Welcome to the PKAL Distributed Digital Community
We need is to reduce the isolation of change agents working to promote learning activities in the STEM disciplines. This is a problem even on a single campus. The boundaries that contain faculty within their discipline and separate faculty from administrators and from experts in assessing student learning, are very real. Opportunities for persons with different expertise and in different spheres of responsibility to share their expertise are greatly limited.
Departments respond to signals from their broader disciplinary community; faculty innovators adapt effective contemporary pedagogies for their individual classrooms; assessment practitioners work in isolation. What is needed is a STEM faculty development structure that reflects a common understanding across disciplines and across the institution of how students learn and what students should know and be able to do-from one course to the next and by the time they graduate. The barriers standing in the way of wide-spread faculty engagement with research-based learning pedagogies cannot be addressed one faculty member, one department, one institution at a time.
A coordinated national effort is needed to build on and enhance current efforts within existing, formal scholarly communities and to catalyze a significant number of new networks and clusters at the local and regional level and within STEM communities of interest that share a commitment to increase the quality, productivity, and community involvement of STEM graduates. The PKAL Distributed Digital Community is the digital home for this collaborative activity.