Last November, Sona Andrews, the provost and vice president for Academic Affairs at PSU, announced the Provost’s Challenge, a subset of the ReTHINK PSU project. The challenge award recipients were announced as spring term was coming to an end and received a shared total of $3 million in grants to help the advancement of Portland State.
Provost’s Challenge awards $3 million in grants
Last November, Sona Andrews, the provost and vice president for Academic Affairs at PSU, announced the Provost’s Challenge, a subset of the ReTHINK PSU project. The challenge award recipients were announced as spring term was coming to an end and received a shared total of $3 million in grants to help the advancement of Portland State.
The project initially started with the Provost’s Challenge, which
Andrews said was put together to see how technology could be used to change some of the curriculum at PSU. A competition was announced to award projects and proposals that would push the university in a more tech-savvy direction.
After the announcement, it quickly became clear to Andrews that there was broad interest throughout campus to “rethink” PSU.
“That’s how ReTHINK came about,” Andrews said. “The idea is that it’s more than just the awards for the Provost’s Challenge that are being made. It’s really about the greater…widespread use of technology in order to deliver programs more effectively, more inexpensively, and to provide greater access.”
The Provost’s Challenge was divided into three categories: reframing, acceleration and inspiration.
When the awards were announced, the reframing and acceleration categories were grouped together and received a total of $2,310,000 and the inspiration category received a total of $200,000. An additional $250,000 is reserved for ePortfolio, platforms and information technology, and $240,000 for centralized project management support over the next two years.
As proposals and projects were submitted and evaluated, students had the opportunity to look online and comment on them. Andrews said that this was an important and innovative touch to the challenge because it shows that student input is valuable.
One focus of the ReTHINK PSU project is to change the way PSU uses online learning. Andrews pointed out that the school is working toward putting entire programs online so that they can be more accessible to students.
“[A large part of] ReTHINK is to be able to provide lower costs to students and provide greater access,” Andrews said.
The current format for most online and hybrid classes is to have the class meet once a week for the professor’s lecture, and then do the majority of work and discussion online. Faculty and staff are working to change to a structure where lectures and readings are posted online and the one class meeting a week is spent on assignments and group work.
One of the projects awarded in the reframing and acceleration category is focused on reframing chemistry and biology education.
“The chemistry department and the biology department [will be] working together to actually meld some of their courses and use some online formats to be able to do that,” Andrews said.
Another big project getting funded is the University Studies Online General Education Pathways project. UNST will receive $275,000, the most funding for a single project.
Rowanna Carpenter, project leader and director of assessment and upper division clusters for UNST, said that their “project is basically to move the general education pathways online so that students who are getting online degrees are getting more streamlined general education pathways.”
Of all the projects, this one effects the greatest number of PSU students. Almost everyone who attends PSU knows and deals with UNST courses, and this project is working to get four entire “pathways” available online. Each pathway includes a sophomore inquiry, three junior clusters and a senior capstone. The goal is to make it clearer to students which classes should be taken.
“So if a student is in family studies, they know that that sophomore inquiry links directly to those cluster courses that are online,” Carpenter said. “They [will] have a suggested capstone that they take that’s also related to that theme, so that it’s clearer to students the connections between those classes.”
With ReTHINK PSU well on its way for this year, students can look for more changes in the online class presence. Andrews pointed out that on the rethink.pdx.edu website, a list of all of the projects that received awards are available to view, as well as those that were not chosen.
“Many of the proposals that didn’t get funded are still moving forward in some fashion or another anyway,” Andrews said.
She added that with all the talk of big universities developing online programs, it’s important for PSU students to be aware of what the PSU faculty and staff are doing to stay on par with them.
“PSU students should not feel like we’re behind the times,” Andrews said. “We’re right there running with them; some cases with the pack, and other cases ahead of the pack.”
