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Campbell also said that the project will be much more significant if it ultimately shows whether students' skills improve over time. "If you don't have some kind of comparison of change, showing what they could do when they came in and when they left," she said, "it may do exactly what the rankings do: reinforce the reality that great students produce great work, and great institutions have great students."

Arum said the AAC&U/SHEEO approach has the potential to be one of "multiple indicators" that higher education institutions and policy makers eventually embrace to understand student learning. "No one measure is going to be sufficient to capture student learning performance outcomes," he said. "Responsible parties know there's a place for multiple measures, multiple approaches." Campbell, of Teachers College, agrees that "because [student learning] is such a complicated issue, any one method is going to have complications and potential limitations"

The Results The faculty participants scored the thousands of samples of work (which all came from students who had completed at least 75 percent of their course work) in three key learning outcome areas: critical thinking, written communication and quantitative literacy. Like several other recent studies of student learning, including Academically Adrift, the results are not particularly heartening. A few examples: Fewer than a third of student assignments from four-year institutions earned a score of three or four on the four-point rubric for the critical thinking skill of "using evidence to investigate a point of view or reach a conclusion." Nearly four in 10 work samples from four-year colleges scored a zero or one on how well students "analyzed the influence of context and assumptions" to draw conclusions. While nearly half of student work from two-year colleges earned a three or four on "content development" in written communication, only about a third scored that high on their use of sources and evidence. Fewer than half of the work from four-year colleges and a third of student work from two-year colleges scored a three or four on making judgments and drawing "appropriate conclusions based on quantitative analysis of data."

To create more engaging video lectures, Northwestern University engineering professor Michael Peshkin created Lightboard, an ingenious transparent dry-erase board that allows him to face the camera while drawing notes and diagrams in front of him. The board consists of a double pane of glass that is lit from within by LEDs. Peshkin uses fluorescent dry-erase markers which are highly visible on the lit glass. If you’re wondering how his writing is not backwards, it’s because he films his lectures through a mirror. Peshkin has posted instructions on how to make your own Lightboard.

Mark C. Marino, assistant professor of Writing at the University of Southern California, came up with this admirable assignment titled “Know Thy Selfie”, in which students are directed to unpack their own selfies for signifiers of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and other identity markers, and to write a thesis-driven essay based on this analysis.