Creating Significant Learning Experiences, Revised and Updated

CHAPTER ONE

CREATING SIGNIFICANT LEARNING EXPERIENCES

The Key to Quality in Educational Programs

We won’t meet the needs for more and better higher education until professors become designers of learning experiences and not teachers.

—Larry Spence (2001)

Every year, in the United States alone, more than one million college teachers prepare to teach classes, and more than twenty million students come to learn. Most of us teach four to eight courses a year. As we engage in this task, we have two options. We can continue to follow traditional ways of teaching, repeating the same practices that we and others in our disciplines have used for years. Or we can dare to dream about doing something different, something special in our courses that would ...