Chris W. Gallagher – författare

An action-oriented guide to revitalizing higher education by putting learning at the center of institutional action.As the challenges to higher education continue to mount, we believe that the surest path forward is a renewed commitment to the primary purpose of colleges and universities: higher learning. In Getting Learning Right, Chris Gallagher, Kristi Girdharry, and Kevin Smith argue that institutions can meet today’s challenges—public skepticism, AI, political pressure—by orienting decision making around a deep understanding of their learners and how learning actually works.The book examines institutional practices undertaken by colleges and universities that get learning right: listening to students; designing learning-focused environments; employing collaborative and project-based learning; helping students build networks of support and opportunity; offering flexible learning pathways; and codesigning and cocreating with students. Each practice is illustrated through key learning concepts, real institutional examples, and firsthand student accounts, whose reports offer fresh insights into more established concepts such as experiential learning and learning transfer.Written for practical and effective use, the book includes reflective questions at the end of each chapter that are designed to facilitate conversation and inform learning-grounded design.

How can universities shape creative, adaptive, integrated learners ready to confront the world? This book's clear-eyed optimism is a challenge to everyone in higher education.American higher education is being torn apart. Institutions, curricula, courses, and faculty roles are being "unbundled"—broken into constituent parts in the name of efficiency and cost savings. As a result, the college learning experience is fragmented and incoherent, leaving graduates less and less equipped to confront the dire social problems that cause those divisions in the first place. In College Made Whole, Chris W. Gallagher lays bare the dangers of the dis-integration of the college experience and shows how we can put higher education back together again. The successful colleges and universities of the future, Gallagher argues, will be integrated: coherently and cohesively designed to help students achieve a lifelong learning experience that is more than the sum of its parts. Pushing back against pernicious dichotomies that frame much discussion of US higher education, Gallagher critiques many of the hottest educational trends, including the overhyping of technological "solutions," rampant adjunctification, the promotion of nondegree credentials as a suitable replacement for college degrees, and the increasingly narrow focus on the vocational aims of a college education. Ivestigating the purposes of higher education historically and today, he suggests audacious proposals to enhance learning, including reorganizing institutions, reordering institutional priorities, redesigning curricula and courses, and rethinking edtech and learning technologies.Lucidly written and packed with practical recommendations and real student stories, College Made Whole will challenge higher education professionals and policy makers, as well as anyone with a stake in the future of US higher education—which is to say, all of us who inhabit this fragile planet.