Giving students a solid foundation upon which to learn
Seven years ago, I was attracted to University of Phoenix because I wanted to experience being a faculty member at a university with a technologically rich environment. After years of working in a traditional education setting at two large public universities and one small private one, I wanted to immerse myself in a new and creative way to teach—online. I wanted to see for myself how effective this new way of delivering education would be in teaching a broad range of curricula, particularly the arts and humanities.
While I was initially skeptical about how successful delivering arts and humanities instruction online would be, I’ve found that the University’s centralized framework encourages and requires creativity, collaboration and real-world resources. The University’s centralized curriculum ensures that all University of Phoenix faculty teach to specific content area outcomes. This means that students are learning the same basic core concepts and experience the same educational quality, rigor and outcomes whether they attend classes in Costa Mesa, California or Wichita, Kansas.
From the onset, the concept of a centralized curriculum challenged my traditional mindset of total academic freedom. What I failed to realize is that a centralized curriculum still offers every faculty member the freedom to develop their own academic resources that supplement the curriculum. As a faculty member, I recommend and implement assignments, discussion questions, research, readings and group projects that introduce current events and enhance the existing, core curriculum. Having a basic guide of the content, structure and activities allows us to spend more qualitative time on enriching and deepening the course content, research and instructional quality of our local campus and online classrooms.
Along these lines, I try to use my professional background to enhance the curriculum of each individual course that I teach. In my Humanities courses, I try to use examples from my experiences working as a professional orchestra/choral conductor for professional musical groups and as a guest conductor for other universities. I purposefully draw lessons from the artistic and aesthetic concepts in the music of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms or contemporary composers such as the film composer John Williams.
In my University of Phoenix School of Business classes, I pull from my professional experience as a Director of Development, Business Initiatives and Government Affairs for a large entity. I cite specific events and activities I experienced while working for a Fortune 500 corporation and one of the nation’s most expensive magnet school programs.
In my position as a dissertation mentor, I tap into my experiences as a manager and leader in a Fortune 500 technology corporation and as a K-12 teacher, school administrator and college professor. Therefore, whether dealing with a dissertation topic that focuses on baby-boomers and their adaptations to technology within the workplace or the impact of the No Child Left Behind legislation, I can speak with authority to help doctoral candidates develop their dissertations.
In all of my roles as a University of Phoenix faculty member, I continually draw on my professional experiences and amalgamate them into the design and structure of the centralized curriculum within which I work.
My experience teaching within a centralized curricular framework, that encourages and requires creativity, collaboration and real-world resources to be integrated into the framework on the part of the faculty, has been a rewarding one.
The environment and structure of our centralized curriculum assures us that University of Phoenix will continue to employ “continuous academic and systemic improvement and overall growth as an institution of higher learning.”
Our model for relevancy and practitioner faculty requires that as research, data and information within fields of study evolves, so too must our curriculum and our courses.
This article originally appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, UOPX Campus Viewpoints section. To review our current faculty articles, visit: https://chronicle.com/campusViewpoint/University-of-Phoenix/29/.
