Category: Access & Inclusion

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For more than a decade, the cost of college tuition in the U.S. has been steadily rising as enrollment continues to drop. Higher ed’s price tag, now averaging $33,000 per year after financial aid for private universities and $19,000 for public ones, is one factor driving away prospective students reticent to bet their degree could one day pay itself off. According to new research taking into account both the earnings and debts of graduates, the wealth gap between college degree-earners and high school graduates is in fact closing. That message is not lost on prospective students of lower income or minority backgrounds for whom the stakes are even higher. 

Among this group of students at greater risk of not realizing the gains of a college degree are those from rural communities. They are often first in their families to go to college and less exposed to the opportunities that surround students in urban economic centers. For university leaders hoping to regain the public’s trust in higher education, one possible avenue to explore is an increase in experiential learning opportunities. By facilitating outside-the-classroom professional experiences for students before they graduate, experiential learning may help raise the value of a college degree, in practice and perception.

“Historically, internships and other experiential learning opportunities have had greater participation among more privileged students with larger networks,” said John Volin, Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost at the University of Maine, who is spearheading an effort to expand student internship opportunities through the newly created Rural Careers Pathway Center.  “Given the value of these programs, particularly in terms of career readiness and attainment, it’s more important than ever to make a greater effort to expose less connected students with these opportunities earlier and more frequently.”

Appearing on more and more college campuses nationwide, experiential learning is a hands-on approach to education designed to allow students to “learn by doing.” It promotes projects, spanning research, internships, travel, and performances, that bring classroom material to life.  

But the practice doesn’t just offer a new, engaging way to learn. It’s many benefits include creating life-long wellbeing, helping with retention, and providing pathways to obtainable careers. 

At the University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK), students are required to take one designated experiential learning class before graduating, thanks to a mandate by the Higher Learning Commission which is instituting a project to improve campus outcomes. “Experiential learning has been shown to have so many benefits for students,” said Beth Hinga, UNK Assistant to the Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, who spearheaded the experiential learning course requirement launched in fall 2020. “It keeps them enrolled, so retention rates are higher. Satisfaction rates with their education are higher.”

Career-oriented experiential opportunities may help reassure families concerned about their children’s job prospects after college.

At the rural and smallest campus in the University of Nebraska system, this potential boost for career development and attainment is especially meaningful. Four in ten UNK students are the first to attend college in their families, who tend to come from farming backgrounds. Without many other professional connections but with what Hinga called “a “phenomenal work ethic,” these students often thrive doing independent work and are able to foster positive service-learning or internship experiences that lead to employment down the road.

As a result, career-oriented experiential opportunities may help reassure families concerned about their children’s job prospects after college. “What I’m hearing from students is that [experiential learning] is a really valuable opportunity for them to show their parents that there are jobs out there that let them do these kinds of things that they want to do,” Hinga said. “The parents get excited because, ‘Gosh, my students do an internship and it’s paid,’ and so they’re able to help pay for their own school and those kinds of things.”

In the rural setting, experiential learning may also be mutually reinforcing for students and the local community. “So many businesses have been great about welcoming students in to do those internships and I think a lot of these students are making a very positive impact on them,” Hinga said. Impressed by how much the young students can offer, employers have continued bringing in more. “Those are the students that they want to hire.”

Moving forward, Hinga said she hopes the university can begin introducing younger students, in their first and second years, to experiential learning. “Students have told us that if they could get those experiences earlier in their college career, it would help them to make sure they know what the proposed career they’re thinking about is all about and make sure it’s really what they want,” she said. 

The University of Maine at Farmington (UMF), another small, rural campus within a larger public university system, has embraced experiential learning as an engagement and retention strategy for some time. In October 2020, a $240 million gift to the UMaine System from the Harold Alfond Foundation spurred a $20 million student success and retention initiative called UMS TRANSFORMS, which centers on experiential learning opportunities, starting with “Research Learning Experiences” (RLEs) and moving onto “Pathways to Careers.” RLEs allow student to pursue research as early as their first semester, while Pathways creates professional preparation and work opportunities.

As early as their first semester, UMF students can engage in professional development through not only traditional work or internship experiences but wider career exploration. In a first-year course focused on sustainability, for example, students visited Maine Hudson Trails and Sugarloaf Mountain to speak with the respective director and sustainability coordinator about each of their job trajectories. In another course called “Popular Horror Narratives,” a unit on horror video games included a visit from one indie video game designer, who spoke about her experience developing a break-out game.

At a school where nearly half the student body comes from first-generation backgrounds, this chance to consider and connect with potential career routes can be transformational. “I think it’s so great for the students to hear from people who aren’t coming from a privileged background, given a lot of our students are coming from rural Maine,” Steve Grandchamp, who taught the course on horror narratives, said. “They can hear, ‘Okay, well, how could you get into this industry?’ Or, ‘how can you kind of forge your own path in all of these different creative ways?’” 

As those who do this work in places like Farmington, Maine and Kearney, Nebraska attest, engaging rural students in real world experiences that can lead to post-college opportunities may also serve to address another challenge for higher ed: letting these students know, “We value you.”

Everyone has a story to tell but not everyone’s story means so much to so many. At the turn of the century, Ghanaian-born Patrick Awuah, Jr. was an engineer at Microsoft in Seattle when he returned to Ghana to start a new university aimed at inspiring young Africans to become ethical, entrepreneurial leaders among historic, systemic challenges. After nearly twenty years since its founding, Ashesi University has changed the course of higher education in Africa, and, with it, the lives of thousands of students and their families.

Awuah’s decision to return to Ghana was a difficult one, particularly for someone who had so successfully transcended the circumstances that encumbered many of his peers. Awuah was educated at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania where the liberal arts pedagogy encouraged curiosity and debate. As an engineering student, he was writing code and building things as well as studying philosophy and political theory.  The government-run university system in Africa was more rote learning than critical thinking, providing only a monolithic option for the less than 5% of young people in Ghana who attended college at the time. Awuah became convinced that to enact economic and political change in Africa, there needed to be a mindset shift in teaching and learning that would encourage that small percentage of young people to think big. 

A few things happened then that would lead him to act on his conviction. Crisis in Rwanda and Somalia painted a negative picture of Africa in the American media, which made Africans in America eager to change the narrative.  In the late 1990s, Microsoft’s annual earnings exceeded Ghana’s gross national product, igniting a sense of moral obligation for those who had left and done well. In 1995, Awuah had a son, born in the US, and he worried for the first time about the racism that is uniquely experienced by African Americans. With a business plan he and his colleagues created while at UC/Berkely, a foundation that would serve as a fund-raising vessel, and the support of his wife, Rebecca, Awuah returned to Ghana in 1998 to begin the process of establishing Ashesi, which means “beginning” in Akan. The university enrolled its first students in 2002.

Awuah faced a chilly reception from accreditors and peer organizations but nonetheless launched Ashesi with 30 students, half of whom received need-based scholarships. Today, it serves about 1,400 students and has a target of growing to 2,500.  Ashesi is now recognized as one of the finest universities in Africa with a proven track record in fostering ethical leadership, critical thinking, an entrepreneurial mindset, and the ability to solve complex problems. Through its example, it has changed the way Africa educates its young people and has created a learning community throughout the country and the continent.

As the story continues, Awuah talks about how he did what he did, what he learned, and what it will take to realize his dream of an African Renaissance.    

LearningWell: How did your experiences in the US influence your decision to focus on education in Ghana?

Awuah: Higher education in Africa has been about looking at the past and regurgitating things that others have discovered.  At Swarthmore, faculty were not interested in me memorizing information and repeating it back to them.  In fact, if you did that, you got a bad grade. It was about active learning.  In terms of my time at Microsoft, the company’s success was largely dependent on the US economy and how it operated within that.  But, very importantly, it was, and is, influenced by the people who work there. They were innovative, they created things, they always thought about what they wanted to do next, and they competed with other companies that were doing interesting things. I realized that this had a lot to do with the kind of education that they’d had. I realized then that we needed a different way of teaching and learning and of nurturing future leaders.

LearningWell: You set out to influence the percentage of people who go to college in Ghana, not on raising the college participation rates.  How did this become your goal?

Awuah: At the time I was thinking, “I am an individual living in Seattle with limited means. What can I do that would make the most difference?” It seemed to me that if you could change the way that, say, 5% of the people are educated, you can change the country, because they are the people who are going to run businesses. They are the people who will run the courts, the government, the police force, the military, etc.  And the way they view the world and the way they engage with the world has profound implications for everyone else.  I felt like I could demonstrate a different way of teaching and learning for Ghana that would get to these same outcomes. 

LearningWell: What was your vision for the university?

Awuah: We wanted to establish a university that moved away from rote learning to a model that nurtured people to be philosophical and active learners about what our society should look like and understand that thinking that way would bring tremendous value to society. First of all, it was very important to me that I founded a university that I would want to work in, whether I was a man or a woman.  And one that I would be happy sending my kids to—inclusive and high quality.  I also wanted it to be an institution that reflected Ghanaian society and, ultimately, African society.

We want to educate people who are going to be good leaders.  And for us that meant people that sit at the intersection of leadership, scholarship, and citizenship. Scholarship means everyone’s a student and everyone’s a teacher.  That means we are sharing our knowledge with each other and we are asking questions that expand conversations, not narrow them.  Leadership is about helping others be more successful, helping society be more successful.  We want people who are collaborative, who engage the talents of others, who communicate effectively, which means they listen well and speak well. And we want good citizens—people who care about the common good, who are ethical. They think about the long-term implications of the decisions they make.

I also, right from the beginning, wanted to make sure that striving for excellence did not mean being afraid of making mistakes or afraid of owning up to mistakes. Sometimes people think that excellence and imperfection are at odds with each other, but the day you lose excellence is the day you think you have achieved perfection.  So that is the culture I set out to build.

LearningWell: What was the initial response to your plans among the academic community and others?

Awuah: The people in corporate Ghana were glad to see something like this in the works.  They were just skeptical I could stay the course.  “Ok, great idea but is this guy really going to do it?”  (I was young then and looked even younger.) 

Ghana’s accreditation system involves a peer review process and the faculty that came to review our curriculum didn’t really like it.  They didn’t like the multi-disciplinarity of it.  The liberal arts core curriculum they didn’t understand.  “Why would a computer science student take courses in philosophy?  They should just do more math.” There was a lot of push-back and a lot of convincing. 

I think that some people felt somewhat disrespected by Ashesi’s reason for being.  “What is so wrong with us that you need to disrupt what we’re doing?” When it came to hiring faculty, we got no applicants from Ghana.  No one in academia here took me seriously.  Private universities were not allowed in Ghana until the late 1990s and the whole thing was such a new idea.  But after a couple of years, this started to change.  I was very fortunate to have a senior professor from the University of Ghana who joined my advisory board, and she eventually joined my team as the dean of faculty and that made a huge difference.

LearningWell: You had a strong social justice mission. What does equity look like at Ashesi? Is it different than in the United States?

Awuah: I think in the US, there are too many labels and that affects people’s mental health and sense of belonging. Here, we just see people as people. We now have students from all over the continent.  The fact that someone is from Rwanda or Kenya or Nigeria or Zimbabwe–or if someone is poor–this is not a label. We try to only see them as who they are—all of us just engaging with other people. 

I’ve advocated for this here because of what I saw in the US.  When I was first in college, there was something I didn’t understand. I actually didn’t understand it until my son was born. Some of our African American friends would say to us Africans, “You guys don’t seem to have a Black consciousness.” Our response was “Of course we know we’re Black, what do you mean?” But the difference was that when I was growing up, I didn’t move around the world with this notion I was Black, I was just “Patrick.” When I go to other countries where the first thing they think of me is “You’re Black,” that creates a lot of barriers.

So we’ve tried to be very careful about not doing that here, especially as we become more diverse.  For example, we want this campus to fully reflect Ghanaian society in terms of physical and learning disabilities.  We’ve set a goal that 4% of the Ashesi community will be people with disabilities. We’ve asked our HR department and hiring managers to think about what jobs someone with autism or Down syndrome might do. And then these people will just be part of our community. They’ll just be “Kofi” or “Adwoa” or “Sarah.”  This makes for a healthy, compassionate place where people feel like they belong and that helps with wellbeing. 

LearningWell: After nearly 20 years, what do you feel has been achieved at Ashesi? What’s still needed?

Awuah: Things are quite different now than they were 20 years ago. The way we approached education was challenged very strongly. Now, there are 50 or 60 private institutions in Ghana. The accrediting system now encourages universities to have what they call a general studies component, what we call our core curriculum. There’s a notion that educating people broadly is a good thing.  

We see a lot more engagement.  We started a collaborative about six years ago and we said, “Let’s get together and share pedagogy and ideas on how we run our universities.  About 10 universities joined us at that time and we now have 400 universities from all over the continent.  There’s a palpable sense of excitement and optimism about lowering the barriers between our institutions and learning from each other. 

I can honestly tell you there are thousands of people whose lives are very different than what they would have been had Ashesi not existed.  Their families have changed and that is very gratifying to see. And it has had an impact.  When we first presented to the accreditation board, we had a goal: 90% of our students would find employment or graduate school placement within six months of beginning their search.  No one thought this was going to happen.  This is in a country where it was accepted that 90% of graduates would take five years to find their first employment.  We’ve met our goal every year.  The last class we measured was something like 96%.  So, the expectation was very low and it is now very different.  Everybody’s asking universities to track how they’re doing on career placement and that’s going to compel all of us to be educating people in ways that actually enable the economy.

Everybody is now talking about educating people in such a way that they can be job creators, they can be entrepreneurs.  There are people who say, “If you want to educate entrepreneurs then have them take a course in entrepreneurship.”  They don’t realize that the liberal arts is a really good way to educate entrepreneurs—individuals who know how to question the status quo or imagine new things. The people who learn first how to take intellectual risks in the classroom are the people who can eventually take risks in business.  The most important thing is for a mind to not be afraid.  

In terms of what still needs to happen? Our graduates are highly sought-after in industry, but are our graduates able to uphold high ethical standards in the outside world? Each year, alumni return to campus to share personal examples of being invited to join corrupt schemes. These alumni tell current students how they successfully chose the ethical path, sometimes turning down a great deal of benefit.

I am grateful for Ashesi’s growing reputation, and proud of the work of our students, alumni, staff, and faculty. But Africa needs even more from Ashesi and needs more institutions like Ashesi. Sitting in Africa’s classrooms today are students whose education will set Africa’s course over the next 20-to-30 years. When more African universities follow Ashesi’s model, we will see a better future for Africa and for the world.

On-campus jobs tend to be born from necessity, largely transactional, and not viewed as particularly meaningful. But what if brewing coffee in the campus cafe, or making calls in the development office, could be supported by mentors and learning modules that made these experiences an integral part of students’ educations and careers? At Arizona State University (ASU), a few innovative thinkers started asking that question.

“So many students are engaged in work while they’re going to school,” said Brandee Popaden-Smith, director of the Work+ Learn program at ASU. “How do we help those students get every bit that they can out of that experience?” 

Students may work because they need to, says Popaden-Smith, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t gain high-quality employment experience in the process.  She and her team imagined student employment could be fulfilling in more ways than one—not only for the coinciding paycheck, but for providing students critical professional development skills and complimenting their studies in the classroom.  

In 2020, Work+ was piloted and then developed at ASU’s University College as an initiative supporting student success. Focused on students currently employed by the university, Work+ is, at a minimum, a win-win strategy to help busy student-employees get the most out of their dual roles.  At its core, it’s about equity and access. 

Around 40% of full-time college students and closer to three-quarters of part-time students in the U.S. are “working learners,” or those employed during the school year as they complete their degrees. The majority are lower-income or first generation students. At ASU, the largest public university in the country, 35% of their approximately 140,000 students (undergraduate and graduate) are the first in their families to go to college. Around 11,000 are working learners, teeing Work+ up to be a program with wide-reaching impact, both locally and nationally. 

Work+ offers several online modules, or “levels,” for student employees to gain critical career skills and contemplate professional pathways. This content responds in part to the 2019 study from Gallup and Bates College, “Forging Pathways to Purposeful Work: The Role of Higher Education,” which suggests students who participate in a course or program encouraging them to think about pursuing meaning in their work are more likely to secure this type of employment. The same research established a positive correlation between college graduates who find purpose in their work and their overall well-being.

Sukhwant Jhaj is ASU’s vice provost for Academic Innovation and Student Achievement and is the point person on the project for ASU Provost Nancy Gonzales. “I focus on issues of institutional strategy as they connect with questions of academic innovation and student success,” Jhaj said. “Things like, “What’s next?’”

According to Jhaj, Work+ targets three questions, with a particular focus on the second. “How do you end achievement disparities that exist? How might we redesign for an integrated work and learning future? And how might we design services using design thinking analytics?” These objectives then align with the larger university’s charter, which emphasizes not only academic excellence and innovation as a research institution, but the fundamental importance of access and inclusion to that end.

Part of this accessibility mission is to elevate on-campus work to the status of the often-sought-after-but-less-widely-available internship. “For a long time, internships were kind of the main high value work experience that students could get while they were pursuing their degree program,” said Popaden-Smith. “But they’re not easily scalable, especially for an institution our size where we’re trying to ensure that every single learner has these types of opportunities.”

Making work more integral to education also creates a sticking factor for students at risk of stopping out. “When you take a look at our working learner populations broadly across the nation, they’re highly representative of historically marginalized groups, and they are the ones facing the significant barriers to persisting through their educational experience,” said Popaden-Smith. She said programs like Work+ that infuse employment with education help students, who might otherwise be forced to choose one over the other, to stay in school. 

Crystal Woods, a psychology major in her last semester at ASU, said she has appreciated participating in Work+ through her job as an academic peer advisor, especially in anticipation of her upcoming graduation. “I feel like the closer you get to graduating, the harder it gets to really decide what you want to do.” Even though she had amassed plenty of professional experience already, working since she was 16 and often two jobs throughout college, Woods said Work+ modules helped her develop career skills she wouldn’t have known how to approach otherwise. She has taken quizzes to learn more about potential career paths that could suit her and kept a record of all her progress along the way. 

Woods believes ASU offers a supportive environment in general for first-gen students like herself, and engaging with Work+ boosted her confidence further. “Entering school, I never thought I could be doing what I’m doing or getting the grades or even graduating early. And so reflecting back on it, I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh. I did do it as a first-generation [student].” The work experience helped her shift from a deficit to an asset mindset. “I don’t walk into interviews as nervous as I was. I kind of walk in [with the attitude of] ‘they need me more than I need them’—even if I really do need them.” 

A critical part of making Work+ effective for students comes down to the role of their employers. Supervisors who engage with Work+ help lead their students through their online modules, providing continuous support and feedback to reinforce the coursework on professional development in practice. These advisors also gain access to a wealth of resources designed to facilitate their own experience, from approaching the hiring process to navigating a mentorship relationship. 

For Kate Armbruster, who is not only a student-employee supervisor but a doctoral student at ASU researching working learners, the impact of student-supervisor relationships is hard to overstate. “This is not just about student employment, student-employees,” Armbruster said of Work+, which she engages with as both a supervisor and researcher. “It’s very much about the supervisor, as well, because we need the supervisor to have buy-in and be motivated and understand how important their role is in student success—how much of an impact they have on student employees.”

Crystal Woods attributes much of her progress as a working learner to her boss and mentor, Amanda, who introduced her to Work+ and also comes from a first-generation background. “Since she was the person who encouraged me, I was able to get research opportunities and work in labs, which I didn’t even think I was smart enough to do. But here I am.”

As successful as it has been for her, Woods admits Work+ is not always an easy sell for students with little time left in their already-strapped schedules. “I know that when you’re already at work and you’re a student and you have homework, it’s just so much on your mind. Work, work, work. Why would they want to do another sort of work? But it’s beneficial at the end of the day.”  That’s what she tells other students.

Meanwhile, Work+ Learn Director Popaden-Smith plans to continue trying to reach as many students as possible, if not all of them, with opportunities Work+ offers. “We’re actually in the process, in order to scale to the entirety of the institution, of shifting to, ‘How are the values and how is the framework of Work+ the foundation for all student employment at ASU?” she said. She envisions the larger Work+ philosophy permeating all student employment experiences and benefiting each and every student employee and supervisor.

For Vice Provost Jhaj, the destiny of Work+ extends well beyond his ASU. “We are focused on how we might reimagine the experience of students that we employ and, in doing so, help rethink work-study nationally,” he said.

As faculty consider which technology tools to try this school year, they may be interested to know there is now one available that helps their students speak up in class. AskClass is a simple teaching tool that gets students talking and lets professors know who to call on next.  Part AI and part behavioral science, AskClass may appear rudimentary, but founders hope that it can help higher education address new concerns about academic disengagement and social anxiety among Gen Z students. 

Damon Moon, a management consultant turned adjunct business professor at San Jose State University, created AskClass with a development partner.  He uses the tool in all his classes and has made it available as a commercial product for professors across the country. Moon said the absence of normal conversation caused by students’ preoccupation with phones and social media, coupled with the emotional side-effects of the pandemic, served as motivation to create a tool that would bring robust conversation back into the classroom.  

“Today’s students can go for hours without talking and the first thing they’ll likely ask is, ‘Do you have a charger?’” Moon joked, though he believes the ramifications of this are serious from both a teaching and a mental health perspective.    

He described the tool as a combination of gamification, data analytics, and a little bit of nudging. The formula is simple and straightforward.  When students enter class, they are met with classical piano music and an “icebreaker” question projected on the AskClass screen, often side-by-side with class content.  The question could be anything from “If you have $100 to donate, where would you give it and why?” to “What is your favorite movie?” Students are asked to discuss their answers with their classmates, as music continues in the background.  Those that share with the entire class are given points that are tallied in real time on the roster on the AskClass screen which displays all of the students’ first and last names.

The point system continues throughout the lecture with many opportunities for students to speak up and get credit.  Professors are encouraged to create class experiences that naturally lead to discussion, like team projects that require a “report out,” providing another chance at points.  A timer helps guide the more introverted students, letting them know there’s a start and finish to their efforts.  Professors, acting more like coaches, yell motivational instructions like “Lucas, you have two minutes to recap the discussion. Go!”

An advantage for faculty, particularly those teaching in large lecture halls, is that they can see who has not participated and can welcome them into the conversation.  Another tactic, the Random Person Selector, calls on students indiscriminately, removing any perception of bias on the professor’s part.

“Raising your hand can be really uncomfortable for some students, particularly those from Eastern Asian countries where it is contrary to our culture,” said Moon, who is from Korea.  “But at the same time, being asked to participate, or having your name randomly come up on the screen, can be the onramp many students need to join the conversation.”

Outcome data from Moon’s classes show that 96% of students said they are more comfortable speaking up in class; and 95% of students said they had better team dynamics compared to other classes. Additionally, 98% of students made a new friend as a result of AskClass.

“AskClass is pretty much your best friend starting the conversation for you in a group of kids,” said Diamon, a senior at San Jose State who is originally from East Africa. “And the points are awesome,” he said. 

Moon said the point system is a reinforcing mechanism that works well with students in direct and subtle ways. Students are familiar with “rewards” programs, like those at Starbucks or their credit cards, and are comfortable competing in digital games.  For classes where professors offer participation credit toward grades, as Moon does, it is a significant motivator.

“I am a very competitive person, so for me to be able to see in real time the points I get, made me really want to participate every single day,” said Lily, a student at San Jose State.  “It makes participation fun; It’s like a game.”

Bob DuBois, PhD, known as ‘Dr. Bob,” is associate director of undergraduate studies and a senior lecturer in the psychology department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He said any way to get students talking in class was of interest to him as a professor. When he heard about AskClass from a podcast featuring Moon, he decided to pilot it in his classroom. He now says it has played a big role in building community in his class.   

“It just changed the entire dynamic,” he said.  “What was once the same three or four students dominating the discussion suddenly became everybody wanting to join in because they could see that they were getting credit for that and watching their points go up.”

DuBois believes students learn more as a result, particularly first-generation students (of which he was one), who often lack the confidence to take risks within the classroom.  He also sees AskClass as a way for busy students to make friends in a place where they spend so much of their time.  “I see AskClass as kind of a scaffolding for building relationships, which is incredibly important on modern campuses where students are so busy that they are not prioritizing making friends.” 

Building relationships that lead to better mental health is an intended benefit of AskClass and one that Moon talks about in his sales pitch. Keith, a recent San Jose State graduate who met his girlfriend through Moon’s class said, “Just being able to put yourself out there in a low stakes environment, especially a learning environment, is so good for your mental wellbeing.”  

Nareg, a former student in Moon’s class, said AskClass creates an environment where people can freely share what’s going on in their lives.  “I think it really creates a sense of belonging for students of any kind of background.  Anyone can come into engagement and find something to talk about, something they have in common with the person next to them.  And then when the professor ties it all together, it creates a holistic environment where everyone has a sense of belonging.”

For Julia, who is from Brazil, the five-minute icebreaker that gets students talking doubles as a stress reliever when moving from one content-rich class to the next. But what she appreciates most about AskClass is the way it gives students agency in the classroom. 

“You no longer feel like a spectator,” she said. “You’re not just sitting there, getting the information and storing it in your brain.  Instead, you feel a part of everything.”

AskClass is now being used by 700 professors at 130 institutions across the country, and Moon is eager for it to expand even more. The tech entrepreneur and business professor said generating a profit from the relatively modest licensing fee is not his motivation, and it is unclear if his technology-based engagement tool is the real differentiator in the satisfaction his students so eagerly reported.  Is it good technology or just good teaching?

Dr. Bob said, “AskClass makes the process of asking questions and soliciting answers structured in a way that we don’t forget how important that is.”