2021-22 Innovation Grants
Each year, the Center invites the Cornell teaching community to propose projects that explore new strategies, emerging technologies, and approaches to facilitate vibrant, challenging, and reflective learning experiences. The 2021-2022 grant recipients developed unique, creative ways to bring new learning opportunities to students and advance teaching within their disciplines. Read about the projects below, and click the images for video.
The CTI has funded a wide range of faculty projects through the Innovative Teaching & Learning Awards. Explore the variety of innovation projects: 2022-23 | 2021-22 | 2019-20 | 2018-19
Active and Applied Critical Thinking
College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
Chelsea Specht, Professor; Christina Schmidt, Lecturer; Mark Sarvary, Senior Lecturer
Applied their grant for Teaching Active and Applied Critical Thinking in CALS Gateway courses. They created a pilot program to generate learning materials and opportunities for students to focus on fundamental critical thinking skills and applications that can be adapted to a variety of CALS courses. The project is focused on CALS gateway course to ensure that incoming students of all backgrounds have the necessary critical thinking skills to thrive in CALS and beyond.
Building with Birds
Landscape Architecture
Joshua Cerra, Associate Professor
Awarded a grant for Building with Birds: Deploying Field Technologies for Enhanced Avian Habitat Assessment and Design Innovation. Cerra used the funds to develop a new course, Building with Birds, to help students understand ways for their urban and rural landscape design work to benefit birds and other wildlife at various scales. The course incorporates new software and hardware for rapidly identifying birds and assessing habitat quality so students can spend more time developing ecological design strategies for their projects.
MPH Competence Development
Master of Public Health, College of Veterinary Medicine
Gen Meredith, Professor and Associate Director of the MPH program
Explored ways of Increasing Active Learning to Foreground Student Competence Development. They used the funding to document and codify innovative strategies and lessons learned during the pandemic to adapt teaching, learning, and mentoring strategies used across the curriculum to enhance and track development of public health competence. This involved incorporating online and hybrid learning components to help integrate in-depth case studies and more hands-on active learning.
Interactive Burmese
Comparative Literature, College of Arts & Sciences
Slava Paperno, Senior Lecturer
Created Real-life environments and asynchronous collaboration: piloting new digital learning tools and resources with Burmese in Web Audio Lab (WAL). He worked with Yu Yu Khaing, lecturer in Burmese to create virtual environments that simulate real-life interactions for the WAL at the Language Resource Center. Additionally, the project aims to develop asynchronous collaboration tools. In combination the two innovations makes Burmese language instruction at Cornell more interactive and student focused.