This semester we are trying something unique in ASSETT. We have plans underway to support four innovative projects for three years that are designed to improve teaching with technologies. We’re calling this our Innovation Incubator.
As we looked across the campus we saw so many change initiatives underway that it seemed to us as if change was bubbling up from the ground! In the past two years, we’ve seen the Innovation Grants, a rethinking of the First Year Experience, the A&S Strategic Plan, Academic Futures, Financial Futures, and now most recently the introduction of Pluralistic Networks.
At the same time, we in ASSETT have honed our mission statement and looked at the impact and reach of our work. Joining these various change initiatives, we’ve decided to add something new to our project portfolio: an innovation incubator. Our idea is based loosely on start-up incubators. In this effort, we have called together groups of faculty who are interested in the same broad area of teaching with technology. We initially received 47 proposals from 44 teams or individuals across the college. We asked them to tell us their big idea in a one-page paper. Below is a word cloud showing the most frequent words in those papers.
We read and synthesized those papers and formed four groups of like-minded scholars. Then we worked with those groups to identify and determine what teaching and learning problem or opportunity they’d like to address as a group. We’re currently working with them to develop project plans and proposals with each team. Our aim is to be formative and to guide these four projects in creating some kind of lasting contribution to the campus in the area they are focused on.
Our projects are designed to be cross-disciplinary, to involve students in the development and implementation of the project, and to involve active learning and engagement. As of the writing of this article, we have four projects:
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One group led by Joy Adams that is working on developing resources and learning objects related to metacognition and mindfulness, which can be implemented in courses across the college.
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One group led by Amanda McAndrew that is investigating opportunities to establish a peer-to-peer support environment for faculty and students. The team strives to create a collective whose members can learn together and share expertise to accomplish digital, print, and other multimodal publishing projects that meet academic standards and are open and accessible to the community at large.
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One group led by Shane Schwikert that is working on integrating data science methods and tools across the curriculum.
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One group led by Jacie Moriyama that is working on how we can use technology to generate meaningful opportunities for students, inside and outside the classroom.
We intend to keep you informed of our progress in our newsletter and on our website as the projects progress. The next major milestone is for the teams to submit a project plan and funding request. If you have more questions or ideas, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Mark Werner or David Brown.
