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As emerging technologies and other issues reshape teaching and learning, UNT scholars came together Oct. 1 to discuss the challenges and opportunities found in higher education today.

The University Research Day panelists were all members of LEEF’s Learning Institute, which supports the research of teaching and learning. The interdisciplinary group included: technical communication professor Ryan Boettger; learning technologies clinical assistant professor Deborah Cockerham; chemistry associate professor Alena Moon; learning technologies assistant professor Ji Hyun Yu; and Upward Bound program project coordinator Mai Zaru.

Carrie Allen, LEEF’s executive director and an associate professor of learning sciences, moderated the event. Panelists shared ongoing work, practical guidance, and recommendations for future research, practice and policy to support learning at UNT and beyond.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Allen: What do you find to be the most pressing challenge in higher education?

Yu: We’ve lost our evidence. We used to know what students learned by looking at their product, but we cannot do that anymore. Students have stopped reading, but they read AI summaries. They have stopped creating the first draft, but they edit what AI wrote. They may feel like they know the content, but ask them to explain it, defend it and use it on a new problem, and they cannot.

Another thing is we’re losing the apprenticeship. When I was in college, I learned from people who knew more than me. They watched me, what I did and how I did it, and they told me which areas I could improve further. That’s what changed me, not the credits. Now, college is a place where you collect credits and AI can create credits. People are asking if we still need college, but I think that’s the wrong question. The right question is what college is for now.

Boettger: If you look at some of the aims and what we’re doing in higher education, the focus is often on the product. I think we need to start thinking about how it’s not so much that students produced something, but the steps that led to that. I want to know the inception, how they got through the process.

Our classes aren’t necessarily always about mastery. Sometimes they’re just about learning how to do something and all the messiness that comes through that. If that foundation is artificial, there’s no foundation to build upon. Those are problems we’re not going to see as educators until we get to junior and senior level courses or beyond.

Allen: What do you recommend be included in the path forward?

Cockerham: The experiential part is really important for our students, getting them involved in real-world opportunities with industry leaders, emphasizing authentic tasks, being sure that what they’re learning is relevant to them and applicable to their careers. My other advice would be to prioritize the human skills: communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and social skills. It’s an area where students often think it may not be important because it doesn’t seem academic.

Moon: I’m going to speak from the perspective of science because that’s the space that I live in. A divide has been built between the ways we practice and do science, and the ways that we teach science. The ways we teach science do not equip students to do science. We have absolutely minimized uncertainty. Everything can be categorized, characterized as correct or incorrect.

Uncertainty motivates the entire scientific endeavor, but I think students are deeply afraid of putting forth a product when they’re so used to this frame of correct or incorrect. When you say, “Just put it out there and let’s see what happens,” I think it’s very scary for learners and I think we’re responsible for it.

Faculty have a well of expertise that they don’t always bring to bear on their teaching. Many of these changes can be supported just by tapping into that expertise. Think about what it would look like for students to negotiate with their peers about whether something makes sense instead of what’s correct.

Zaru: Faculty need time so that we don’t write multiple choice questions, so we actually sit and grade how students are thinking. If we’re constantly rushing from one task to another, one meeting to another, we miss a lot of opportunities to support our students.

I want you to think about the times we could have slowed down to capture more and to involve more students. They want to figure it out with us. Let us walk through this messiness, our thought process, together.