The Horizon Team has moved past the initial stage in the process of evaluating where ACU fits in the landscape of higher education. The team produced a white paper in March detailing its findings after a large amount of reading and discussion around campus. The team is moving on to identifying experiments and ideas the university could try.

Dr. Mark Phillips, associate professor of management sciences and leader of the Horizon Team, said the white paper, which is available on the Horizon Team’s blog, helped organize the team’s research and move on to the next step in the process.

“We wanted to ensure we were well-grounded in higher education and we wanted to make it available to anyone on campus who would be interested,” Phillips said. “Now and into this summer we’re looking for any new things we could try out in the classroom.”

Phillips said one new change that could be experimented with is classroom lecture style.

“There’s a lot of push to move class delivery away from lectures,” he said. “Most people don’t find lecture particularly efficient or enjoyable, and there’s been a lot of exploration in other places to switch things around and have less lectures. We want to experiment with things that have proven to work and we won’t take on anything that damages the learning experience.”

Dr. Susan Lewis, associate professor of journalism and mass communication, is a member of the Horizon Team. She said the team has been consistently working toward its ultimate goal.

“We’ve been meeting with faculty, staff and students to hear about their ACU experiences and the things they love about ACU and the things they want to preserve about ACU,” Lewis said. “As we’ve listened to different departments, we’ve been very encouraged. There are good things happening here, and it’s been really interesting to learn about what faculty and students are doing.”