently, all we need to do is include undergraduates in what we already do, and this is mainly a matter of resources (space and money)." Put another way, the 'plans' often resembled a reaganomics approach to 'trickle down' undergraduate research; i.e., put enough money in the top of the centers and some will trickle down to provide some undergraduate research opportunites. I have multiple concerns with this issue. One is that it is not particularly learner-centered but rather 'center-centered'. No one brought up the issues of what can we do: to widen participation, to ensure that DL is a successful experience for larger numbers of students, to ensure that students get the skills and supervision they need to fully participate. I would argue that this implicit 'research as usual' model would work for the top few percent but would fall apart as larger numbers of undergraduates are involved, with differing ('more'?) supervisory or mentoring needs. Perhaps limiting participation to the exceptional students is an implicit understanding that I am unaware of?

What is the relationship between what a student does in DLC with the rest of their college career? Is DL something an undergraduate student does in their spare time, between classes and part time work? Do they get paid? Do they get course credits? How does it couple with the rest of their degree programme? None of the resentations challenged the status quo in terms of the rest of the degree programme; the implicit assumption seemed to be that DL activities are carried out as semester-long, independent studies as part of the standard degree programme. If this is the case, it limits, and perhaps even sidelines, the overall impact of DL in terms of a person's whole college experience (I assume you can only take so many independent studies per degree in most programmes and these are competing for attention with classes being taken simulateously).

What is the relationship between what a faculty does in DLC with the rest of their teaching load? If a faculty member is supervising 2 graduate and 4 undergraduate researchers, are they still expected to teach their normal class load? What about if they are supervising 6 graduate students and 16 undergraduates? Is 'discovery teaching' something that a faculty member does 'instead of' or 'in addition to' their traditional teaching requirements? If it is 'in addition to' then the DL programme will run into scalability problems; i.e., there are only so many additional duties (students) that one can take on.

How do activities or programmes or ideas trialed in the DLC feedback into the larger disciplinary or faculty programmes; i.e., how will it impact the larger undergraduate programme? I think this is probably the big question that the previous concerns come at from different angles. How does what we do in the DLC relate to the larger picture from the student perspective, the faculty perspective, the degree perspective, and the institutional perspective? How will the rest of the college of engineering and CU benefit from the DLC? How will the ideas and lessons learned in the DLC migrate out to the university at large? How will the university as an organization learn or change as a result of the DLC?

Last Updated: 4/16/99; 2:41:00 PM
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