Since only about a quarter of Ball State students participate in immersive learning projects, President Paul W. Ferguson wants to make learning outside of the classroom more common.
The university will continue to offer immersive learning projects, but will begin to develop and focus on the broader, more inclusive idea of entrepreneurial learning, while beginning an effort to study the effects immersive learning has had on students’ lives.
Ferguson’s revised vision is called The Centennial Commitment. The 18-point plan takes the idea of immersive learning and expands the themes of community engagement and research to apply to day-to-day classes.
The university has had 25,148 students participate in 1,541 projects since 2007-2008. Each year, there are about 100 projects centered in Muncie and Delaware County.
Last year, there were 282 projects total. Marilyn Buck, associate provost and dean of university college, said immersive learning projects have taken place in every county except two or three.
Between 25 and 30 percent of students participate in immersive learning projects, said Jennifer Blackmer, director of immersive learning.
“What I have heard, since I took over as a director of immersive learning, is students want to get involved and don’t know how,” Blackmer said.
The types of difficulties students face when looking for an immersive project are not knowing how to reach out to the faculty involved, how to work collaboratively with students on a semester-long project and working with a community partner, she said.
However, immersive projects are selective by nature. The faculty chooses who becomes a member of their class.
This is where the expansion of entrepreneurial learning comes in. An entrepreneurial experience isn’t about training every student at a largely liberal arts college to think about the bottom line and profit, Blackmer said.
“What Paul [Ferguson] is getting at is not [the idea of] starting a business, but that spirit of starting something new. To go out and make things happen,” she said.
Entrepreneurial learning is an expansion of immersive learning to the core curriculum of Ball State, Blackmer said echoing the president’s Feb. 6 address.
Even the president’s emphasis on the entrepreneurial student echoes efforts from the last presidential administration. He said the new vision focuses on building off the university’s strengths.
Former President Jo Ann Gora began rebranding the university in 2006 with the idea of immersive learning, which began at the Virginia B. Ball Center in 1999.
“Immersive learning has been marketed as the cornerstone of a Ball State education,” said Blackmer, director of immersive learning since the summer of 2014. “That’s our challenge, to keep immersive learning as distinctive and signature as it is and yet scale some of these opportunities through the curriculum.”
The characteristics the university is looking to scale into classrooms are making class work group-focused, enabling them to work with community partners, work on semester long projects and move some classes away from the traditional lecture format.
Blackmer said the alternative to a lecture is for all class learning to take place outside the classroom and class time focus on discussion.
Gora created two strategic plans during her stay at Ball State, the more recent of which is now being replaced by President Ferguson’s 2015-2018 strategic plan. A strategic plan defines the university’s goals and vision for a specific timeframe. They typically comprise goals that have individual objectives that the university can measure to show progress.
Gora’s metrics still exist under Ferguson, especially the ones that deal with immersive learning. However, Ferguson’s Centennial Commitments, which runs from 2015 to 2018, is divided into 18 points. Centennial takes the 107 metrics that comprised Gora’s Education Redefined 2.0 and prioritizes them into 18 goals the president has set forth for the university.
“The fundamental pieces of [Gora’s strategic plan] have not changed drastically. It’s just a reorganization and maybe a way to simplify it for people,” William Knight, assistant provost of institutional effectiveness, said. “When you say 107 metrics, eyes kind of roll. So it’s a way to put it in a way people can understand.”
The university has seven metrics for measuring the effectiveness of immersive learning. Three of them provide direct insight toward the quantity of students involved and the degree of participation of immersive learning. The university measures these items on an academic year basis. These metrics will fall under the first category of being student-centered and apply to the third point of the new point.
In the metrics for Gora’s strategic plan 2012-2017, one provision is to publish papers for conferences that report on immersive learning. As of 2013-2014, 87 such papers were published. The benchmark for that year was four papers. The number of published papers for conferences by 2016-2017 needs to be at least 10.
The strategic plan also includes a provision to maintain a minimum enrollment in immersive learning projects. The university should maintain yearly enrollment of 4,200 students, according to its self-defined metrics. When the university began the 2012-2017 plan, it was 4,177. In subsequent years that enrollment has been 4,414 and 4,318 for 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 respectively.
The last notable metric from the 2012-2017 strategic plan is how each department will offer at least one immersive learning opportunity in each department. This metric started at 37 for the university in 2011-2012.
In 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 the benchmark for the number of departments that offer at least one immersive learning project was 39 and 40 respectively.
What the university had for those two years was 39 and 35 departments with at least one immersive learning project. The university aims to have 45 departments offering at least one immersive learning project by 2016-2017.
The university will continue to gather these metrics for the revised plan and extend them to 2018.
However, any data regarding the quality of immersive learning projects, rather than the quantity, is missing. This is something the university began to rectify in December 2014.
“Basically nobody has ever had any sort of evaluative information of whether or not students who have had this experience are, say, more likely to graduate,” Knight said.
The information on how immersive learning affects a graduate’s post-college life and their job placement has not been collected and studied before because it attracts between 25 to 30 percent of students. Now that the projects have been going for several years, the university has enough graduates to study the long-term effects of immersive learning.
“What we want to do now that we are amassing a history of good projects, some not so good, but mostly good ... [is] to know what the outcomes from those projects are for students,” Blackmer said.
Blackmer said the outcomes they want to know is how effective immersive learning has been beyond a successful project and how successful it makes students.
“We know it’s been successful, now we are looking for data to back it up,” she said.
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