The CTL is happy to announce the recipients of this year’s INFUSE awards. The INFUSE program is designed to provide space and support for intentional and rigorous improvements to teaching and learning focused at the course level. In addition, the program supports an enhanced teaching culture by providing a structure to encourage meaningful collaborations and dialogue between faculty and more broadly within departments or the larger campus community.
In support of Boise State’s Strategic Plan, proposed projects needed to focus on improving educational access and student success. Specifically, projects should be designed to cultivate a commitment to high-quality, new and innovative learning experiences in all courses, curricula and co-curricula.
A brief description of funded projects follows. All projects have plans to share more about their efforts and results through CTL events in Spring 2023.
OER in World Languages. This project focuses on the creation of OER materials for French 102 to address both the perceived equity gap in access to courses due to economic disparities and to improve student representation in the course materials. Through revitalization of the curriculum to be more engaging, contemporary and inclusive. The project team will enhance an existing OER text, but also create significant ancillary materials including assessments, task-based activities, slide decks, original authentic videos, and more.
Transparent Assignments in Respiratory Care: Project members report being unsatisfied with current persistence and retention rates of students enrolled in the online RRT program. Differing levels of engagement have also been observed and are attributed to external pressures students in this program face . As a result, the program seeks to make the learning experience more transparent and accessible so that learning objectives can be reasonably accomplished and student confidence is increased thereby supporting students’ effort to achieve and progress to graduation.
Scaffolded and Equitable Writing in the Engineering Curriculum. Writing and team writing has the potential to support equitable engineering education. However, currently writing/teamwork education happens piecemeal across courses and is dependent on individual instructor knowledge and approaches. This project aims to create an approach to teaching both writing and teamwork by centering equity and inclusion, scaffolding instruction across a three-year sequence of project courses in materials science. The project team will develop writing/teamwork modules and peer assessment tools for each of the three courses.
All projects have plans to share more about their efforts and results through CTL events in Spring 2023.