Decades of research demonstrates that educational relationships are central to student learning, motivation, well-being, and persistence in higher education. However, much of the literature on relationship-rich education centers student perspectives or institutional structures, with comparatively little attention to how faculty themselves understand barriers to and effective practices for relationship-building. This study addresses that gap. Data are drawn from some 2,000 anonymous faculty responses collected using Mentimeter during educational development workshops conducted between 2021 and 2024. In analyzing this data, we identified four dominant categories of barriers – time, institutional factors, student factors, and well-being. Faculty also identified four primary strategies for relationship-building: demonstrating care, using interactive pedagogies, sharing personal stories, and connecting with students individually. Findings suggest that while structural and institutional factors can be significant constraints to relational teaching, many faculty chose evidence-informed practices to build educational relationships with and among students. These results offer practical insights for instructors seeking to foster meaningful connections that support student learning and belonging, and also highlight the importance of centering faculty voices in institutional efforts to foster student success and in research on college teaching.

Mastery grading, a research-supported alternative assessment system, is considered in this article as a replacement for traditional methods in a Calculus II course. Traditional percentage-based grading often fails to accurately reflect student learning in calculus, leading students to focus on accumulating points rather than mastery of topics. The implementation of mastery grading that we discuss here includes core standards as well as supplementary standards. In addition, we incorporate a traditional final exam and online homework, as well as in-class activities. We also allow students the possibility of a standard percentage-based way of computing their grade, and we discuss why having this option can help with student acceptance of mastery grading. Finally, we share survey results from an implementation of this version of mastery grading in spring 2025.

In large-enrollment courses, instructors often receive hundreds of student comments that are difficult to synthesize, and traditional Likert-scale evaluations rarely capture the nuances of students’ learning experiences. This study introduces an accessible, evidence-based approach that uses open-source artificial-intelligence text analysis to interpret qualitative feedback quickly and systematically. Using 678 comments from 270 students in lecture and active-learning sections of an undergraduate course, the analysis identified clear contrasts in how students described engagement, learning, and enthusiasm - differences that were not visible in the numerical ratings. The AI results extended the insights from standard evaluations, highlighting aspects of classroom climate and instructional design that instructors could address directly. Because the procedure runs on common computers with freely available software, it enables faculty to examine large sets of comments in minutes rather than hours. This paper offers a practical guide for applying this approach to course evaluations, helping instructors turn extensive qualitative feedback into concise summaries for teaching improvement.

Transdisciplinary collaboration and communication are essential for solving complex problems that resist single-discipline solutions. Guiding students in developing the ability to engage in transdisciplinary problem solving and confidently navigate uncertainty is a pressing concern among higher-education institutions. While education abroad is widely documented as a high-impact learning practice, there is little research assessing the value of education abroad as a tool for transdisciplinary engagement and skill development. This study presents evidence of the efficacy of education abroad in achieving those goals. Over five hundred students at a midwestern state flagship university were surveyed regarding their experiences with and confidence in transdisciplinary interaction as part of summer education abroad programs. Across a wide variety of summer programs, students overwhelmingly report engaging in transdisciplinary work and growing their transdisciplinary skills.

This paper describes an innovative first-year experience program that supports students’ academic and personal success through mentorship, community engagement, design thinking, and guided personal development. A study on the efficacy of this program revealed significant gains in students’ sense of community, campus engagement, preparedness for life at the university, and confidence in securing an internship, in addition to positive feelings about faculty mentors. These results suggest the program’s effectiveness in strengthening early college experiences and promoting student confidence in navigating university life and career development.

Poor teaching, often considered the flip side to teaching excellence, is a common and persistent problem, not only for students and teachers, but also for the broader higher education sector. We investigated university students’ perspectives of poor teaching behaviors in a medical, nursing and health sciences-aligned faculty. Students were surveyed, before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, regarding their perceptions of such behaviors. Our results broadly align with those of comparative studies but also identify some specific, unique differences. Comparing pre- and post-pandemic surveys, students’ perceptions of key poor teaching behaviors had either considerably worsened (e.g. uncaring) or improved (e.g. unengaging) from 2017 to 2022. The pandemic did not appear to affect students’ perceptions of some commonly-identified poor teaching behaviors (e.g. poor communication skills). Our findings reinforce consistent calls for tertiary institutions to better equip teachers with professional development to enhance students’ learning experience, in an increasingly complex and disrupted higher education landscape.

HyFlex course design is a delivery model that provides students the flexibility to attend face-to-face, online synchronously, or asynchronously. In order to support students in HyFlex college classes, instructors must prepare engaging, accessible, and equitable learning opportunities for all learners. However, it can be difficult for college instructors to create learning environments that help students feel belonging and engagement in HyFlex courses. In this Quick Fix article, we explain how the guidelines for Universal Design for Learning (UDL) overlap with and align with Beatty’s fundamental values of HyFlex learning, specifically in bimodal course design (i.e., online synchronous and face-to-face). UDL allows for diverse learners to participate in learning experiences through multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression. These components are all broadly tied to the HyFlex value of accessibility, which allows access for all learners to diverse modalities of instruction, but UDL and HyFlex can be leveraged to support all students both with and without disabilities. We first expand upon how UDL guidelines and HyFlex values complement each other, and then we give examples of strategies to put into action for using UDL in HyFlex college courses. While there has been much research on each UDL and HyFlex approaches to support college instructors, the merging of the values within these theories is novel, and this pairing has implications for direct practice implementation in the classroom. This paper introduces a concept that can be further elaborated on in other conceptual works and potentially lead to new theoretical frameworks. Additionally, future research could explore how UDL and HyFlex approaches enhance each other in college courses and other areas of education.

Many guides on how to prepare a syllabus for a college class purport to be evidence-based and cite scholarly publications to back up their recommendations. We argue that the literature on syllabi is far less robust than is commonly believed. We document five shortcomings that characterize much prior work on the topic: recommendations based on instructors’ opinions, not empirical evidence; an institution-centric bias that de-centers the student voice; a tendency to view the syllabus document as a self-evident good suited for all tasks (“mission creep”); the use of artificial laboratory settings; and the collection of limited types of data. We conclude by calling for more rigorous empirical work on students’ experiences with the syllabus document, especially qualitative research that centers students’ perspectives.

While there is extensive research on syllabus preferences and engagement in lab studies, current studies lack ecological validity and analysis of how syllabi affect professor-student relationships and class engagement. The present study utilized a quasi-experimental design to examine the impact of syllabus format on expected professor-student rapport in a real classroom environment. Thirty-two undergraduate psychology students participated in a research study examining class and instructor expectations and instructor-student rapport prior to meeting the professor. Students were provided either a visual syllabus or a standard syllabus, both of which contained the same standard content (books, assignments, contact information, and due dates). The data suggests that compared to the standard syllabus, a visual syllabus generated more positive feelings, including excitement and eagerness, and reduced anticipatory anxiety. Students in the visual syllabus condition had significantly higher professor-student rapport. Therefore, a visual syllabus represents one way to potentially improve professor-student rapport and student expectations for class. This quick teaching modification is easily implemented in a variety of disciplines.

In this study we ask: how does student involvement in course (re)development impact the students’ future learning and experience of subsequent classes? Students participated in a summer collaboration with a faculty member to either diversify course content or implement inclusive pedagogical approaches. After participation, students then went back into classrooms, seeing course content through new lenses. Through the analysis of reflective journals while participating in the program and semi-structured interviews a semester after participation, we show how engaging in collaboration through this program impacted students’ learning and engagement showing three main findings: students were more aware of where faculty incorporated diverse content and inclusive practices in their classes, took more ownership of their education, and engaged with class content in new ways.