,Hi Barbara
I haven't heard a formal discussion of what a student centered university is
but I'll guess that it evolved from the human factors / ergonomics user
centered approach. The basic premise of user centered design is that how a
product or system is used should be central to the design process.
Typically this involves having the users participate in the process either
through focus groups or other types of evaluations. The problem I
encountered when I was a human factors practitioner was that the user didn't
always know what really worked well. Their preferences didn't always result
in better performance. This approach has dominated the field for the past
15 - 20 years.
One can easily extrapolate this to students especially when we discuss
curriculum. We have all encountered students who complain that our courses
are not relevant to their future careers or that the material isn't
presented in an entertaining way. A liberal arts education isn't career
training. We do, however, need to be "student centered" by ensuring that the
students can achieve the goals we set for them, by ensuring that we are
teaching them to think and problem solve, and by keeping the material we
present current. There are aspects of the university experience that
definitely should be student centered. I'm sure we can all remember dealing
with the bureaucracy of administrative services, registration, bursar,
telecommunications, computer systems. Typically those services are designed
to make things easier for the workers not the people receiving the service.
So my answer is that being student centered does not necessarily mean giving
students the grades they want or only teaching what they want to learn.
Gary J. Klatsky, Ph. D.
Department of Psychology [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Oswego State University (SUNY) http://www.oswego.edu/~klatsky
Oswego, NY 13126 Voice: (315) 312-3474
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On
Behalf Of Barbara Watters
Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2000 1:33 PM
To: TIPS
Subject: What is "student-centered"?
A few general questions for TIPSters:
When you hear a college or university say it is "student centered," what
does that mean to you? What do you think it "should" mean? In your
experiences, how have you seen that philosophy being put into practice?
Thanks.
Barbara
Dr. Barbara Watters
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Penn State Erie, The Behrend College
Station Road
Erie, PA 16563
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
