Ursinus, like many of its peers, believes that the residential part of residential liberal education contributes a great deal of value to what we offer. Many schools see the residential element as critical to making that education more valuable than what happens at commuter institutions or colleges that rely on online instruction. It would be natural to worry, given our unexpected and forced transition to remote learning, that we had in the process lost our competitive advantage. Now that we’ve had to fully embrace (at least in the short term) remote learning as an avenue for educating our students, are we no longer any better than for-profit online institutions—or perhaps even worse at this point, given our lack of experience at designing online instruction? At least for Ursinus, my answer to this question is an emphatic denial; we continue to provide an educational experience that is far beyond what those other institutions offer.
Some reasons for my denial are simple. Within at least the context of this semester, all residential colleges that have experienced this mid-semester transition have a tremendous advantage in that we have already established the kind of interpersonal connections that are difficult to develop outside of face-to-face relationships. More than just in the classroom, interactions in the laboratory, in the studio, in practice rooms and on a stage, in office hours, in casual meetings in hallways, in the dining hall, and on campus provide an essential foundation for engaged learning. Those critical relationships provide a basis for mutual understanding that is critical to learning in any environment.
But at Ursinus, well before we contemplated any online instruction, we believed that what we had to offer was a much better education than the average residential liberal education. That difference starts with CIE (our Common Intellectual Experience), and is built into Ursinus Quest. The culture around CIE has developed a collaborative interdisciplinary faculty that is highly unusual. We believe that framing our learning around the four Open Questions has fostered a coherence to what we do that is exceptional and highly effective.
On top of that, we demand a level of reflection among our students that helps them not only see connections between different disciplines and different approaches, but we challenge them to find the personal meaning and chart their own professional and personal ambitions based on informed ethical thinking.
None of those elements of the Ursinus curriculum depend on face-to-face instruction. Yes, we definitely capitalize on the residential experiences, on work on a stage or in a laboratory, on the experiences in an internship, and those opportunities have been put on hold. But we have been presented with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help students make sense out of their experiences in a global crisis, and we must not let this opportunity slip away. The Open Questions are more relevant now than ever, and we need to reinforce their meaning to our students.
Yes, teaching online this semester provides challenges. But the opportunities are huge for a curriculum such as Ursinus Quest, where we routinely place our disciplinary studies in a larger context. We have been presented with a context that dramatically sets the stage for confronting the Open Questions. What other set of circumstances could better sharpen the urgency of the question “How should we live together”? What confluence of factors could make it more clear that we need to continually revisit the question “How can we understand the world”? As faculty and staff at Ursinus, we should see at least as many opportunities to enhance our work with students provided by COVID-19 as we have seen in the challenges of moving to remote teaching. As many Ursinus faculty already have done, we need to seize this opportunity to weave the current crisis into our work with students. Our Open Questions framework is an advantage we have had over peers well before March of 2020, but now we must use this versatile framework to take our education to a new level, a level that will relieve any doubt of the superiority of education at Ursinus over those places whose claim to excellence is a great system for online teaching of Python coding.
MBS–4/15/20
Big Ideas for Small Colleges 