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What is the application process?
- Faculty teams who are interested in High-Impact Course Redesign should submit a letter of interest addressed to the Executive Director of the Office for Faculty Excellence by April 13, 2022. There is no application form but the letter should include:
- The course selected for redesign;
- Names of team members and identification of a team leader;
- An argument for the selected course and team: essentially, how the course meets the requirements for the program and why the faculty team is the right one for the work;
- Indication of support from the Chair;
- Indication of support from the Dean;
- (Optional) Any online or other adaptive tools currently known by the team and/or being considered for use in this course redesign; these could be tools specific to a learning outcome, discipline, or learning environment.
How many meetings will there be during the program and what time of day are they taking place?
June 13, 14, and 16 are reserved for the HICR seminar. These are full days, anticipated to be on campus. Some time will be spent with the full group, but the majority will be spent working within course teams to actually write the redesign
Subsequent meetings will be minimal, but important: A pre-semester meeting to solidify plans; a mid-semester check-in to take note of strengths and weaknesses, and a between the semesters meeting to solidify tweaks and changes for the subsequent semester.
What is the compensation?
Faculty will earn a stipend of $1,500, paid out in June 2022.
Do you have to have a specific plan for how to redesign the identified course?
No. You do need to know what course you want to redesign and why. From there we will work together, and the faculty will make all final decisions about their course. Faculty do need to be open to: moderate standardization of pedagogy and assessment; active learning strategies; technologies and tools that have worked in the discipline.
How will the course redesign evaluation process affect me as a teacher?
In courses that are redesigned, students will be surveyed about aspects of the course and its teaching. While the intention is not to focus on the person but on the course (design, delivery, tools, etc), inevitably students may comment on instructors. Faculty will receive survey responses. The initial survey is quite useful in helping faculty to understand who the students are in terms of their studying habits and academic disposition.
Can any faculty participate?
The program is open only to full-time faculty who teach courses that meet the program criteria.
How much of the course will be standardized? What individual options will faculty teaching the course subsequently have when they teach the course in the future?
What level of standardization is expected for each faculty teaching the redesigned course will be up to the faculty team, working in conversation with their departmental faculty and in accordance with the policies and customs of their department. The course developed by the faculty team would be a department resource, which is to say that it would be designed with the intention of universal adoption by all faculty teaching it subsequently. Think of it as a further developed course proposal, with certain elements specified and others left unspecified, for individual instructor choice. That balance of specified and unspecified will be for the faculty designers to determine, as it would vary by discipline and department culture. For example, in Writing Studies, faculty have specifications about the genre, the number of essays, word count, and certain aspects of the pedagogy employed, but readings, writing topics, and many other elements are left unspecified. Assessment is similarly mandated in some ways (shared criteria for evaluating writing), and left unspecified in other ways (how much class participation counts, for example). During the multi-semester process of developing and revising the course, faculty teams should thus present and gain feedback from other faculty in their department.
Please do not hesitate to contact Emily Isaacs (isaacse@montclair.edu) with any additional questions that you might have.
Updated 07.21.22 SR