On June 15, from 3:00 – 4:00 pm (EDT), Martin Kurzweil will speak at an American Council on Education (ACE) webinar on “Instructional Quality, Student Outcomes, and Institutional Finances,” a white paper he co-authored with Jessie Brown. To register for this free webinar, please visit the ACE website. Martin will be joined by Catherine Haras (Senior Director of the Center for Effective Teaching and Learning, California State University, Los Angeles),  Joel Hartman (Vice President for Information Technologies and Resources, University of Central Florida​), and Steven Taylor (Associate Director of Academic Innovation, American Council on Education).

From ACE:

ACE commissioned a white paper as part of the Council’s collaboration with Strada Education Network to explore whether improvements in instructional quality can increase a postsecondary institution’s net revenue. This webinar will focus on insights from the white paper, Instructional Quality, Student Outcomes, and Institutional Finances, and offer how faculty development at one university has had a demonstrable impact at an institutional level.

The paper provides a conceptual framework in which improvement in instruction leads to better student outcomes such as increased retention rates, decreased repetition of courses, and faster time to degree. These improvements in student outcomes, in turn, lead to increases in marginal revenue that are larger than the marginal costs of improving instruction and of serving a larger student population. Surveying the literature, the authors find evidence supporting this hypothesis, though no previous study has explored it directly.