Teaching & Learning

Goals

The University of Michigan provides rich academic and social settings to help students find the right combination of courses and extra-curricular activities to meet their individual needs. It also seeks to enhance the student learning experience by improving the student-faculty ratio, encouraging international experiences, supporting academic multicultural initiatives, keeping pace with instructional technology and facilities, and expanding undergraduate engaged learning opportunities.

Overview

Instruction of students is a shared activity involving tenured and tenure-track faculty, lecturers, clinical faculty, other instructional faculty, and graduate student instructors. Faculty incorporate current research and scholarly work into their courses and enrich the classroom experience with exceptional expertise and depth.

The university continuously develops its educational environment to equip students with essential knowledge and competencies for today’s world. The Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) and Center for Academic Innovation (CAI) partner with faculty, graduate students, postdocs, and administrators to support and promote the advancement of evidence-based learning and teaching practices, curricular innovation, tools for student success and equity, and educational research and analytics.

The institution supports the development of traditional capabilities – the ability to speak and write clearly, reason critically and quantitatively, gain competence in a student’s discipline of choice, and engage with the arts and humanities – and prepares students for the future by helping to build confidence to innovate and take risks, develop skills for group work, collaborate effectively with individuals from diverse backgrounds and cultures, and have command of the latest information technologies.

The university offers undergraduate students the opportunity to participate in focused “learning communities,” each organized around intellectual interests, such as international issues, research, or civic engagement. These give students the opportunity to live, interact and learn with a close-knit group that includes faculty and staff.

Global engagement is an area of special emphasis as a focus of unique learning opportunities. The Global Michigan web portal helps students find and pursue the kind of deep, cultural understanding that comes through shared experiences among students and faculty from different countries and cultures.

The university regularly administers a survey of undergraduate students known as UMAY (University of Michigan Asks You). UMAY asks students to report about their satisfaction with academic programs, their sense of knowledge gain, and their opportunities to gain experience outside of the classroom. Data from past surveys are summarized in this chapter.

Instructional Workforce

Course instruction is performed by individuals in a variety of job categories including tenured and tenure-track faculty members, lecturers, clinical instructional faculty, and graduate student instructors.

   SOURCE: U-M Human Resources Data

Headcount represents the total number of faculty members, regardless of full-time status. Full-time equivalent (FTE) faculty represents the total teaching or research load of faculty members, expressed as a proportion of a full-time workload. A standard full-time faculty load is one FTE, while part-time faculty loads are expressed as one-third FTE.

“Other Instructional Faculty” includes regular faculty not assigned to the tenure track, supplemental instructional faculty, and adjunct lecturers.

Student-Faculty Ratio

U-M’s undergraduate students-to-faculty ratio was lower than the averages of AAU public and Big Ten institutions in Fall 2024.

   SOURCE: U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges, 2025 Edition

All the universities in the chart are AAU member institutions. (See Appendix A for a complete AAU member list.) The AAU public and private institution averages and the Big Ten institution averages are based on all respective member institutions, not only those in the chart.

Center for Research on Learning and Teaching

U-M is committed to promoting excellence, equity, and innovation in teaching. The Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) plays a central role in supporting these efforts on campus.

   SOURCE: Center for Research on Learning and Teaching Annual Reports

CRLT partners with U-M faculty, graduate student instructors (GSIs), and academic leaders to advance a university culture that values and rewards teaching, respects and supports individual differences among learners, and creates learning environments in which diverse students and instructors can excel. 

Core services include early career orientations and teaching academies, 1:1 consultations, seminars and workshops, and grants to fund instructional innovations; customized programs and retreats for U-M’s departments, schools, and colleges, including assistance with curriculum redesign and GenAI; and a website that houses a rich array of resources on teaching and learning (www.crlt.umich.edu)

Specialized programs include a Canvas course, An Instructor’s Guide to Promoting Student Mental Health and Well-Being; the Foundational Course Initiative, which supports the redesign of large undergraduate courses with a focus on equity and student success; the CRLT Players, a theatre troupe that performs sketches on classroom and departmental climate; and CRLT in Engineering, a branch office that supports the educational mission of the College of Engineering.

Learning Communities

U-M students take advantage of many opportunities to join communities of common intellectual interest to enhance their educational experiences.

8.4 Student Participation in Michigan Learning Communities, 2023-24

   SOURCE: Program Offices.  *LEAPS figures are for Fall 2024 program since that is the program’s first term.

Michigan Learning Communities are generally groups of students and faculty from diverse backgrounds, drawn together by shared goals and common intellectual interests. These programs combine the personal attention of a small college environment while still providing the resources of a large research university. In some communities, the members live in the same residence hall during the academic year.

More information about Michigan Learning Communities and Living Learning/Theme Communities can be found online.

Global Education

University of Michigan was named the country’s top-ranked public university when it comes to education abroad, and #2 in the nation overall.

   SOURCE: Education Abroad Reports, Global Michigan

U-M was ranked #1 in the nation during International Education Week 2024, and #2 in the nation overall according to the annual Open Doors report issued by the Institute of International Education.

The phrase “education abroad” refers to students who received academic credit for educational programs they attended abroad, or participated in research, internship, volunteer service, work opportunities, and conferences and professional meetings abroad as not-for-credit activities. The counts in the chart encompass both undergraduate- and graduate-level programs.

Although the pandemic put a halt to campus-related travel for the last half of academic year 2019-20 and continued to affect travel through academic year 2022-23, U-M student participation in education abroad has returned to its impressive levels prior to the interruption.

U-M students traveled to 121 countries for international experiences during the 2023-24 academic year.

   SOURCE: Education Abroad Reports, Global Michigan

Numbers in parentheses indicate the number of students who visited that country at least once during the academic year. The level of all study and other educational travel abroad has been increasing since the pandemic has subsided.

Student Satisfaction

Seniors express high levels of satisfaction with the quality of instruction they have received, the availability of small classes and engagement with faculty members.

8.6 Self-Reported Satisfaction of Graduating Seniors with Instructional Quality and Faculty Interaction, 2009-2024

   SOURCE: U-M Asks You (UMAY) undergraduate survey

The segments shaded in blue represent the fraction of students who replied “Very satisfied,” “Satisfied,” and “Somewhat satisfied” for the particular question and year.

Engaged Learning & Research Experience

Nearly all Class of 2024 seniors reported they engaged in learning activities outside the traditional course-related settings.

   SOURCE: Engaged Learning Census (ELC)

In 2014, the Provost’s Task Teams on Engaged Learning and Digital Instruction established goals and practices to guide U-M’s efforts to prepare students for 21st-century challenges. The five learning goals capture a range of capacities students need to address contemporary societal problems in a world that is increasingly volatile, uncertain, ambiguous, and complex: creativity; intercultural engagement; social/civic responsibility and ethical reasoning; collaboration, communication, and teamwork; and self-agency, the ability to innovate and to understand and manage risks.

When undergraduate students apply to graduate, they self-report on whether they participated in seven engaged learning experiences during their time at U-M: civic engagement, client-based projects, creative work and performance, entrepreneurship, international experience, internships, and research. The Engaged Learning Census is developed and administered in partnership by the Office of the Vice Provost for Engaged Learning, the Office of Budget and Planning, and the Office of the Registrar.

Most students report satisfaction with opportunities for research or creative activity experiences.

   SOURCE: U-M Asks You (UMAY) undergraduate survey

This chart shows the levels of satisfaction that seniors report through the U-M Asks You (UMAY) survey regarding the opportunities to participate in a research project or other creative activity, usually with a faculty member.

Learning Measures

Students reported gains in their academic skills and knowledge between the time they started at Michigan and their senior year.

8.8 Self-Reported Learning Gains of Graduating Seniors from Time of Initial U-M Enrollment Compared to Senior Year, 2024

   SOURCE: U-M Asks You (UMAY) undergraduate survey

The blue-shaded segments represent the sum of the responses “Excellent,” “Very good,” and “Good”.