Coordinating College-Wide Instructional Change Through Faculty Communities

Author(s):  
Geoffrey L. Herman ◽  
Laura Hahn ◽  
Matthew West

In February 2012, the College of Engineering created the Strategic Instructional Initiatives Program (SIIP) to transform and revitalize the core engineering courses at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As SIIP has evolved, we have learned that in order to achieve these goals, we must first focus on creating collaborative teaching cultures. This effort has sparked the rapid spread of Research-Based Instructional Strategies across the college and created a thriving community of faculty invested in improving undergraduate instruction. In this paper, we describe the current policies and procedures that we use to direct SIIP. In particular, we will focus on the structure of the leadership team and how we have fostered deep collaborations among faculty developers, education researchers, and engineering faculty. We conclude by presenting an evaluation of the program.

1952 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-93
Author(s):  
Kenneth B. Henderson ◽  
Kern Dickman

There are several reasons why some students enter a college of engineering lacking adequate preparation in mathematics. One is that the mathematical needs of such students have not been clearly defined. It seems to be an auspicious hypothesis to assume that, if these needs are identified in some specificity and high school mathematics teachers apprized of them, students can be better prepared for collegiate work. Acting on this hypothesis, a study was conducted to discover the minimum mathematical needs of students who expect to enter the College of Engineering of the University of Illinois. Since the curricula and course content of most colleges of engineering tend to be similar, it is assumed that, in the absence of other data, these needs will serve very well to indicate “what it takes” in most colleges of engineering.


2015 ◽  
Vol 137 (09) ◽  
pp. 46-47
Author(s):  
Mohamed Gad-el-Hak

This article presents view of two books on massive open online courses (MOOCs). The two books ride on a homologous theme: the revolutionary future of undergraduate education. A Whole New Engineer, by David E. Goldberg and Mark Somerville, describes the change in engineering education that is taking place at the newly minted Olin College of Engineering and the more established the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Another book, The End of College, Kevin Carey prognosticates the future of learning and the university of everywhere based upon emerging MOOCs. Rising tuition prices and a flagging global economy, combined with advances in information technology, are leading to a rapidly changing scene from traditional lecture-hall teaching to online education.


Author(s):  
Thomas H Colledge

The objective of engineering education is to educate students who are ‘ready to engineer’.  This implies that students should be broadly prepared with not only deep knowledge and understanding of the technical fundamentals, but also the pre-professional skills required to be successful in the engineering workplace of today and tomorrow1.  Part I of this paper includes a brief rationale and need for ‘Engaged Scholarship’ and the inherent need for a robust ecosystem to support it.  Part II details the existing curricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular efforts which form the core for the engaged scholarship ecosystem in the College of Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University.  Curricular, co-curricular and extra-curricular opportunities for students are detailed.   Part III provides an overview of how this assortment of minors, certificates, programs, courses, and student organizations is being integrated and institutionalized into a strategic mission for the University.


2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 79-88
Author(s):  
Catherine Prendergast

This article reports on the multi-year collaboration between the Ethnography of the University Initiative (EUI) at the University of Illinois and the University's Rhetoric Program, a required first-year writing course. I argue that this collaboration was successful in large part because the goals of writing programmes in American higher education settings – teaching the process of research, inviting students to see themselves as producers of knowledge and fostering collaboration between peers – are highly consonant with principles of EUI. Indeed, my own history with EUI reflects the parallel commitment of Writing Studies and the methods and goals of EUI. I suggest that EUI can serve as a powerful model for universities if they seek to place undergraduate student research writing at the core of their mission.


1976 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 311-321
Author(s):  
Richard Videbeck

Three Doctor of Arts degree programs are offered at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle. Students in the programs must prepare themselves both as scientists, and as instructional developers. Four special courses provide students with a grounding in instructional design, using media, and evaluating products and are the core of the program that is designed to produce university instructors that are strongly oriented toward the task of improving instruction and well prepared to do so.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (5) ◽  
pp. 4-12
Author(s):  
David P. Kuehn

This report highlights some of the major developments in the area of speech anatomy and physiology drawing from the author's own research experience during his years at the University of Iowa and the University of Illinois. He has benefited greatly from mentors including Professors James Curtis, Kenneth Moll, and Hughlett Morris at the University of Iowa and Professor Paul Lauterbur at the University of Illinois. Many colleagues have contributed to the author's work, especially Professors Jerald Moon at the University of Iowa, Bradley Sutton at the University of Illinois, Jamie Perry at East Carolina University, and Youkyung Bae at the Ohio State University. The strength of these researchers and their students bodes well for future advances in knowledge in this important area of speech science.


2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
David K. Blake

By examining folk music activities connecting students and local musicians during the early 1960s at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, this article demonstrates how university geographies and musical landscapes influence musical activities in college towns. The geography of the University of Illinois, a rural Midwestern location with a mostly urban, middle-class student population, created an unusual combination of privileged students in a primarily working-class area. This combination of geography and landscape framed interactions between students and local musicians in Urbana-Champaign, stimulating and complicating the traversal of sociocultural differences through traditional music. Members of the University of Illinois Campus Folksong Club considered traditional music as a high cultural form distinct from mass-culture artists, aligning their interests with then-dominant scholarly approaches in folklore and film studies departments. Yet students also interrogated the impropriety of folksong presentation on campus, and community folksingers projected their own discomfort with students’ liberal politics. In hosting concerts by rural musicians such as Frank Proffitt and producing a record of local Urbana-Champaign folksingers called Green Fields of Illinois (1963), the folksong club attempted to suture these differences by highlighting the aesthetic, domestic, historical, and educational aspects of local folk music, while avoiding contemporary socioeconomic, commercial, and political concerns. This depoliticized conception of folk music bridged students and local folksingers, but also represented local music via a nineteenth-century rural landscape that converted contemporaneous lived practice into a temporally distant object of aesthetic study. Students’ study of folk music thus reinforced the power structures of university culture—but engaging local folksinging as an educational subject remained for them the most ethical solution for questioning, and potentially traversing, larger problems of inequality and difference.


1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-245
Author(s):  
Winton U. Solberg

For over two centuries, the College was the characteristic form of higher education in the United States, and the College was closely allied to the church in a predominantly Protestant land. The university became the characteristic form of American higher education starting in the late nineteenth Century, and universities long continued to reflect the nation's Protestant culture. By about 1900, however, Catholics and Jews began to enter universities in increasing numbers. What was the experience of Jewish students in these institutions, and how did authorities respond to their appearance? These questions will be addressed in this article by focusing on the Jewish presence at the University of Illinois in the early twentieth Century. Religion, like a red thread, is interwoven throughout the entire fabric of this story.


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