Higher education in the United States of America, considered by many to set

a worldwide standard for broad access and high levels of excellence, has

for many decades seen massive changes in its approaches to teaching and

learning. Redesigning and transforming the way colleges and universities

teach their students has been likened to reconstructing an airplane while it

remains aloft. More than 4,000 US colleges and universities have met the

challenge by analyzing major changes in student populations and introducing

new instructional techniques that recognize the primacy of learning over

teaching. This seemingly innocent but powerful transformation, acknowledging

that teaching only matters as a means to the real end - learning - is powering

a pedagogical revolution.

The Learning Revolution in US higher education began when World War II

veterans flooded university classrooms, soon to be followed by their children,

the American "Baby Boom." Overwhelming numbers of new students from new

kinds of backgrounds flooded colleges and universities, forcing professors to

rethink how they went about teaching these new generations.

To handle the numbers, many new universities were created, and many

established centers for teaching excellence to help professors adapt to new

populations with new techniques. In the 1990s, higher education further

professionalized the teaching craft via the Schlarship of Teaching and

Learning. Research into how students learn and how to help them learn took

its place alongside traditional academic research. Aided by a wave of new

technologies, teaching centers and the scholarship of teaching and learning

are transforming the university classroom as well as many new venues outside

the classroom where learning now takes place. The resulting new pedagogical

architecture now embraces every dimension of US higher education.