For years, I heard a fairly standard piece of advice about graduate school: Don’t enroll directly after completing an undergraduate degree.

Finish your undergraduate degree. Get a job. Spend a few years in the profession. Figure out what you are good at, what interests you and where you want your career to go. Then return to school for an advanced degree.

I understand the reasoning behind that advice.

But lately, I have begun to wonder whether we have turned generalized advice into a rule that doesn’t fit everyone.

I oversee graduate programs in communication, and I have noticed more students moving directly from their undergraduate education into master’s programs. Some finish their bachelor’s degree in one semester and enroll in their master’s just days later.

At the University of Florida, there are some particular reasons this happens. Many students arrive in their undergraduate programs with substantial college credits already completed. They may have imagined spending four years in college, only to discover that they can complete their undergraduate degree in two or three. For some, pursuing a graduate degree allows them to extend the period of study they had originally expected while also earning an advanced credential.

Florida’s Bright Futures program can also play a role. For eligible students who complete their undergraduate degree early, remaining Bright Futures funding may help offset graduate-level tuition during their first semester after graduation. Combination-degree programs provide another pathway, allowing qualified students to begin taking graduate courses while they are still undergraduates. In our college, students can apply as many as 12 graduate credits toward both their bachelor’s and master’s requirements.

Those incentives make the decision easier.

But I think something bigger is happening too.

Graduate school no longer seems to represent exclusively the second act of someone’s career. For some students, it is increasingly becoming the final stage of their initial education.

The national numbers offer some support for the broader growth of graduate education, although they do not definitively establish that more students are going directly from bachelor’s to master’s programs. U.S. postbaccalaureate enrollment has grown over time, and recent Council of Graduate Schools data point to continued demand for master’s programs.

So perhaps the more useful question is not whether students are going directly to graduate school more often.

It is whether they should.

Share

The case for waiting

I understand why the traditional advice developed, particularly in a field like communication.

Professional experience gives graduate education context.

Consider a class on crisis communication. A student who has worked inside an organization during a crisis hears that discussion differently. A lesson about managing clients means something different after you have dealt with a difficult client. Organizational communication becomes less theoretical when you have experienced a dysfunctional organization. Leadership courses become different once you have had a good boss, a bad boss or perhaps become a supervisor yourself.

Professional experience gives students a library of situations against which they can test what they are learning.

That is an important advantage.

Research on adults simultaneously working and attending graduate school has found that these students particularly value active learning and the opportunity to connect academic ideas with their professional environments. The relationship is not always seamless, but when the academic environment and workplace align, graduate education can become a particularly powerful form of applied learning.

Work also gives students something else: direction.

At 22, it can be difficult to know precisely what specialization you want. After three or four years in a profession, you may have a much clearer sense of the skills you lack.

You may discover that you want to move from execution into strategy. From journalism into audience analytics. From public relations into management. From content creation into research. Or perhaps into an entirely different part of the communications industry.

In those cases, graduate school becomes very intentional.

You are not getting a master’s degree simply because it is the next credential available. You are acquiring specific knowledge to solve a problem or move toward a particular career objective.

There is also an economic argument for getting some experience first.

Many entry-level communications jobs do not require master’s degrees. The bachelor’s degree remains the typical entry-level qualification for careers including public relations, journalism and technical writing. Employers often value internships, portfolios and professional experience alongside academic preparation.

That matters.

A graduate degree should have a purpose. If the job you want requires experience rather than another credential, two years in the workplace may produce a better return than two additional years in a classroom.

The case for going straight through

But there is another side to the argument.

A student coming directly from undergraduate school has advantages too.

First, they already know how to be a student.

They are accustomed to reading, writing papers, meeting deadlines, studying and navigating academic systems. There is no transition back into the classroom after five or ten years away.

More importantly, going directly to graduate school can allow a student to develop expertise earlier.

A bachelor’s degree in communication is necessarily broad. Graduate education provides an opportunity to specialize. A student interested in political communication, digital strategy, audience analytics, public relations, social media, journalism, artificial intelligence or another emerging area may be able to develop a differentiated professional identity before entering the full-time workforce.

And today’s communications environment changes rapidly.

The tools, platforms and business models our graduates encounter are evolving faster than they did a generation ago. A carefully designed professional master’s program can give a recent graduate another year or two to deepen technical skills, build a portfolio, work with industry professionals and develop specialized expertise.

There can also be a very practical financial argument.

Accelerated and combination-degree programs change the traditional calculation. At UF, for example, qualified students can take up to 12 graduate credits that count toward both their bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Bright Futures can also reduce first-semester graduate costs for some students who finish their undergraduate degrees early and still have eligible funding remaining.

Telling a student in that situation to graduate, work for three years and then return to school simply because that is the traditional order may make little sense.

There is another assumption we should question.

We sometimes talk as though students without several years of employment have no professional experience.

That is increasingly inaccurate.

Many strong undergraduates graduate with multiple internships, campus media experience, freelance work, research projects, agency experience, student organizations, client projects and significant portfolio work.

A 22-year-old may not have three years of full-time employment, but that does not necessarily mean that person has spent four years isolated from professional practice.

Share

What are you trying to accomplish?

Maybe that is the question we should be asking instead.

Not:

“How old should you be before graduate school?”

Or:

“How many years should you work first?”

But:

“What do you need graduate school to do for you?”

If you are unsure what kind of communications career you want, getting some professional experience may be the better choice.

If the career you want rewards professional experience much more than credentials, go get the experience.

If you have already identified a specialization and graduate study will help you develop it, continuing directly may make sense.

If an accelerated program dramatically reduces the cost of the degree, that should be part of the calculation.

If you are trying to change careers, graduate education may serve a completely different purpose.

If you are already working and have discovered a specific gap in your knowledge, your professional experience may make graduate study significantly more valuable.

And if you are considering graduate school primarily because you do not know what else to do after graduation, that may be a reason not to enroll yet.

A master’s degree is too expensive, in money, time and opportunity cost, to be a holding pattern.

There isn’t one right time

This is where my thinking has changed.

I still see enormous value in working before graduate school. Some of the strongest graduate students I have taught bring years of professional experiences into our discussions. They can immediately connect concepts to organizations, clients, colleagues and situations they have actually encountered.

But I have also taught excellent students who came almost directly from undergraduate programs. They bring different strengths: academic momentum, curiosity, emerging technical skills and a willingness to experiment.

The mistake is assuming that one path must be superior to the other.

Higher education loves general rules. Work three years. Get your master’s before 30. Don’t get a master’s until you know exactly what you want to do.

Real lives are more complicated than that.

There is no universally “right” time to go to graduate school.

There is a right time for a particular person.

And figuring out when that is requires us to stop thinking in generalities and start looking at the individual’s goals, finances, experience, opportunities and circumstances.

The question isn’t, “When should people go to graduate school?”

It is much more personal.

“When should you?”

One of the things I have learned from leading online graduate programs is that students can value flexibility and still deeply crave connection.

Those two things are not contradictory.

Students choose online education for many reasons. They may be working full-time, raising families, living hundreds or thousands of miles from campus, or trying to fit graduate education into an already complicated life. Online programs give them access and flexibility that a traditional residential program may not.

But flexibility does not mean students want to learn alone.

In fact, one of the things we hear repeatedly from students in our online graduate programs at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications is that they want more opportunities to connect. They want to know their classmates. They want relationships with faculty. They want to feel that they are part of something rather than simply completing a sequence of courses.

I have seen that in my own teaching.

Most of the courses in our programs are asynchronous, but one of the classes I teach includes a required weekly synchronous meeting. At the end of a recent semester, one student wrote on LinkedIn:

“A special shout-out to Evan Kropp for making this my most engaging semester yet. Having the opportunity to meet weekly and connect in real time made the class such an insightful and memorable part of my graduate experience.”

She was talking about a class, but I think she was also talking about community.

There was value in seeing the same people each week. There was value in conversation that happened in real time. There was value in becoming familiar with one another rather than simply encountering names attached to discussion posts.

This semester, we are taking that idea further. The online graduate programs I lead are holding our first in-person gathering for students, called Beyond the Screen. Students will come together for an evening and the following day to meet one another, spend time with faculty, network, learn, and build relationships.

The academic programming matters, of course.

But I suspect some of the most valuable moments will happen between the scheduled activities.

They will happen over dinner. During a break. When two students realize they work in similar fields. When someone finally meets a professor they have known only through a computer screen. When a conversation that begins casually turns into a professional relationship or friendship.

Those moments are difficult to measure, but they matter.

And this need for community extends far beyond higher education.

Near where I live in New Hampshire, a local podcast called Seacoast Stories tells stories about the people, businesses, and issues shaping the region. But it has increasingly moved beyond simply producing a podcast. It holds live events and organizes a monthly Dinner Club where community members come together around a table.

Its website captures the idea beautifully: the goal is to turn an audience into neighbors. The organization says about one in three Dinner Club seats is now occupied by someone returning for another dinner.

Across the Atlantic, Pint of Science uses another variation on the same idea. Scientists and researchers leave universities and laboratories and meet members of the public in pubs, cafés, and other informal spaces to talk about their work. What began in the United Kingdom has grown into an international festival spanning hundreds of cities.

A graduate program. A neighborhood dinner. Scientists talking in a pub.

They look very different, but all three are responding to something fundamentally human: people want opportunities to be with other people.

There is evidence that the need is substantial. Gallup research across 142 countries found that 24 percent of people described themselves as very or fairly lonely. Younger adults reported greater loneliness than adults 65 and older.

Within higher education, a recent meta-analysis drawing on tens of thousands of students found a substantial relationship between loneliness and a lower sense of belonging.

But loneliness is not simply a matter of being physically alone.

A student can sit in a lecture hall surrounded by hundreds of people and feel invisible. An online student living 1,000 miles from campus can feel deeply connected to classmates and professors.

Community is not created by proximity alone.

It comes from being known.

It comes from repeated interaction. From shared experiences. From knowing that there are people who notice when you are present and perhaps notice when you are missing.

Community also creates something that increasingly efficient systems tend to eliminate: serendipity.

We have become exceptionally good at designing experiences that allow people to accomplish things quickly. Log in. Complete the transaction. Watch the video. Submit the assignment. Join the meeting. Leave the meeting.

Efficiency has enormous value.

But sometimes the inefficient parts of life are where relationships form.

The conversation after the meeting. The person sitting next to you at dinner. The five minutes before class begins. The unexpected discussion that has nothing to do with the agenda.

Those moments are difficult to engineer, but leaders can create more opportunities for them to occur.

That may be an increasingly important responsibility of leadership.

We cannot manufacture friendships. We cannot force people to feel connected. And putting people in the same room does not magically create community.

But we can create the conditions in which community is more likely to develop.

We can create smaller groups where people actually learn one another’s names.

We can build repeated opportunities for interaction rather than relying on one large annual event.

We can create shared experiences around meals, learning, projects, celebrations, traditions, or common interests.

We can give people reasons to talk to someone they do not already know.

And sometimes we can simply provide the space and time for people to linger.

In higher education, particularly online education, this requires intentionality. We should think about community as deliberately as we think about curriculum, technology, assessment, and student services.

But the same question applies to workplaces, neighborhoods, professional organizations, churches, civic groups, and almost every organization we lead.

We spend a great deal of time asking how we can make experiences easier, faster, more convenient, and more personalized.

Those are worthwhile goals.

Maybe we also need to ask another question:

Where, in what we are building, will people find one another?

Because community matters.

And community doesn’t happen by accident.

For generations, higher education has followed a familiar sequence: complete high school, attend college for four years, earn a degree, and enter the workforce.

That model remains valuable, but it was built for a different society. It assumes that education occurs primarily at the beginning of adulthood and that one concentrated period of study can prepare someone for decades of work.

That assumption is becoming harder to defend.

Today’s professionals will likely change roles, learn new technologies, develop new specialties, and sometimes reinvent their careers several times. A forty-year career may no longer fit inside one four-year education.

The future of higher education should therefore be built around lifelong credentialing.

This does not mean abandoning the bachelor’s degree. It means recognizing that education should not end when a student completes one. Universities should create relationships that allow learners to return throughout their lives for shorter programs, specialized credentials, individual courses, and updated professional knowledge.

These models are not limited to undergraduate education. Graduate education must also become more flexible.

Many professionals need advanced education but cannot immediately commit to a full master’s degree. A graduate certificate can provide a more accessible starting point. When designed intentionally, that certificate can later become part of a larger degree rather than an isolated educational experience.

In our program at UF CJC Online, for example, students can complete a graduate certificate and embed it within a master’s degree plan. This allows them to earn an additional credential without extending the overall time or cost of the degree. The certificate has immediate value and also contributes to a larger academic pathway.

Lifelong learning should also continue after the degree is completed.

UF CJC Online’s Master Access benefit allows graduates of its online Master of Arts in Mass Communication programs to return and observe current courses across the program’s concentrations for $500 per year. Alumni can use the benefit to remain current as communication platforms, technologies, and professional practices change.

These two models address different moments in a learner’s development.

Embedded certificates allow students to build toward a graduate degree in meaningful stages. Master Access extends the educational relationship beyond graduation. Together, they reflect a broader shift from education as a single transaction to education as an ongoing institutional relationship.

That shift will require more than creating additional certificates.

Institutions will need to make it easier for learners to enter, leave, return, and build upon previous work. Credentials must connect logically. Credit policies must be transparent. Advising must help students see both their immediate options and their longer-term pathways.

Universities must also reconsider what graduation represents.

Traditionally, graduation marks the end of the educational process. In a lifelong-learning model, it becomes a transition point. Graduates remain part of an active learning community and return when their industries, responsibilities, or ambitions change.

Higher education is well-positioned to lead this transformation. Universities already have faculty expertise, trusted credentials, strong alumni networks, and experience creating rigorous learning experiences.

The challenge is not whether institutions can educate people throughout their careers. It is whether their structures will allow them to do so.

The future of higher education may not be defined by replacing the four-year degree or the traditional master’s program.

It may be defined by placing both inside a much longer relationship between institutions and learners.

The most successful universities will not simply award credentials and send graduates into the workforce.

They will create pathways that allow people to keep learning for life.

In July, Gallup and Lumina Foundation released new survey data showing that Americans’ confidence in higher education had slipped backward after a modest improvement the previous year.

Only 38 percent of U.S. adults now report having a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education, down from 42 percent last year and 57 percent in 2015. Respondents pointed to several reasons for their skepticism, including cost, political agendas and concerns about whether colleges adequately prepare students for the workforce.

But one new finding deserves particular attention.

For the first time, the survey asked Americans how artificial intelligence might affect the importance of college degrees during the next five years. Forty-six percent said AI would make degrees less important. Only 20 percent thought degrees would become more important, while 33 percent expected no change.

The results were closely connected to respondents’ existing confidence in higher education. Among people who lacked confidence in higher education, 64 percent believed AI would make college degrees less important. Among those who remained confident, only 32 percent expected degrees to lose importance.

We should be careful about what these findings mean.

The survey does not establish that AI caused the decline in confidence. Instead, it shows that people who already question the value of higher education are especially likely to see AI as another reason a degree may no longer be necessary.

That perception should concern college and university leaders.

It also suggests that higher education has not adequately explained its role in an AI-driven society.

The public conversation about AI too often begins with replacement.

Will AI replace entry-level employees?

Will it replace instructors?

Will it replace traditional assignments?

Will it make certain majors, skills or degrees obsolete?

These questions are understandable, but they lead us toward the wrong conversation. The more useful question is this:

How can people learn to use AI to perform nonhuman tasks more efficiently while preserving their time and attention for the work that requires human judgment, creativity, empathy and responsibility?

AI can summarize documents, organize information, generate preliminary ideas, identify patterns and automate routine processes. It can help people complete many tasks faster.

But efficiency is not the same as wisdom.

AI cannot decide which problems are worth solving. It cannot assume moral responsibility for a decision. It cannot genuinely understand another person’s lived experience. It cannot build trust, exercise courage, navigate a difficult human relationship or determine what a community ought to value.

Those are human responsibilities.

This is where higher education can become more important, not less.

Colleges should certainly teach students how to use AI. Graduates need practical experience selecting appropriate tools, evaluating outputs, recognizing bias, protecting confidential information and knowing when AI should not be used.

But AI proficiency alone is not enough.

Students must also learn to ask better questions, evaluate evidence, communicate across differences, exercise ethical judgment, work collaboratively and solve complicated problems involving real people. They must develop the ability to recognize where technological capability ends and human responsibility begins.

That requires more than technical training. It requires the broader development of the person.

Higher education has always been about more than transferring information or preparing someone to complete a list of workplace tasks. At its best, it helps people become thoughtful professionals, informed citizens and capable human beings.

In the AI age, that mission is not outdated. It is urgent.

The problem is that institutions often communicate the value of college as though the world has not changed. They promote programs, credentials and career outcomes, but do not always clearly explain how the educational experience prepares graduates to work alongside intelligent technologies.

The value proposition must become more explicit.

A college education should help students understand:

• What AI can do
• How to use it effectively and ethically
• How to evaluate what it produces
• When not to rely on it
• Which decisions must remain human
• How to lead, communicate and solve problems in an increasingly automated workplace

Higher education will not rebuild public confidence simply by insisting that degrees remain valuable. Institutions will have to demonstrate how their curricula, teaching practices and student experiences are changing.

They must show that students are not being prepared to compete against AI.

They are being prepared to work with AI while contributing the judgment, humanity and accountability that technology cannot provide.

AI does not make education less relevant.

It raises the standard for what a meaningful education must accomplish.

At the end of my Seminar in Mass Communication Teaching course, I asked students to write a critical reflection about their growth. They considered how their understanding of teaching had changed, identified strengths and weaknesses in the courses they designed, examined important instructional decisions, and described challenges they encountered along the way.

As I read their reflections, it occurred to me that instructors should complete the same exercise.

We often ask students to examine their assumptions, evaluate their performance, and explain what they would do differently. Faculty members should be willing to apply that same standard to themselves. Every semester produces successes, frustrations, surprises, and moments when an instructor realizes that something that seemed clear on the screen was not nearly as clear to the students completing it.

So, after a summer of teaching future college instructors, this is my reflection on what a semester of teaching actually looks like from the faculty side.

Before the Semester: Designing the Experience

A semester begins long before the first class meeting.

Before students arrive, the instructor is reviewing the syllabus, organizing the learning management system, checking links, revising assignments, selecting readings, updating deadlines, and deciding what students should ultimately be able to demonstrate.

This course presented an unusual design challenge. Students were not simply learning about teaching. They were developing their own teaching philosophies, syllabi, course maps, assessments, rubrics, technology plans, modules, and final teaching portfolios.

That meant the course itself needed to model the practices it was teaching.

If I emphasized alignment, the assignments needed to align. If I taught clarity and transparency, my own directions needed to be clear. If I encouraged instructors to create meaningful learning experiences, the course could not become a collection of disconnected assignments about teaching.

One of the semester’s major successes was the overall progression of the work. Students began by exploring faculty roles and their own beliefs about teaching. They then moved into course goals, objectives, syllabi, alignment maps, assessments, rubrics, technology, teaching challenges, and final portfolios.

By the end, they were not simply discussing teaching. They had created tangible evidence that they could begin doing it.

That progression worked. It gave the semester a clear destination, and students could increasingly see how each assignment contributed to the portfolio they would eventually complete.

The Early Weeks: Establishing a Classroom Community

The beginning of a semester is partly about content, but it is also about tone.

Students are trying to determine what kind of instructor you are. They want to know whether the course will be organized, whether questions are welcome, whether assignments will be graded fairly, and whether the person leading the class is genuinely interested in their success.

The instructor is making assessments too.

Who speaks quickly? Who needs more time? Who has teaching experience? Who is entering the subject for the first time? Who is confident? Who may need encouragement before contributing?

This semester included students with very different professional backgrounds and levels of teaching experience. Some had already spent years in classrooms. Others had never taught and were still deciding whether higher education might become part of their future.

That diversity became one of the course’s strengths. Students brought examples from journalism, public relations, marketing, digital media, technology, business, and other professional settings. They also formed connections with one another and developed their own group identity, including the memorable creation of the “Victoria Coalition.”

Those moments matter. They are not distractions from learning. They are part of how a class becomes a learning community rather than a collection of individuals completing the same assignments.

The Middle of the Semester: When the Work Becomes Real

Most semesters have a point when the initial energy wears off and the work becomes more demanding.

For this course, that happened when students moved from describing the type of instructor they hoped to become to designing the actual structures that would support their teaching.

Writing a teaching philosophy can feel inspiring. Constructing a course alignment map is different.

An alignment map forces the instructor to answer harder questions:

What should students be able to do?

How will they demonstrate that learning?

What materials will prepare them?

What activities will provide practice?

Does the technology serve a learning purpose, or is it simply interesting?

Students discovered that course design is not just content sequencing. It requires every major component of the course to work together. An engaging activity is not automatically a useful activity. A polished assignment is not necessarily aligned. A technology tool is not valuable simply because it is popular.

This was also when grading became more complicated.

Giving feedback on early ideas is relatively straightforward. Giving feedback on alignment requires careful attention to whether objectives are measurable, whether assessments operate at the appropriate cognitive level, and whether materials and activities actually prepare students to succeed.

The volume of feedback also increased. Students were building different courses in different disciplines, so there was no single correct model. Each submission required me to enter the student’s course, understand what they were trying to accomplish, and respond within that context.

That is one of the less visible realities of teaching. Grading is not merely assigning points. Done properly, it involves interpreting a student’s intentions, identifying where the work is succeeding, locating the most important opportunity for improvement, and explaining that opportunity in a way the student can use.

The Daily Work Nobody Sees

A course is not maintained only during class meetings.

Much of teaching takes place in small, unremarkable tasks that rarely appear in descriptions of faculty work.

Students send emails asking whether they have interpreted an assignment correctly. Someone cannot access a resource. A link stops working. A due date appears differently in two locations. A student wants clarification about feedback. Another has fallen behind and needs help developing a realistic plan.

The instructor reviews the question, opens the course, checks the instructions, reconstructs how the student encountered the issue, and decides whether the problem belongs to the student, the course, the technology, or some combination of all three.

Sometimes the answer is a short email.

Sometimes the question exposes a flaw that requires revising an assignment, posting an announcement, clarifying expectations for the entire class, or changing the plan for the next meeting.

This semester included an assignment whose instructions were not as clear as they should have been. Students recognized similarities between that assignment and a previous activity and became uncertain about what they were expected to produce. I was traveling and did not see their message quickly enough to resolve the confusion before they completed the work.

That was an instructional failure, even though it was not intentional and did not derail the semester.

It reinforced a simple lesson: the fact that an assignment makes sense to the person who wrote it does not mean it will make sense to the person encountering it for the first time.

The appropriate response is not defensiveness. It is to acknowledge the confusion, determine why it occurred, fix what can be fixed, and prevent the same problem in the future.

Students were learning that revision is part of course design. I was reminded that revision is also part of course delivery.

Teaching While Life Continues

Another reality of faculty work is that the semester does not pause when the instructor’s life becomes complicated.

This summer, I taught one of our live seminar meetings from Paris. Because of the time difference, a class scheduled for the evening in Florida began around midnight for me.

It was not an ideal teaching arrangement. It was, however, a realistic demonstration of what faculty members often do. We prepare around travel, administrative demands, family obligations, professional events, and unexpected interruptions because students still deserve a meaningful learning experience.

The session required more preparation than usual. I needed to ensure the technology worked, organize the activities carefully, anticipate the limitations of teaching at that hour, and remain present for students despite the circumstances.

The class went forward.

That does not mean instructors should glorify overwork or pretend that exhaustion improves teaching. It means that consistency sometimes requires adaptability. The lesson is not that faculty members should always push through. The lesson is that good preparation creates resilience when conditions are less than ideal.

When the Course Does Not Go Exactly as Planned

No semester follows the syllabus perfectly.

A discussion takes longer than anticipated. A concept requires more explanation. A planned activity does not generate the response the instructor expected. Students encounter a technology problem. An assignment needs clarification. A student raises a question that leads the class in a more useful direction than the original plan.

The challenge is knowing what to preserve and what to change.

Instructors can become overly attached to their plans because they invested time in creating them. But the purpose of a lesson plan is to support learning, not to prove that the instructor predicted the evening correctly.

This semester reminded me that structure and flexibility are not opposites.

Students benefit from clear expectations, consistent deadlines, organized modules, and transparent grading. They also benefit from instructors who recognize when the planned approach is not working and are willing to adjust.

The strongest class meetings were not necessarily the ones that followed my notes most precisely. They were the ones in which preparation created enough structure for genuine conversation, questions, and unexpected insights to emerge.

A Major Win: Students Created Work They Can Actually Use

The clearest success of the semester was the quality of the final teaching portfolios.

Students did not end the course with a hypothetical discussion about what teaching might involve. They left with teaching philosophies, sample syllabi, course maps, assessments, rubrics, technology plans, and evidence of their thinking about student engagement, accessibility, academic integrity, and classroom challenges.

Some students entered the course unsure whether they wanted to teach. By the end, several could imagine pursuing adjunct, lecturer, community college, professional practice, coaching, or training roles.

Others already had teaching experience but developed a more sophisticated understanding of whole-course design. They recognized that teaching a strong lesson and designing a coherent course are related but different skills.

One student described learning that a rubric is not only a grading document but also a teaching document. Another realized that technology should solve a learning problem rather than merely make a course appear innovative. Others wrote about balancing accountability with empathy, treating revision as part of teaching rather than evidence of failure, and designing authentic assessments that mirror professional practice.

Those observations demonstrated genuine learning.

The portfolios also gave students something practical to carry forward. They can refine them, add teaching experience, incorporate evaluations and student work when appropriate, and use them when applying for future positions.

That was the goal, and it was achieved.

Another Win: The Class Became a Community

A second major success was the level of connection within the group.

Online and hybrid learning environments do not automatically produce community. Instructors must create opportunities for students to speak, collaborate, share uncertainty, and learn from one another.

The live meetings played an important role. So did peer review, class discussions, and the gradual process of students sharing the courses they were building.

By the end of the semester, students were not only completing their own portfolios. They were interested in seeing what their classmates had created. After grading the final portfolios, I created an optional discussion space where students could share their completed work and continue learning from one another.

That interest in each other’s success is one of the best outcomes a course can produce.

What I Would Improve

The semester was successful, but it was not perfect.

First, I would review the sequence and wording of every assignment again, particularly where two assignments may appear conceptually similar. Students should understand not only what they are being asked to produce but how the new task advances beyond the previous one.

Second, I would continue reducing unnecessary complexity. Teaching future instructors creates a temptation to include every potentially useful topic. But more content does not automatically produce more learning. The course must preserve enough space for students to process, apply, revise, and discuss.

Third, I would look for additional ways to make the portfolio develop even more visibly throughout the semester. Students eventually understood how the pieces fit together, but that connection could be reinforced earlier and more frequently. Each assignment should clearly indicate where it belongs in the final portfolio and what previous work it builds upon.

Fourth, I would build more structured moments for students to pause and recognize their own progress before the end. By the time they submitted their final reflections, many were surprised by how much their thinking had changed. That reflection should occur throughout the course, not only after the primary work has been completed.

Finally, I would continue examining the balance between detailed feedback and student independence. Feedback should help students improve without turning the instructor into a co-author of every artifact. Students need guidance, but they also need space to make decisions, defend those decisions, and develop confidence in their own judgment.

What I Took Away From the Semester

My most important takeaway is that teaching is a continuous cycle of preparation, delivery, observation, response, and revision.

The syllabus is not the course. The Canvas shell is not the course. The assignments are not the course. Even the live meetings are not the entire course.

The course exists in the interaction among all of those elements and the people experiencing them.

Teaching includes planning activities, leading discussions, grading assignments, responding to emails, fixing confusing instructions, encouraging a student who is uncertain, maintaining standards when doing so is uncomfortable, and recognizing when the instructor is the person who needs to make a change.

It requires both confidence and humility.

An instructor must be confident enough to establish expectations, make decisions, evaluate work, and guide the class. The instructor must also be humble enough to acknowledge mistakes, listen carefully, revise the course, and accept that students may experience an assignment differently than intended.

This semester also reaffirmed that students often remember more than the content alone. They remember whether the instructor seemed prepared. They remember whether questions were welcomed. They remember whether feedback helped them improve. They remember whether a difficult moment was handled with calm and respect. They remember whether the classroom felt like a place where they could take intellectual risks.

Students completed the semester by reflecting on the educators they hope to become.

My own reflection is that effective teaching remains unfinished work. That is not a weakness of the profession. It is one of its defining features.

Every semester provides another group of students, another set of circumstances, and another opportunity to become a better instructor than the one who entered the classroom at the beginning.

This semester, I am teaching a graduate seminar focused on university teaching. Each week, our discussions examine a different part of the work faculty members do, from designing courses and assessments to using technology and responding to challenges in the classroom.

This week, we focused on challenging teaching situations and difficult student scenarios. We considered how instructors might respond when students miss assignments, stop participating, dispute grades, communicate inappropriately, experience personal difficulties, or struggle to meet course expectations.

Our discussion produced an important takeaway that I felt was worth sharing with readers of this newsletter:

Before making assumptions about a student, instructors should be willing to listen and determine how they can help.

When students fall behind or behave in unexpected ways, it is easy to create an immediate explanation. We may assume that a student is careless, unmotivated, irresponsible, or simply unwilling to do the work.

Sometimes that interpretation may be correct. But often, we do not yet have enough information to know.

The behavior we see may be connected to a health concern, a family emergency, financial stress, work responsibilities, confusion about an assignment, fear of failure, or another circumstance that is not visible to the instructor.

That does not mean faculty members should ignore course policies or remove academic expectations. Listening is not the same as excusing behavior. Helping is not the same as solving every problem for a student.

It does mean that instructors should pause before reaching a conclusion.

A conversation can help us determine what is actually happening and what response is appropriate. The student may need clarification, a firm reminder of expectations, a reasonable degree of flexibility, encouragement, or a referral to another university resource.

Without that conversation, we risk responding to the behavior we observe while missing the issue underneath it.

One simple way to begin is:

“I noticed that you have missed several assignments, and I wanted to check in. Can you help me understand what is happening?”

That message does several things at once. It communicates that the instructor is paying attention. It reinforces that the missed work matters. It also gives the student an opportunity to explain rather than immediately placing them in a defensive position.

Our seminar discussion also reinforced that faculty members cannot and should not try to manage every student challenge alone. Instructors are not counselors, case managers, disability specialists, or financial aid advisors. In many cases, the most helpful action is recognizing that a student needs support and connecting that student with the appropriate person or office.

The instructor’s role is often to open the door.

Students remain responsible for their choices, their communication, and their academic work. Accountability still matters. But accountability is more effective when it is based on accurate information rather than assumptions.

Challenging teaching situations rarely have one perfect response. They require judgment, boundaries, consistency, empathy, and an understanding of institutional policies and resources.

But in many cases, the best first step is remarkably simple:

Listen before judging.

Ask before assuming.

Understand the situation before deciding how to respond.

Sometimes the most important teaching decision begins with a conversation.

Imagine asking a college student how a course is going.

The answer will often begin with a letter.

“I have an A.”

“I’m trying to bring my B up.”

“I can still pass if I do well on the final.”

These answers tell us something about the student’s academic standing. They tell us much less about what the student understands, what the student can do, or how the student’s thinking has changed.

That distinction matters because letter grades have become so deeply embedded in American education that they can seem like a natural and necessary part of learning.

They are neither natural nor particularly old.

Grades began as an educational reform

For much of the history of education, students learned without receiving an A, B, C, D, or F. Early American colleges relied on oral examinations, public demonstrations, written comments, and broad descriptions of performance.

There was no shared grading system. Institutions experimented with numbers, percentages, ranks, divisions, and descriptive labels.

The nineteenth-century education reformer Horace Mann helped introduce several practices that would eventually shape modern grading. At the time, students were frequently examined orally, ranked against their classmates, and sometimes physically moved within the classroom according to their performance.

Mann believed this constant competition could undermine motivation. After studying the Prussian education system, he promoted written examinations and monthly report cards that would document individual progress, inform parents, and help schools maintain consistent records.

His goal was not to make grades the center of education. It was to replace public ranking with a system that could show how students were developing over time.

As Robert Talbert explains in Grading for Growth, Mann’s reforms were legitimate improvements over the systems they replaced. Students and parents previously had few reliable ways to understand what had been learned or what still needed improvement. The problem came later, as a record intended to communicate growth accumulated more purposes and more power.

By the end of the nineteenth century, grades were beginning to take the familiar form of letters, points, and averages. By the early twentieth century, much of the grading structure we now consider traditional was in place.

Grades helped solve real problems.

But eventually, the tool created to document learning began to define it.

A remarkably efficient system

The letter grade is an impressive piece of administrative technology.

A professor can evaluate months of work and reduce the result to a single symbol. That symbol can be entered into a transcript, converted into grade points, averaged with other courses, and used by people who were never present in the classroom.

An A in one course can be combined mathematically with a B in another, even when the courses measure entirely different knowledge and skills.

The resulting grade-point average can then influence:

• Academic standing

• Scholarships and financial aid

• Admission to majors

• Graduate and professional school applications

• Honors and awards

• Internship opportunities

• Employment screening

Grades make complex decisions manageable.

That does not necessarily make them precise.

A grade appears objective because it is expressed as a letter, number, or percentage. But every grade is the result of many human decisions.

Faculty determine what work students will complete, how much each assignment will count, what criteria will be used, whether participation matters, how late work will be handled, and what level of performance separates an A from a B.

Two instructors can evaluate similar work differently. Two sections of the same course can have different expectations. A grade of 88 may suggest mathematical precision, but the judgments producing that number are rarely precise to a single percentage point.

Grades provide useful information. The problem begins when we mistake compressed information for complete information.

When the measure becomes the objective

Students are rational participants in the systems we create.

When institutions make grades consequential, students pay attention to grades.

They calculate what assignments are worth. They ask what will be on the test. They determine how much effort a task requires. They prioritize graded work over ungraded learning. They avoid risks that could lower their averages.

None of this means students are lazy or unconcerned about learning.

It means they understand the incentives.

A student who experiments with a difficult idea may produce weaker work than a student who follows the safest path through an assignment. A student who chooses a challenging course may receive a lower grade than one who selects an easier option. A student who struggles, responds to feedback, and improves substantially may still be penalized by an average that preserves every early mistake.

The system may say we value curiosity, intellectual risk, revision, and growth. The gradebook can communicate something different:

Get it right the first time.

Complete what earns points.

Avoid unnecessary risks.

Protect the average.

Grades do not automatically eliminate a student’s interest in learning. Students can care deeply about a subject while also caring about their grades.

But when every learning activity becomes a transaction for points, the transaction can overwhelm the learning.

Feedback and grades are not the same

A grade tells students how their work was judged.

Feedback helps them understand what to do next.

These functions are related, but they are not interchangeable.

Consider the difference between receiving “B-” and receiving this information:

Your argument is clear, but the evidence does not fully support your conclusion. Two sources are summarized rather than analyzed. In your revision, explain why the evidence matters and address the strongest competing interpretation.

The letter efficiently records a result. The feedback creates an opportunity for learning.

In practice, students may focus so intensely on the grade that they barely process the comments accompanying it. Once the grade has been awarded and the class has moved to the next assignment, detailed feedback can feel like an explanation of a closed decision rather than guidance for future improvement.

Why do we provide some of our most detailed feedback after students have lost the opportunity to apply it?

The more useful approach is to give students information while there is still time to revise, practice, and improve. Feedback becomes educational when students are expected to do something with it.

Grades now carry more weight than they can support

A course grade was never designed to provide a complete description of a person’s intelligence, potential, work ethic, creativity, judgment, or professional readiness.

Yet grades are frequently asked to stand in for all of them.

An employer may interpret a GPA as evidence of future performance. A graduate program may use it to estimate academic potential. A scholarship committee may use it as a measure of merit. Students may internalize it as a measure of their own ability.

But the same grade can represent very different realities.

A B might reflect strong work in an unusually demanding course. It might reflect incomplete mastery. It might reflect excellent learning combined with missed deadlines. It might reflect average work under one professor’s standards and exceptional work under another’s.

Even within a single assignment, a grade can combine several dimensions: knowledge, writing ability, organization, compliance with directions, timeliness, participation, and presentation.

Once those dimensions are merged into one symbol, the information cannot easily be separated again.

Grades are effective at ranking and sorting because they reduce complexity.

Learning is complex.

Generative AI is making that tension harder to ignore. When students can use AI to improve the apparent quality of essays, presentations, code, and other products, a grade assigned to the final submission may reveal less about the learner’s independent understanding.

The question is no longer simply whether AI makes academic dishonesty easier.

It is whether our grading systems were already placing too much emphasis on polished products and too little emphasis on the learning process that produced them.

The answer is not necessarily to abolish grades

Grades continue to serve practical purposes. Institutions need to determine whether students are making satisfactory progress. Faculty need a way to certify performance. Other institutions and employers need information they can understand.

Eliminating grades entirely would also create new problems. Narrative evaluations require considerable faculty time. Pass-fail systems can conceal meaningful differences in performance. Alternative approaches can become confusing when students transfer or apply to programs that expect conventional transcripts.

The more productive question is not whether every college should abandon grades tomorrow.

It is whether grades should continue to dominate learning as completely as they do now.

Faculty and institutions can begin with smaller changes:

• Use more low-stakes practice before high-stakes evaluation.

• Give students opportunities to apply feedback through revision.

• Separate academic mastery from behaviors such as punctuality when possible.

• Design assessments around authentic demonstrations of ability.

• Explain what a grade represents rather than relying on a percentage alone.

• Use portfolios, narratives, competencies, and examples of work alongside grades.

• Reduce point accumulation that rewards completion without demonstrating learning.

• Ask students to reflect on how their work changed and what they learned from the process.

None of these changes eliminates standards.

In many cases, they make standards clearer.

Recovering the purpose of assessment

Assessment should help answer three questions:

What should students learn?

What evidence would demonstrate that they learned it?

What should happen when they have not learned it yet?

The modern grading system often answers a different question:

How many points did the student accumulate before the semester ended?

That question is administratively convenient, but it should not become the organizing principle of education.

Grades developed to help schools record, summarize, compare, and communicate student performance. They still perform those functions remarkably well.

But a tool designed to document learning should not become the reason students learn.

The grade should be evidence of the education.

It should never become the education itself.

For generations, higher education has organized itself around a familiar image of the college student: an 18-year-old who moves into a residence hall, attends classes during the day, participates in campus activities, and structures most of life around college.

That student remains an important part of higher education. But that student no longer represents the full market institutions need to serve.

A major portion of today’s higher education audience consists of adults who are working, raising children, caring for parents, changing careers, returning after stopping out, or trying to remain relevant in a rapidly changing workforce.

According to a recent report from the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning and CollegeAPP, more than one-quarter of U.S. adults between the ages of 25 and 64 intend to enroll in some form of higher education or training within the next two years. That represents approximately 41.7 million prospective learners.

This is not a secondary audience. It is central to the future of higher education.

Yet many colleges continue to treat adult learners as a specialized population served through evening programs, continuing education divisions, or a collection of online courses layered onto systems originally designed for someone else.

Higher education says it wants adult learners. The more important question is whether our institutions are prepared to change for them.

Adult learners make different decisions

Traditional college marketing often emphasizes institutional prestige, campus life, tradition, facilities, and the broader promise of personal transformation.

Those messages are not necessarily irrelevant to adults, but they are rarely sufficient.

Adult learners are usually not asking, “Where do I want to spend the next four years?”

They are asking more immediate questions:

Will this help me earn a promotion?

Can it help me change careers?

Will I gain skills that employers value?

Can I complete the program while working?

How much will it cost?

How long will it take?

What will I be able to do when I finish?

Adult learners are not resistant to higher education. They are resistant to vague promises.

Institutions seeking to reach them must shift from inspiration alone to proof. Marketing should clearly explain program costs, completion timelines, schedule expectations, career relevance, faculty expertise, employer recognition, and the outcomes students can reasonably expect.

That communication also needs to be honest. Not every credential guarantees a promotion, salary increase, or new career. Colleges should be clear about what a program can provide, what it cannot promise, and how it connects to specific professional opportunities.

The institutions that attract adult learners will be the ones that can demonstrate value, not merely claim it.

Share Kropp on Campus Higher Education Newsletter

Flexibility is not a perk

For adult learners, flexibility is not an optional benefit added to a program. It is often the condition that makes enrollment possible.

Flexibility includes online and asynchronous learning, but it cannot stop there. It also includes predictable course schedules, clear degree pathways, transparent deadlines, responsive advising, reasonable policies, and support services available outside traditional business hours.

If a program only works for someone with unlimited time and few responsibilities, it was not designed for adult learners.

Many colleges have expanded online education without reconsidering the institutional systems surrounding it. An adult learner may be able to complete a course at 10 p.m., but still be unable to reach financial aid, advising, technical support, or career services outside the hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

That is not institutional flexibility. It is flexible course delivery inside an inflexible institution.

In my work overseeing online graduate education in a professional college, I see adult learners not as a side audience but as a central part of higher education’s future. Most of our students are already working, managing adult responsibilities, and building or changing careers. The essential question is not simply how to deliver courses online. It is how to design education around their actual lives, goals, constraints, and professional ambitions.

Programs should produce immediate value

Adult learners often return to education with a concrete purpose. They may need a credential to advance, new skills to remain competitive, or specialized knowledge to move into another field.

They therefore have limited tolerance for assignments and requirements that appear disconnected from those goals.

That does not mean adult education should be easier or less intellectually rigorous. Adult learners do not need watered-down education. They need relevant, rigorous education.

Programs should continue to teach theory, research, critical thinking, and disciplinary knowledge. But they should also help students connect that knowledge to action.

The curriculum-design question should not only be, “What should students know by the end of this course?”

It should also be, “What should students be able to do at work next week?”

Applied projects, current case studies, professional tools, simulations, and authentic assessments can help students translate academic knowledge into professional judgment. Whenever possible, students should produce work that resembles what professionals actually create and that can demonstrate their capabilities to employers.

For adult learners, academic quality and workforce relevance should not be treated as competing priorities.

The strongest programs deliver both.

Flexible courses are not enough

Recruiting adult learners without redesigning the larger student experience is likely to reproduce many of the barriers that prevented them from enrolling or completing a credential in the first place.

Those barriers often include:

• Confusing admissions requirements

• Unclear transfer-credit policies

• Slow institutional responses

• Inflexible course sequences

• Inconsistent advising

• Limited evening or weekend support

• Complicated financial-aid processes

• Technology systems that assume prior knowledge

• Career services designed primarily for traditional undergraduates

For adult learners, friction kills enrollment.

Every unnecessary step creates another opportunity for a prospective student to decide that returning to school is not realistic. Adults are comparing education with urgent demands on their money, time, work, and families. A confusing application process is not merely an inconvenience. It can end their consideration of the institution entirely.

Support must also continue after enrollment. Adults may need academic advising, career coaching, technology assistance, financial guidance, confidence building, and help understanding an institutional culture they have not navigated in years.

Higher education often contains a hidden curriculum of terminology, processes, deadlines, and expectations. Institutions should not assume every returning adult already understands it.

There is no single adult-learner persona

Institutions must also resist treating all adult learners as one homogeneous market.

Some are working parents. Some are military affiliated. Some are career changers. Some have degrees and need advanced specialization. Others have accumulated college credit but never completed a credential. Some are pursuing economic advancement, while others are responding to job displacement or changes within their industries.

Their motivations, barriers, financial situations, and support needs are different.

A working professional pursuing a graduate certificate may make decisions very differently from an undergraduate returning after a decade away from college. Both may be adult learners, but they are not the same audience.

Better segmentation should shape program design, marketing, advising, communication, and student support.

Adult learners are also a sustainability issue

The growth of the adult-learner market arrives as many institutions confront demographic pressure, declining numbers of traditional-age students in some regions, public skepticism about the value of college, and significant financial strain.

Adult learners should not be treated as a temporary enrollment patch for those challenges.

But institutions that continue to treat them as a secondary audience will miss one of the most consequential growth and mission opportunities in the sector.

Serving adults well can advance access, workforce development, economic mobility, and institutional sustainability at the same time. Doing so, however, requires more than launching new programs or increasing advertising expenditures.

It requires redesign.

College leaders and governing boards should be asking:

Are adult learners visible in our strategy, budgeting, scheduling, and student-success planning?

Can prospective students quickly understand our costs, timelines, and outcomes?

Do our support services operate when adult learners need them?

Are we asking adult learners to adapt to the institution, or is the institution adapting to the learners it says it wants to serve?

The adult-learner market is not simply about finding new sources of enrollment. It is about whether higher education can become more responsive to how people actually live, work, and learn.

If colleges want to serve this population well, they must stop asking adults to fit into old institutional models.

They must start redesigning those models around clarity, flexibility, relevance, belonging, and immediate professional impact.

Faculty members are often asked to do a lot. They teach, advise, research, serve on committees, respond to students, revise curriculum, assess learning, and keep up with changes in their fields. Somewhere in the middle of all that, they are also expected to design effective courses.

That is a heavy lift.

The good news is that faculty do not have to design courses alone. In many institutions, instructional designers are available through centers for teaching and learning, online education offices, academic technology units, colleges, departments, or program-level support teams. Their titles and locations may vary, but their role is often the same: to help faculty design stronger, more intentional, more student-centered learning experiences.

That support matters because course design requires more than subject matter expertise. Faculty bring deep knowledge of the discipline. They know the concepts, debates, skills, professional expectations, and intellectual habits students need to develop. Instructional designers bring expertise in learning design. They understand alignment, sequencing, accessibility, assessment, engagement, student workload, online learning, and how students move through a course.

When those two areas of expertise come together, the result can be a much stronger course than either person could create alone.

The key is collaboration. Instructional designers are not there to take over a course, and faculty are not expected to hand over their expertise. The best partnerships happen when both parties understand their roles, respect each other’s contributions, and keep student learning at the center of the work.

For faculty preparing to work with an instructional designer, here are six strategies that can make the collaboration more productive.

1. Start with outcomes, not content

Faculty often begin course design by thinking about content. What readings should students complete? What lectures need to be recorded? What topics need to be covered? What assignments have been used in the past?

Those are important questions, but they should not be the starting point.

A better place to begin is with learning outcomes. What should students be able to do by the end of the course? What should they understand, apply, analyze, create, evaluate, or demonstrate? What would count as evidence that they have learned what the course was designed to teach?

Instructional designers can help faculty make this shift from coverage to learning. That shift is not always easy because faculty often have more content than time. Most courses contain more possible material than students can reasonably absorb. Starting with outcomes helps determine what matters most.

This does not mean content is unimportant. It means content should serve the learning goals. Readings, lectures, discussions, activities, and assignments should all connect back to what students are expected to learn.

A useful opening conversation with an instructional designer might begin with this question: “By the end of this course, what do I want students to be able to do that they cannot do now?”

That question gives the design process direction.

2. Clarify roles and expertise early

One of the most helpful things faculty and instructional designers can do early in the process is clarify what each person brings to the partnership.

Faculty are the subject matter experts. They know the discipline. They know what students need to learn. They understand the expectations of the field, the level of complexity appropriate for the course, and the kinds of thinking students need to practice.

Instructional designers are learning design experts. They know how to structure learning experiences, align objectives with assessments, organize content, design activities, support accessibility, improve clarity, and reduce unnecessary friction for students.

These roles are complementary. One does not replace the other.

Problems can arise when the roles are misunderstood. Faculty may worry that an instructional designer will try to change the substance of the course or question their expertise. Instructional designers may feel frustrated if they are treated only as technical support or asked to simply upload materials into the learning management system.

A better approach is to name the partnership directly.

The faculty member might say, “I know the content and the goals of the course. I am looking for your help making sure the course is well designed for student learning.”

The instructional designer might say, “I will rely on your disciplinary expertise, and I will help think through structure, alignment, student experience, and design.”

That kind of clarity builds trust. It also prevents the work from becoming territorial.

3. Stay open to redesign, not just formatting help

Instructional designers can certainly help make a course cleaner, clearer, and easier to navigate. They can help organize modules, improve page layouts, check links, review accessibility, and make the learning management system easier for students to use.

But their value goes well beyond formatting.

A strong instructional designer can help faculty rethink the course itself. That might mean revising assignments, changing the sequence of topics, breaking a large project into smaller stages, adding more opportunities for practice, improving discussion prompts, building in feedback loops, or replacing a lecture-heavy module with a more active learning experience.

This requires openness from the faculty member. If the course design process begins with “I already know exactly what I want, and I just need someone to put it online,” the collaboration will be limited. The designer may still be helpful, but the course may miss an opportunity to become stronger.

A more productive mindset is: “Here is what I have done before. Here is what I am trying to accomplish. Help me think through whether this is the best way to get students there.”

That does not mean every recommendation from an instructional designer needs to be accepted. Faculty still make important decisions about the course. But being open to redesign creates space for better ideas to emerge.

Sometimes the most useful design question is not “How do we build this?” but “Should we build it this way at all?”

4. Treat the designer as a collaborator, not a technician

Instructional designers are often asked to fix things: build a course shell, upload files, create quiz settings, adjust due dates, format pages, or troubleshoot the learning management system. Those tasks may be part of the work, but they should not define the relationship.

Faculty get more from the partnership when they treat the instructional designer as a collaborator rather than a technician.

A technician receives instructions. A collaborator helps solve problems.

That distinction matters.

If a faculty member says, “Please upload these lectures and assignments into the course,” the designer can complete the task. But if the faculty member says, “I want students to understand this concept and apply it in a realistic situation. Here is what I usually do. How might we design this more effectively?” the designer can contribute at a much higher level.

Collaboration also requires conversation. Good course design is rarely created through a single handoff of materials. It usually involves questions, revisions, tradeoffs, and decisions.

Why is this assignment placed here?
What are students expected to do before they attempt it?
Where will they receive feedback?
How much time will this take?
What will students find confusing?
How does this activity connect to the outcome?

These are not challenges to the faculty member’s authority. They are design questions. They are the kinds of questions that help make a course more coherent and more effective.

When faculty invite those questions, the course improves.

5. Be willing to explain your teaching choices

Every faculty member has teaching choices that make sense to them. A reading is assigned because it introduces a key theory. A lecture is included because students usually struggle with a concept. A discussion is placed in a certain week because it prepares students for a later assignment. A final project is structured a certain way because it mirrors professional practice.

But those reasons are not always visible to someone outside the course.

Instructional designers can be much more helpful when faculty explain the purpose behind their choices. Why this reading? Why this assignment? Why this sequence? Why this activity? Why this assessment?

This is especially important when a designer asks questions that may initially feel basic or even obvious. For example, a designer might ask, “What do you want students to get out of this discussion?” or “How does this quiz connect to the module objective?”

Those questions are not meant to diminish the faculty member’s expertise. They are meant to uncover the logic of the course so that the design can support it.

Sometimes, explaining a teaching choice confirms that the choice is strong. Other times, the explanation reveals that the choice may need to be revised. A reading may be important, but too advanced for where it appears in the course. An assignment may be valuable, but missing the scaffolding students need. A discussion may ask a good question, but not give students enough structure to answer it well.

The point is not to defend every existing choice. The point is to make the reasoning visible so it can be strengthened.

6. Keep the student experience at the center

Course design is not only about what the instructor teaches. It is also about what students experience.

This is one of the most important contributions an instructional designer can make. Designers often look at a course from the student’s point of view. What will students see first? Will they understand what to do? Are the instructions clear? Is the workload reasonable? Do the activities prepare them for the assessments? Are deadlines visible? Is feedback built into the course? Can students tell how each piece fits together?

Faculty naturally see the course through the lens of their own expertise. That is appropriate. They know where students need to end up. But students experience the course as learners, often encountering material for the first time. What feels obvious to an expert may feel unclear to a novice.

A well-designed course helps close that gap.

Keeping the student experience at the center does not mean making the course easy. It means making the course purposeful. Students can be challenged and supported at the same time. They can be pushed to think deeply while still receiving clear instructions, meaningful practice, and useful feedback.

When faculty and instructional designers work together, one of their shared goals should be to reduce unnecessary confusion so students can focus their energy on learning the material.

That is a worthwhile design goal.

A partnership worth using

Faculty do not need to be experts in every part of course design. They do not need to know every best practice in online learning, every accessibility standard, every learning management system feature, or every approach to assessment design.

They need to know their field. They need to know what students should learn. They need to bring their teaching goals, disciplinary knowledge, and professional judgment to the table.

Instructional designers bring a different but equally important form of expertise. They help translate those goals into a learning experience that is organized, aligned, accessible, engaging, and focused on students.

The strongest courses are often built through that partnership.

So if you are preparing to design or revise a course, do not assume you have to go it alone. Find out what instructional design support exists at your institution. It may be located in a center for teaching and learning, an online learning office, a college-level support unit, or even within your department.

Then start the conversation.

Bring your expertise. Invite theirs. Ask questions. Explain your choices. Stay open to revision. Keep students at the center.

That is where better course

In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education interview, filmmaker Ken Burns raised a question that is worth sitting with.

He argued that one of the greatest dangers facing higher education is what he called a “transactional tendency,” where education is increasingly understood as an economic exchange rather than a transformational experience.

It is a provocative argument.

And whether one fully agrees with him or not, it raises a useful question for those of us who work in higher education:

Has college become too transactional?

On one level, the transactional view is understandable.

Students and families are making major financial decisions. Tuition is expensive. Debt is real. The job market is uncertain. People want to know whether a degree will lead somewhere. They want evidence that the investment is worth it.

That is not unreasonable.

In fact, higher education should be able to answer those questions. We should be able to speak clearly about outcomes, skills, affordability, career pathways, and return on investment. Students deserve that clarity.

But Burns’s argument asks us to consider whether something gets lost when those become the only questions.

If the purpose of college is reduced to tuition in, credential out, job secured, then education begins to look less like a developmental experience and more like a product purchase.

That may be efficient.

It may be measurable.

It may even be necessary in some respects.

But is it enough?

Burns’s broader point is that education should also be transformational. Not in a vague or idealistic sense, but in a practical human sense. A meaningful education should help students think more deeply, ask better questions, create something of value, and act with greater independence.

That may be the most important part of the conversation.

A transactional education asks: What will this degree get me?

A transformational education asks: How will this experience change how I think, communicate, solve problems, work with others, and understand the world?

A transactional education emphasizes completion.

A transformational education emphasizes growth.

A transactional education may help students move through a program.

Share Kropp on Campus Higher Education Newsletter

A transformational education should help students become more capable, more confident, and more prepared to act with judgment and purpose.

The question is not whether one is good and the other is bad. The question is whether higher education has allowed the transactional side to become too dominant.

And if it has, why?

Part of the answer is economic. As the cost of college has increased, students and families have understandably demanded clearer value. Higher education cannot ignore that pressure.

Part of the answer is cultural. We live in a world that values speed, efficiency, optimization, and immediate payoff. It is not surprising that students approach college with those same expectations.

Part of the answer is institutional. Colleges and universities have often adopted the language of the marketplace. We talk about customers, products, delivery models, funnels, and outcomes. Some of that language may be useful for operations. But what happens when it begins to shape how we understand the purpose of education itself?

And part of the answer may be that higher education has not always explained transformation clearly enough.

We often say that education changes lives. But what does that mean?

Does it mean students become better writers?

Better thinkers?

Better collaborators?

More ethical professionals?

More curious people?

More engaged citizens?

More adaptive problem-solvers?

More confident creators?

If transformation is part of our purpose, then we need to define it, design for it, assess it, and talk about it with the same seriousness that we bring to career outcomes and enrollment data.

That does not mean rejecting career preparation.

Students need jobs. They need skills. They need pathways. They need programs that understand the realities of work.

But career preparation and transformation do not have to be opposing goals.

A student can gain practical skills and become a stronger thinker.

A student can prepare for a career and develop a broader sense of purpose.

A student can earn a credential and also become more independent, reflective, creative, and capable.

Maybe the issue is not that higher education has become practical.

Maybe the issue is that our definition of practical has become too narrow.

Burns’s comments point toward a larger concern: higher education may be drifting from its deeper civic and human purpose. That does not mean the system is broken beyond repair. It does mean we should be willing to ask harder questions about the path we are on.

Subscribe now

Are we designing courses that help students inquire, apply, create, and reflect?

Are we assessing more than recall and completion?

Are we advising students only toward registration and graduation, or also toward purpose and direction?

Are we helping students understand that education is not simply something they purchase, but something they participate in?

Are we preparing students not only for their first job after graduation, but for the many changes, challenges, and decisions that will come after that?

These are not abstract questions.

They are design questions.

They are leadership questions.

They are institutional questions.

The goal does not need to be choosing between transactional and transformational value. Higher education should provide real value. It should lead to opportunity. It should help students improve their lives in practical and measurable ways.

But perhaps the transaction should serve the transformation, not replace it.

That may be the conversation Burns is inviting us to have.

Not whether career outcomes matter. They do.

Not whether students should care about return on investment. They should.

But whether higher education can still make a compelling case that its value is larger than the credential alone.

Maybe the best education does not simply help students get somewhere.

Maybe it helps them become someone.

And maybe that is the purpose higher education needs to explain, defend, and design for more intentionally.

Walk into a university classroom today and you will see a teaching method that would be instantly recognizable to a professor from 500 years ago.

A faculty member stands at the front of the room. Students sit in rows. Information flows primarily in one direction.

Despite enormous advances in educational research, technology, and our understanding of how people learn, the lecture remains one of the most common instructional approaches in higher education.

Why?

The answer requires understanding why lectures existed in the first place.

The Original Purpose of the Lecture

The word “lecture” comes from the Latin word lectio, which means “a reading.”

In the earliest European universities of the Middle Ages, books were rare, expensive, and often unavailable to students. A professor’s job was literally to read from a text while students copied the material by hand.

The professor was not simply an expert. The professor was the access point to knowledge.

If you wanted to learn from Aristotle, you did not purchase a copy online, download a PDF, or watch a YouTube video. You sat in a room and listened to someone who had access to the text.

In that context, lectures were revolutionary.

They allowed knowledge to be distributed to larger groups of people than would otherwise have been possible. Lectures were an efficient technology for an era of information scarcity.

The Rise of the Expert

As universities evolved, the purpose of lectures began to shift.

Printing presses made books more accessible. Libraries expanded. Students gained greater access to information.

Yet lectures remained central because professors offered something more than access to content. They provided interpretation.

Students attended lectures not merely to hear facts but to hear how experts understood those facts.

The lecture became a way for scholars to organize complex information, connect ideas, and expose students to disciplinary ways of thinking.

For centuries, this remained a valuable function.

The professor was still one of the primary gateways to expertise.

The Information Explosion

The twentieth century dramatically altered the educational landscape.

Books became inexpensive.

Television emerged.

Then came personal computers.

Then the internet.

Then search engines.

Then smartphones.

Then artificial intelligence.

For the first time in human history, access to information ceased to be a meaningful barrier to learning.

Today’s students can access more information from a smartphone in thirty seconds than a medieval scholar could access in a lifetime.

This raises an uncomfortable question.

If the lecture was originally designed to solve the problem of information scarcity, what happens when information becomes abundant?

The Evidence Begins to Accumulate

For decades, educational researchers have studied how students learn.

The findings are remarkably consistent.

Students learn more effectively when they actively engage with content rather than passively receive it.

Discussion, problem-solving, application, reflection, collaboration, retrieval practice, and feedback consistently outperform passive listening alone.

This does not mean lectures are ineffective.

It means lectures are often insufficient.

Listening can be valuable. It can inspire. It can clarify. It can provide structure and context.

But learning occurs when students do something with information, not merely when they hear it.

The question is no longer whether students can access information.

The question is whether they can analyze it, evaluate it, apply it, and create something meaningful from it.

Why Change Is So Difficult

If the evidence is so clear, why do lectures remain dominant?

Part of the answer is tradition.

Universities are institutions that preserve knowledge. That strength can also make them resistant to change.

Part of the answer is practicality.

Lectures scale. One professor can teach hundreds of students at once. Active learning often requires additional planning, resources, and support.

Part of the answer is identity.

Most professors were taught through lectures. Most earned advanced degrees through lecture-based systems. Most have spent years observing lectures before ever teaching their own classes.

As a result, many faculty members unconsciously equate teaching with lecturing because it is the model they experienced.

We teach the way we were taught.

Even when evidence suggests better alternatives exist.

The Next Evolution

None of this means lectures should disappear.

The lecture is not the enemy.

The challenge is recognizing that lectures are a tool, not a teaching philosophy.

A well-delivered lecture can introduce a concept, spark curiosity, provide context, and help students understand why something matters.

What it should not do is carry the entire burden of learning.

The future of higher education is unlikely to be lecture versus active learning.

It is more likely to be lecture plus engagement.

Lecture plus discussion.

Lecture plus practice.

Lecture plus feedback.

Lecture plus application.

The most effective instructors of the future will not ask, “How do I deliver this content?”

They will ask, “What do students need to do with this content?”

That is a fundamentally different question.

And it reflects the reality of our time.

The lecture was created to solve the problem of limited access to information.

That problem has largely been solved.

The next stage in the evolution of higher education is not helping students find information.

It is helping them make sense of it.

Universities transformed themselves once when knowledge became more accessible.

The challenge now is whether they are willing to evolve again.

A thoughtful comment on a recent post asked a simple question:

“Any thoughts on why we are reluctant to teach faculty what they would need to know?”

The question stopped me for a moment because it gets at something deeper than the topic of the original article.

In my previous post, I argued that faculty status alone does not necessarily prepare someone to lead. Being an excellent scholar, researcher, or teacher does not automatically translate into effective leadership. The skills required are different.

But perhaps the more important question is this: if we know leadership requires a different set of skills, why do we do so little to prepare faculty members for leadership roles?

Higher education has long relied on a fairly predictable career progression. Faculty members earn advanced degrees, develop expertise in their disciplines, conduct research, teach students, and contribute through service. Along the way, some are asked to become department chairs, program directors, associate deans, deans, or other academic leaders.

Yet very few faculty members receive formal preparation for the responsibilities they are about to assume.

Most doctoral programs do not teach budgeting. They do not teach personnel management, strategic planning, organizational communication, conflict resolution, performance management, hiring practices, or change leadership. These topics are rarely part of the curriculum, despite becoming central responsibilities for many academic leaders.

Instead, leadership preparation is often left to chance.

Part of the reason may be that universities have historically rewarded expertise above all else. Academic culture places tremendous value on disciplinary knowledge. The assumption, whether stated or unstated, is that those who have demonstrated excellence in their field will naturally emerge as capable leaders.

Sometimes that happens.

Often, however, leadership requires an entirely different set of competencies.

Knowing how to conduct groundbreaking research is not the same as managing a difficult personnel situation. Publishing influential scholarship is not the same as leading organizational change. Teaching a course effectively is not the same as building consensus among competing stakeholders.

The skill sets overlap in some areas, but they are far from identical.

Another reason leadership preparation receives limited attention is that higher education has traditionally relied on apprenticeship. Future leaders are expected to learn by serving on committees, participating in governance, and observing those already in leadership positions.

There is certainly value in experience and observation. Many important lessons are learned through service.

The challenge is that observation is inconsistent. Some faculty members work closely with strong leaders and gain valuable insight. Others observe ineffective leadership or have limited exposure to decision-making processes. As a result, leadership development becomes highly uneven and largely dependent on circumstance.

There may also be a cultural component at play.

Faculty members are trained to value independence, intellectual freedom, and shared governance. Those are important strengths of the academy. Yet leadership development can sometimes be viewed with skepticism, as though it belongs more to the corporate world than the academic one.

The result is that leadership preparation is often treated as optional rather than essential.

To be fair, many institutions do offer leadership development opportunities. Leadership academies, department chair workshops, mentoring programs, and executive education experiences exist across higher education.

These programs provide meaningful value, and many participants benefit greatly from them.

The challenge is that they often arrive late in the process. In many cases, faculty members are not offered leadership development until they have already accepted a leadership position. Others self-select into these programs after deciding they want to become leaders. Still others never participate at all because opportunities are limited, voluntary, or unavailable at their institution.

By contrast, we do not wait until someone is assigned to teach a course before introducing them to the fundamentals of teaching. We recognize preparation as part of professional development. Leadership is rarely treated with the same level of intentionality.

Another common argument is that leadership cannot be taught.

There is some truth to that. No workshop can fully prepare someone for every challenge they will face. Judgment, emotional intelligence, resilience, and interpersonal effectiveness are developed over time through experience.

But this argument creates a false choice.

The fact that leadership cannot be learned entirely in a classroom does not mean it cannot be developed. We would never argue that because teaching requires experience, faculty should receive no preparation in pedagogy. We would never argue that because research expertise develops over time, doctoral students should receive no research training.

Experience matters. Preparation matters too.

The strongest leaders typically benefit from both.

Others argue that not all faculty members aspire to leadership positions, making broad leadership development unnecessary.

That is also true.

Not every faculty member wants to become a chair, dean, or administrator. Nor should they.

However, institutions are generally quite good at identifying future research talent, teaching talent, and disciplinary expertise. There is no reason they cannot also identify faculty members with leadership potential and provide pathways for development before leadership opportunities arise.

The consequences of failing to do so become visible when faculty members move into administrative roles.

New department chairs may find themselves navigating complex personnel issues with little training. Program directors may suddenly become responsible for budgets they have never managed before. Deans may inherit organizational challenges that require sophisticated leadership and communication skills developed nowhere in their academic careers.

Many eventually succeed. Academic leaders are often intelligent, capable, and highly motivated individuals.

But too many are forced to learn through trial and error.

That approach carries costs.

Organizations lose momentum. Employees become frustrated. Leaders experience burnout. Time and energy are spent solving preventable problems that could have been addressed through preparation and development.

The solution is not to transform faculty members into corporate executives. Nor is it to suggest that every faculty member aspires to administrative leadership.

Rather, institutions should recognize leadership as a professional competency worthy of development.

Future academic leaders would benefit from structured learning opportunities focused on communication, conflict resolution, strategic planning, personnel supervision, resource management, decision-making, and organizational change. These skills do not replace disciplinary expertise. They complement it.

What makes this particularly puzzling is that universities routinely invest in research development, technology training, compliance education, accreditation preparation, and countless other professional development activities. We recognize that expertise requires continual growth.

Leadership should be no different.

The modern university is a complex organization. Leading within that environment requires knowledge and skills that extend beyond disciplinary expertise. If institutions want effective leaders, they should be intentional about developing them.

We would never expect a faculty member to teach without preparation in their discipline. Yet we routinely ask faculty to lead complex organizations with little preparation at all. Perhaps the real question is not whether faculty can become effective leaders. It’s why we continue to assume they should have to figure it out on their own.

A student asked me in class whether AI could replace a professor.

My answer surprised the room:

Yes.

Not hypothetically. Right now.

If I wanted to, I could use AI to help design a course, generate lectures, create assessments, facilitate discussions, provide feedback, evaluate assignments, and post grades. Many of the mechanical functions of teaching can already be assisted, accelerated, or automated by AI tools.

That reality makes many educators uncomfortable.

But pretending the technology is incapable of these things does not help us prepare for what comes next.

The more important question is not “Can AI replace professors?”

It is “Should it?”

And I think that question forces us to examine what teaching actually is.

If education is simply content delivery, then AI will continue to become extraordinarily effective. AI can scale instruction, personalize learning pathways, provide immediate feedback, operate 24/7, and reduce administrative burdens that consume enormous amounts of faculty time.

In some ways, it may improve parts of education significantly.

But great teaching has never been only about delivering information.

Great professors recognize confusion before students know how to articulate it. They motivate discouraged learners. They adapt explanations in real time. They mentor students through uncertainty, career decisions, confidence struggles, and intellectual growth. They model professionalism, curiosity, empathy, accountability, and human connection.

Those are harder things to automate.

The future of higher education likely will not be AI versus professors.

More realistically, it will be professors who effectively leverage AI versus those who do not.

That distinction matters.

As I explored in a recent three-part article series on teaching with AI, I have been experimenting with these tools in my own work. Last semester, I used AI to assist with grading workflows and feedback organization. This semester, I am using it to help prepare seminar discussions and structure classroom activities.

Not because I want AI to replace teaching.

Because I want to understand how it can improve teaching.

Used thoughtfully, AI may free faculty from some of the repetitive and administrative work that often pulls time away from actual student engagement. Ironically, AI may create opportunities for professors to become more human in how they teach, mentor, and connect with students.

Perhaps the real danger is not that AI will replace professors. It is that higher education might mistake efficiency for education itself.

For decades, grades have served as one of higher education’s most recognizable signals of student performance. But in recent years, a growing number of colleges and universities have begun questioning whether those signals still mean what they once did.

That conversation recently returned to the spotlight as faculty at Harvard University debated a proposal designed to address grade inflation. The proposal would reportedly limit A grades in undergraduate courses to 20% of the class, plus four additional students. The discussion emerged after reports that approximately 60% of grades awarded at Harvard were A’s during the 2024-2025 academic year.

The issue itself is not new. Concerns about grade inflation have existed for decades, with critics arguing that steadily rising GPAs make it increasingly difficult to distinguish exceptional performance from average performance. Supporters of reform often argue that inflated grades weaken the value of academic evaluation, create challenges for employers and graduate schools trying to assess applicants, and reduce incentives for students to push themselves academically.

Others see the situation differently.

Many faculty members and students argue that higher grades do not automatically mean lower standards. They point to changes in teaching methods, student support systems, technology, tutoring access, and instructional design as possible reasons students may be performing better than in previous decades. Others argue that grading systems historically leaned too heavily on punitive or competitive models that may not accurately reflect learning. Some critics of strict grading caps also worry that forced grade distributions can discourage collaboration, increase unhealthy competition, and penalize strong-performing cohorts simply because only a limited number of top grades are allowed.

The conversation has become even more complicated in the era of generative AI.

Recent reporting has highlighted research suggesting that the arrival of tools like ChatGPT may be contributing to increases in top grades in writing- and coding-heavy courses. At the same time, employers appear to be placing renewed attention on GPA and demonstrable skills, raising broader questions about how academic performance should be evaluated moving forward.

There is also an institutional and cultural dimension to the debate. Universities today operate in an environment shaped by student retention pressures, mental health concerns, customer-service expectations, rankings, and increased competition for enrollment. Some observers argue these pressures may indirectly influence grading practices. Others counter that today’s students are working under very different academic, economic, and technological realities than previous generations, making direct comparisons difficult.

What makes the discussion particularly interesting is that people often agree on the problem but disagree on the cause. Even among those concerned about grade inflation, there is little consensus on whether the solution should involve grading caps, revised assessment models, competency-based evaluation, narrative feedback, or entirely different approaches to measuring learning.

At its core, the debate is really about a broader question:

What should grades actually represent?

Are they measures of mastery? Effort? Improvement? Relative performance against peers? Readiness for employment? Or some combination of all four?

Higher education appears to be entering a period where institutions may increasingly revisit those questions.

I’m curious how others view this issue, especially faculty, administrators, students, and employers.

Is grade inflation a real problem?
If so, what is causing it?
And what should grades mean in 2026?

When I began experimenting with AI-assisted grading, I had several concerns.

Would the feedback feel impersonal?
Would students think the responses were artificial or generic?
Would the quantity of feedback become overwhelming?
Would students actually read and apply it?

After a full semester of testing, the answer to most of those concerns was surprisingly clear: students overwhelmingly valued the experience.

This third and final article in my series focuses on what students actually said about the grading approach, what worked, what I learned, and where I plan to take the experiment next.

For context, the AI was never making grading decisions. I remained fully responsible for evaluation, scoring, interpretation, and judgment. The AI functioned primarily as an organizational and drafting partner. I dictated raw observations and thoughts while reviewing student work, then used AI tools to help structure and refine that feedback into clearer, more detailed, and more actionable responses.

What I did not anticipate was how strongly students would respond to the depth and specificity of the feedback itself.

Across final reflection papers, unsolicited Canvas comments, course evaluations, and graduation surveys, students consistently described the feedback as one of the most valuable parts of the course experience.

Several themes appeared repeatedly:

• Students appreciated the depth and quantity of the feedback
• They felt the feedback clearly explained both strengths and weaknesses
• They said it helped them improve on future assignments
• They felt more confident about assignment expectations
• They viewed the feedback as constructive rather than punitive
• They felt supported while still being challenged academically

This became especially important in courses built around formative assignments leading toward a large summative deliverable. In those environments, detailed iterative feedback matters because students are building toward a final project step-by-step. If the formative feedback is weak, delayed, or unclear, the final outcome suffers.

Instead, many students described the feedback as a running guide throughout the semester.

One student wrote:

“I LOVED everything about the specific feedback given on assignments. It was so fast and so helpful. I would often skim through it the second I saw it hit my inbox, and then I would go back to it later when I had time to really dig into it. The balance of positive vs critical was great, and the tone felt constructive and supportive, I think. Overall, it made it seem like you actually knew what was going on in my assignments and were invested on a level that most professors don’t go for.”
–Student Capstone Reflection

Another student explained how the feedback improved future performance:

“I appreciated how clearly you identified both strengths and areas for improvement, as it made it much easier to apply those learnings to future assignments and, in the end, strengthen my final campaign.”
– Student Capstone Submission Comment

Additional student comments reinforced similar themes:

“Professor Kropp was always extremely detailed with his feedback on our work which was super helpful.”
– Student Course Evaluation

“Dr. Evan Kropp was incredible. He provided thorough feedback that helped me grow significantly over the semester. He encouraged freedom of expression, which made me feel that my voice and perspective were valued. Rather than imposing a strict right or wrong, he was very open, approachable, and undeniably helpful.”
–Student Graduation Survey

“Evan Kropp challenged me more than any other instructor during my time at UF, particularly through the capstone course. While the experience was demanding, his detailed and thorough feedback pushed me to refine my thinking and produce stronger, more strategic work. He created an environment that was both rigorous and supportive, and I can confidently say I learned the most from his class throughout my experience as a UF student.”
–Student Graduation Survey

“Evan’s lectures and his very detailed and helpful feedback upon grading assignments was a step above anything I received during the program. I felt totally supported and empowered to do my work and know how I can improve.”
–Student Graduation Survey

One surprising outcome was that students did not describe the feedback as excessive. I initially worried that the volume of comments might become overwhelming. Instead, students often described it as substantial but useful. Many indicated they returned to the feedback multiple times while working on later assignments.

Equally noteworthy: I did not intentionally omit negative student feedback from this article. There simply was not meaningful criticism of the grading approach itself. That does not mean the system is perfect, and it certainly does not mean the experimentation should stop. It simply suggests that students recognized value in receiving detailed, actionable, growth-oriented feedback.

That distinction matters.

Subscribe now

Too often, discussions around AI in education focus exclusively on efficiency. Efficiency matters, particularly in large online courses, but this experiment reinforced something more important for me personally: AI may help educators scale individualized support more effectively than many of us initially assumed.

The next phase of this experiment will focus less on individual assignments and more on longitudinal student development.

Next semester, I plan to create individualized feedback folders for each student. Rather than viewing assignments in isolation, I want to explore whether AI can help identify broader developmental patterns across an entire semester.

For example:

• Which weaknesses consistently improve over time?
• Which challenges persist despite repeated feedback?
• Which types of feedback appear most actionable for students?
• Are students implementing suggestions between assignments?
• Are there recurring communication, strategy, research, or writing issues that become visible only across multiple submissions?

I also plan to conduct post-semester analysis by uploading formative assignment feedback alongside final summative evaluations to determine whether there were missed themes, overlooked patterns, or opportunities for earlier intervention.

Importantly, this remains an evolving process. I still review, edit, confirm, and refine all feedback personally. The goal is not automation of teaching. The goal is augmentation of teaching.

At its best, this approach allows instructors to spend less time wrestling with formatting and organization and more time focusing on what actually matters: helping students learn, improve, and grow.

For me, that has been the biggest takeaway from this experiment. AI did not reduce the human side of teaching. In many ways, it amplified it.

Higher education has long operated under an assumption that makes sense historically, but may deserve reconsideration in today’s environment:

The people who lead universities should come from the faculty ranks.

There are good reasons this model developed. Faculty governance helped protect academic freedom, preserve institutional mission, and ensure that educational decisions were guided by scholars rather than outside political or commercial interests. Faculty leaders understood the culture because they lived it.

But modern higher education is no longer operating in the same environment in which this system was built.

Today’s universities are extraordinarily complex organizations. Many leadership roles now require expertise in areas such as online education, enrollment strategy, budgeting, technology, organizational management, workforce alignment, marketing, compliance, student success, and large-scale operational execution.

Yet many institutions continue to treat faculty status itself as the primary qualification for leadership positions, even when the role being filled requires deep professional expertise in areas outside traditional academic work.

To be clear, this is not an argument against faculty leadership.

Some of the best higher education leaders are former faculty members who combine academic credibility with strong administrative ability, strategic thinking, and operational expertise. Those individuals are invaluable.

The challenge is the assumption that academic accomplishment alone prepares someone to lead highly specialized administrative functions.

Share Kropp on Campus Higher Education Newsletter

In practice, universities sometimes end up placing talented researchers or respected faculty members into leadership roles far outside their direct experience. In other cases, individuals step into positions not because they are the best fit, but because nobody else is willing to take on the responsibility.

That creates difficult situations for everyone involved:

• Faculty may lose confidence in leadership

• Staff may feel misunderstood or unsupported

• Leaders themselves may feel overwhelmed or isolated

• Important operational areas may stagnate or struggle to evolve

Meanwhile, higher education continues to face mounting pressure to adapt quickly in a rapidly changing world.

Perhaps the question is not whether faculty should lead, but rather how institutions define leadership qualifications in the first place.

Should universities continue to prioritize faculty lineage above all else?

Or should they begin identifying broader forms of expertise within their own faculty while also remaining open, when appropriate, to experienced leaders from outside traditional academic pathways?

Maybe the future is not abandoning shared governance, but modernizing it.

Can higher education preserve the strengths of faculty-led governance while also building leadership structures better aligned with the operational realities of today’s institutions?

That may be one of the most important governance questions higher education will face over the next decade.

One year ago, I published the first issue of Kropp on Campus.

At the time, I had a simple goal. Create a space to think out loud about higher education, grounded in real experience rather than just theory. Fifty-two posts later, that goal has turned into something much more meaningful.

Over the past year, the newsletter has explored a wide range of themes that sit at the center of higher education today:

· Teaching and learning, especially what actually works in real classrooms

· The evolving role of faculty, including adjunct realities and workload pressures

· Graduate education and the expectations of working professionals

· Trust in higher education and how institutions can rebuild it

· The rapid integration of AI into coursework, assessment, and curriculum design

· The changing nature of student behavior, motivation, and engagement

If there is a common thread across all of it, it is this: higher education is not standing still, but in many cases, we are still trying to teach and operate as if it is.

Over the past year, I have noticed a shift. Conversations are becoming more practical. Less about whether change is coming, and more about how to navigate it. Faculty are asking sharper questions. Students are expecting more relevance. Institutions are feeling pressure to adapt faster than their structures allow.

That tension is where most of my writing has lived.

Looking ahead, the focus will become even more concentrated on teaching and learning. Not in the abstract, but in the day-to-day decisions instructors make. How we design assignments. How we give feedback. How we integrate AI without losing rigor. How we prepare students for a professional world that is evolving in real time.

Much of that thinking will build toward the release of my upcoming book in January with Cognella, which will center on helping faculty make sense of teaching in a digital, AI influenced environment.

If you have been reading since the beginning, thank you. If you joined somewhere along the way, I am glad you did.

There is more to come.

As the spring semester closes, many faculty members experience a familiar shift. The focus moves from learning and feedback to negotiation and justification. Inboxes fill with messages from students who are disappointed in their final grades and are asking, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly, for reconsideration.

Often referred to as “grade grubbing,” these interactions can place faculty in an uncomfortable position. That discomfort is especially pronounced for contingent faculty, who may worry about student complaints or whether they will be supported if a situation escalates.

It is easy to view these moments as frustrating interruptions at the end of an already demanding term. But they are also worth examining more closely. Understanding why students make these requests, and how faculty can respond consistently and professionally, can reduce stress and improve the overall integrity of the grading process.

Why students push for higher grades

In most cases, these requests are not random or purely opportunistic. They are shaped by a combination of structural pressures, psychological factors, and learned behaviors.

Students are often operating under real constraints. GPA thresholds tied to scholarships, financial aid, or graduate school admissions can create a sense that a single grade has outsized consequences. In competitive programs, even small differences in GPA can feel significant.

There are also psychological dynamics at play. Students frequently experience grades in terms of loss rather than achievement. A B may feel like falling short rather than performing well. By the end of the semester, there is often a sense of hindsight regret, where students believe they could have done more and are looking for a final opportunity to change the outcome.

In some cases, students have also learned that grade negotiation can work. If they have previously received adjustments after asking, or if they have experienced inconsistent grading practices across courses, they may see this as a normal part of the academic process.

Why this is difficult for faculty

For faculty, these requests arrive at a time of fatigue and time pressure. The semester is ending, grading is complete or nearly complete, and attention is already shifting to the next set of responsibilities.

For contingent faculty in particular, there may be additional concerns about job security and student evaluations. If expectations around administrative support are unclear, saying no can feel risky. Even for full-time faculty, there can be a natural desire to avoid conflict or resolve situations quickly.

The challenge is that inconsistent responses can create longer-term problems. Making exceptions in one case raises questions about fairness in others. Over time, this can erode both standards and trust in the grading process.

Prevention starts early

The most effective way to handle end-of-semester grade challenges is to reduce ambiguity from the start.

Clear, detailed rubrics tied directly to learning objectives provide a shared framework for evaluation. When students can see exactly how their work aligns with specific criteria, grading becomes less subjective and easier to explain.

Setting expectations in the syllabus also matters. Policies around grade discussions, re-evaluations, and extra credit should be explicit. Encouraging students to engage early, rather than waiting until final grades are posted, can shift conversations to a more productive point in the learning process.

Frequent, actionable feedback throughout the semester is equally important. When students understand where they stand and how they can improve, final grades are less likely to come as a surprise.

Responding to grade challenges

When students do reach out, the goal is not to shut down the conversation, but to anchor it in clear academic criteria.

Effective responses tend to share a few characteristics. They are grounded in the rubric and assignment expectations, not in subjective impressions. They are consistent across students. And they avoid making immediate decisions under pressure.

In many cases, it is helpful to move the conversation into a structured review. For example:

• “I understand your perspective. I’ve reviewed your work against the rubric, and the grade reflects how it met those criteria.”

• “I’m happy to walk through the rubric with you so you can see exactly where points were earned and lost.”

When students point to effort or circumstances, it can help to acknowledge those factors while maintaining clarity about grading standards:

• “I appreciate the effort you put in. Grades in this course are based on demonstrated learning outcomes, which are outlined in the rubric.”

• “I take circumstances seriously, but changes to grades need to be tied to the academic criteria for the assignment.”

If a student raises a specific concern about how the rubric was applied, that is a reasonable basis for review:

• “If you believe there was an error in how the rubric was applied, I’m open to reviewing that specific concern.”

And in cases where the grade stands:

• “After reviewing your work again, I’m confident the grade accurately reflects the rubric and course standards, so it will remain as assigned.”

These responses are not about being rigid. They are about being clear, consistent, and aligned with the course design.

The extra credit question

Requests for extra credit often follow grade discussions. This is an area where faculty approaches vary, and there is no single correct answer.

Extra credit can be useful when it is intentionally designed. When built into the course from the beginning, it can encourage deeper engagement or allow students to extend their learning in meaningful ways.

However, ad hoc extra credit at the end of the semester introduces challenges. It can create equity concerns if not offered to all students. It may shift the focus from mastering core material to accumulating points. And it can undermine the structure of the course if it becomes a last-minute adjustment mechanism.

A practical approach is to decide in advance whether extra credit will be part of the course design. If it is, it should be clearly defined and aligned with learning objectives. If it is not, it is reasonable to communicate that it will not be offered retroactively at the end of the term.

Striking the right balance

Faculty are not obligated to agree to every request for a grade change. At the same time, students should feel that their questions are heard and evaluated fairly.

The balance lies in professional judgment. Listening carefully, reviewing concerns when appropriate, and making decisions grounded in clear criteria are all part of the role. Confidence in those decisions comes from preparation, transparency, and consistency.

Reframing the moment

End-of-semester grade conversations are often viewed as administrative tasks to manage or resolve. But they also serve a broader purpose.

They model how to engage in professional dialogue, how to interpret and apply standards, and how to accept outcomes based on clearly defined criteria. In that sense, they are part of the educational experience.

Maintaining standards is not about being inflexible. It is about preserving the integrity of the learning process for all students.

As a final reflection:

If a student challenged every grade in your course, would your system hold up clearly and consistently?

Earlier this year, I wrote about an experiment I planned to run in one of my courses: using AI to support my grading process. The premise was straightforward. I would remain fully responsible for evaluating student work, but I would use AI as a tool to help organize, refine, and expand my written feedback.

The goal was not efficiency alone. It was to improve the quality, clarity, and usefulness of the feedback students receive.

Now that the semester has concluded, I can evaluate how that experiment actually performed.

What I set out to do

In the original article, I outlined a few specific goals:

• Maintain full human control over grading decisions

• Use AI to structure and refine feedback, not generate judgments

• Increase the depth and clarity of feedback to students

• Reduce redundancy and improve organization

• Ideally, save time without sacrificing quality

At its core, this was not about replacing any part of the teaching process. It was about improving one of the most time-intensive and often inconsistent parts of teaching: written feedback.

What actually happened

The results were stronger than I anticipated.

First, the time savings were substantial. Over the course of the semester, I estimate that I reduced grading time by approximately 50 percent. That alone would be meaningful, but the more important outcome was what happened to the feedback itself.

The quality of feedback improved significantly.

Using AI as a structuring tool allowed me to take rough, sometimes fragmented thoughts and turn them into organized, coherent, and professional responses. Instead of brief comments or repetitive notes, students received detailed explanations of both strengths and areas for improvement.

In many cases, feedback expanded to one to two pages per assignment. Despite taking less time to produce, it was far more comprehensive.

Equally important, the feedback became more precise. I was less repetitive and more intentional in how I communicated key points. The result was feedback that was both tighter in structure and more expansive in substance.

Impact on student learning

The most important question was whether this actually helped students learn.

From what I observed, the answer is yes.

Students were given more actionable and specific guidance. Rather than general comments, they received clear explanations of what was working, what was not, and what they could do next. This appeared to translate into stronger revisions and improved overall performance across the semester.

One shift that stood out showed up during office hours.

Students came in better prepared.

Instead of broad or vague concerns, conversations became more focused. Students referenced specific feedback points, asked targeted questions, and engaged in more productive discussions about their work. The feedback did not replace those conversations, but it made them more effective.

Share Kropp on Campus Higher Education Newsletter

Student response (initial observations)

Throughout the semester, I received informal feedback from students through Canvas comments and office hour conversations.

The consistent theme was appreciation for the level of detail.

Students noted that the feedback was thorough, specific, and helpful in guiding their revisions. Several expressed that it gave them a clearer understanding of expectations and how to improve their work.

In short, the feedback was not just longer. It was more useful.

I will provide a more detailed breakdown of formal student feedback, including themes and direct quotes from course evaluations, in Part 3.

What I learned

This experiment reinforced a few important points.

First, AI is most effective when used to enhance human judgment, not replace it. The evaluation, decision-making, and accountability remained mine.

Second, better feedback does not necessarily require more time. It requires better structure. AI helped bridge that gap by turning unstructured thoughts into clear, organized communication.

Third, when students receive more specific and actionable feedback, they engage more deeply with their work. That alone justifies continued use.

What comes next

Based on these results, I plan to continue using and refining this approach.

There is still room for improvement. I want to further streamline the workflow, ensure consistency across assignments, and continue evaluating how students respond to different types of feedback.

In Part 3, I will share a more complete analysis of student feedback from course evaluations, including specific examples of how students experienced this approach.

For now, the conclusion is straightforward.

Using AI to support grading did not reduce the quality of my teaching. It improved it.

Higher education is under fire. Students, employers, and policymakers are all asking the same uncomfortable question: are we actually preparing people for the world? The answer, more often than not, is: not as well as we think.

The criticism isn’t really about course content or academic rigor. It’s about something harder to measure and, for that reason, easier to overlook — soft skills.

So what are soft skills, exactly?

Soft skills are the interpersonal, cognitive, and professional competencies that shape how people work — not just what they can do, but how they do it. They include things like:

• Communication — written, verbal, and the ability to listen actively and adapt your message to your audience

• Critical thinking — analyzing information, questioning assumptions, and making reasoned decisions

• Collaboration — working effectively across differences, managing conflict, and contributing to a shared goal

• Adaptability — responding to change, tolerating ambiguity, and learning on the fly

• Civic engagement — the capacity to participate thoughtfully in community and democratic life

The term “soft” is unfortunately misleading. These skills are anything but soft in practice. They are the skills that get people hired, get them promoted, and — critically — make them effective contributors to both their workplaces and their communities.

A brief history

Soft skills are not a new idea. The ancient trivium — grammar, rhetoric, and logic — was essentially an early framework for communication and reasoning. Liberal arts education, at its best, has always aimed to produce graduates who can think, speak, and engage as citizens. But somewhere along the way, that vision got crowded out.

The twentieth century brought enormous pressure on universities to produce credentialed specialists. Funding followed job-placement metrics. Curricula narrowed. General education requirements — often the only place soft skills were even nominally addressed — became boxes to check rather than genuine developmental experiences.

By the time employers began sounding the alarm in the 2000s and 2010s, the structural patterns were already entrenched. Survey after survey showed hiring managers struggling to find graduates who could communicate clearly, work in teams, or handle the ambiguity of real workplace problems. Yet the response within higher education was often to acknowledge the gap rhetorically while leaving the curriculum essentially unchanged.

The debate heating up now

Today, the pressure is sharper. Workforce development concerns have been joined by a broader anxiety about the purpose of education itself. Can graduates navigate an information environment saturated with misinformation? Can they engage productively with people who hold different values? Are they equipped not just to hold jobs, but to be neighbors, voters, and community members?

These are not fringe questions. They are driving serious policy conversations, accreditation reviews, and institutional strategic planning across the country. And they are landing squarely in the lap of faculty — often without much guidance about what to do next.

What faculty can do

Here’s the good news: you don’t have to rebuild your course from scratch. Soft skill development doesn’t require a separate class or a wholesale redesign. It requires intention.

Start with a simple question: what soft skills are genuinely necessary in the field or context your course addresses? A nursing course, an engineering capstone, and a sociology seminar will have different answers. Once you’ve identified two or three, ask yourself: where in this course do students already encounter situations that demand these skills — and are they being asked to practice and reflect on them explicitly?

A few practical approaches that work across disciplines:

• Add a learning outcome that names the soft skill alongside the content objective. “Students will synthesize competing theoretical frameworks and communicate their reasoning clearly to a non-expert audience.”

• Design at least one assignment that requires collaboration, peer feedback, or real-world stakeholder communication.

• Build in structured reflection — brief written responses that ask students to name what they practiced, what was hard, and what they’d do differently.

• Assess the soft skill directly, not just the content output. If communication matters, grade the communication.

A call to faculty

Higher education’s critics are not entirely wrong. We have, for too long, assumed that soft skills develop by osmosis — that the act of going to college somehow produces capable communicators and engaged citizens without anyone having to teach those things explicitly. The evidence suggests otherwise.

The good news is that we don’t need to wait for sweeping institutional change to start doing better. Every faculty member, in every discipline, has the power to look at their course and ask: what are the human skills my students need, and am I actually teaching them?

That question — taken seriously — is where the change begins.

Additional Question: Do you think the term “soft” is the most appropriate word to describe these skills? How do you feel about “durable skills?” What term other might you suggest?