The university’s Active Learning Initiative (ALI) supports a postdoctoral fellowship program funded by the college deans and the provost. Department are invited to submit proposals for funds ($385K over 3 years) to support a teaching postdoc who will work with 3-4 faculty to substantially improve teaching and learning in their courses. Our experience over the past decade is that teaching postdocs greatly facilitate faculty efforts to learn about and adopt active learning and other research-based pedagogies.

Details about this competition can be found below, or you can download the PDF:

• Funding and schedule
• Context and rationale
• Faculty collaborations with postdocs on course transformations
• Proposal submission (deadline, Nov. 22, 2024)
• Project support from the Center for Teaching Innovation
• Project reporting and dissemination
• Appendices

Call for proposals from departments

The Provost's office, together with college Deans, invites departments to apply for grants that support a teaching postdoc to work with a team of faculty members who want to implement active learning in their courses. These grants provide a unique opportunity for faculty who are new to active learning and want to learn more or for those who want to expand upon initial efforts in implementing these teaching strategies. This Active Learning Initiative (ALI) competition is open to undergraduate and graduate departments across the university.

Previous ALI projects have delivered impressive results in twenty-one departments encompassing humanities, social sciences, and STEM courses. So far more than 100 Cornell faculty have worked with an ALI postdoc to improve their courses. Department chairs report that ALI projects have been transformative for the teaching cultures within their departments.

Teaching postdocs work closely with the faculty on course transformations and greatly facilitate improvements in student learning by helping faculty research, develop, and implement new teaching materials and approaches. The postdocs have PhDs in the appropriate discipline and a strong interest in teaching. The Center for Teaching Innovation (CTI) trains teaching postdocs to be education specialists embedded within their departments. Experience at Cornell and elsewhere indicates that there is a large supply of capable and interested candidates for such jobs in most disciplines, and good jobs for them afterward.

The grant will cover the postdoc’s salary¹ for three years, recruitment and setup costs for the postdoc, and some funding to cover the postdoc’s research and travel. The grant will also provide $30K per year to be shared among the faculty involved in the project. This is to facilitate and encourage faculty participation through teaching relief, summer salary, or other mechanisms. Project support is also provided by a central ALI team within the Center for Teaching Innovation.

Funding and schedule

This competition is funded by the University Provost and the college deans. The grants are for $384K spread over three years (see table below) and are available to departments for projects starting in the summer/fall of 2025. Grants typically support the redesign or design of 3–5 courses and involve teams of faculty who are scheduled to teach these courses in the next three years. Proposals may include courses of all sizes and level from large introductory courses to smaller senior capstone courses and graduate courses.

Grant applications are submitted by department chairs after projects have been reviewed and endorsed by the department’s faculty. Department chairs and their faculty teams should meet with Tim Riley, Director of the ALI (trr22@cornell.edu), early in the process of developing their proposals. We also recommend that department chairs discuss their plans with their college. They can also consult teaching specialists from the Center for Teaching Innovation (CTI) for advice on pedagogical strategies, assessment design, and approaches to teaching with technology; contact Carolyn Aslan, Senior Associate Director of the ALI, in CTI for more information (crc1@cornell.edu).

Three-year budget (supporting one postdoc)

Important dates for this competition

October 18: Optional Draft proposals are due. Departments can submit a draft proposal for initial review and discussion. Although this step is optional, we strongly recommend it.

October – November: Department team meetings. Tim Riley and Carolyn Aslan would like to meet with each department team planning to submit a proposal to discuss and help develop the proposed innovations, implementation plans, and strategies for sustaining changes. This meeting should include all the instructors who are interested in teaching a transformed active learning course and participating in the project.

Nov. 22, 2024: Final proposals are due. These should be five-ten pages long, describing innovations and rationale, a schedule for faculty involvement and implementation, a plan for assessment of efficacy and outcomes, and a plan for sustaining the changes beyond the end of the project (without additional funding). See the discussion below for more information.

January 2025: Proposal awards will be announced. Winning proposals will be selected by the Vice Provost for Academic Innovation, with input from internal reviewers and in consultation with the college deans. Departments can begin the hiring process for postdocs, who typically start in the summer to begin work on fall courses.

Proposals should be submitted electronically to Carolyn Aslan at ali-admin@cornell.edu. If you would like to see examples of previous successful proposals, please e-mail us.

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Context and rationale

Extensive research from the last 20–30 years, much of it “discipline-based education research” in college classrooms, has led to new, highly effective pedagogies that are quite different from conventional lecturing. The new pedagogies emphasize active learning, with much more interaction among students, and between students and instructors than in the traditional format, even when applied to large classes in lecture halls.

These methods emphasize building a course backwards from carefully articulated learning outcome goals for both the course as a whole and also broken down into specific sub-goals for every lecture. The goals are less about the acquisition of particular facts, and more about imparting an expert’s facility with the subject through “deliberate practice” of expert thinking/performance. These methods generally incorporate time in class for students to process what they are learning, discuss it with others, and practice or apply their knowledge. Opportunities are provided for fine-grained, real-time assessment and feedback (multiple times in every class) — information that is essential to the students themselves as they grapple with the course material.

A large and growing research literature (many hundreds of papers), from both cognitive psychology and college classrooms, shows that these new pedagogical approaches are significantly more effective than the traditional lecture-based format still used in much college teaching today (see Appendix D for examples). And faculty who have tried these approaches report that they are far more engaging for both instructor and student.

Since 2012, the Active Learning Initiative has supported successful course transformations in 19 departments. Early successful results in Biology and Physics motivated the expansion of the initiative to the humanities, social sciences as well as other STEM disciplines. Students now use active learning strategies to debate the impact of social inequality (Sociology), explore ancient societies through hands-on experience of their material cultures (Classics), probe the structure of music using electronic keyboards in class (Music), and practice modeling dynamic systems in the life sciences (Math).

In addition to common and effective active learning strategies (classroom polling, think-pair-share, structured worksheets, small-group discussions), ALI instructors at Cornell have been designing innovative projects and assignments that give students more agency over their learning through student-directed lab experiments (Physics), semester-long projects (Natural Resources, Economics, Engineering, Classics), video assignments (Plant Sciences, Engineering), and at-home lab kits (Engineering, Classics). More information about the variety of previous grant projects can be found on our website.

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Faculty collaborations with postdocs on course transformations 

Creating an active-learning course is time-consuming. Faculty need to develop clear learning goals for the course, absorb often large amounts of research on how to teach their topics, design large amounts of new pedagogical material (for example, the in-class questions, problems, or activities), and create or revise tools for assessing the impact of the new instructional methods. The major cost of the current and earlier ALI projects has been in hiring teaching postdocs who make it possible for the faculty to do this work.

The Center for Teaching Innovation (CTI) trains teaching postdocs to be education specialists. Funding supports a postdoc for three years, so they can work on multiple iterations of courses through several semesters. Postdocs are expected to work in person in Ithaca and attend and assist faculty during the in-person classes. Part of the responsibility of the lead faculty member on the grant is to help supervise and mentor the postdoc.

More information about the roles of teaching postdocs can be found in Appendix C. We also recommend a handbook developed for similar initiatives at UC Boulder and the University of British Columbia, which guides faculty on starting a course transformation project and effectively collaborating with embedded teaching specialists (postdocs).

Active learning course transformation projects work best when instructors are both enthusiastic about transforming their course and also realistic about the time commitment that is needed to effectively collaborate with a teaching postdoc. We recommend that department chairs draft a letter to each participating faculty member outlining the expectations and incentives in detail for faculty to sign to signal their commitment. All of the involved faculty should be willing to commit to the following within the time period of the project.

• Spending at least two semesters implementing significant revisions to an existing course or designing a new course. Preparatory work needs to happen in the summer or semester before teaching.
• Collaborating with a postdoc in clarifying learning outcomes, identifying where students are struggling, designing learning activities and assignments, and assessing student learning and experiences in their course. Usually, this involves meeting on a weekly basis.
• Being open to trying new teaching strategies.
• Getting feedback about their course by inviting an observer from the central ALI team to visit their class a few times a semester, meeting with the ALI team consultant before classes begin and at least once during the semester, and collecting student feedback through a mid-semester survey.

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Proposal submission (deadline, Nov. 22, 2024)

Department chairs and project lead(s) are strongly encouraged to submit a draft proposal (deadline Oct. 18, 2024) and meet with Tim Riley and Carolyn Aslan before submitting their final proposals. Departments may also want to consult Carolyn Aslan and other CTI consultants for advice on design, assessment, and teaching strategies.

Before the proposal is submitted, a meeting that includes the department chair, the project lead(s), and all the faculty who will be working on a course redesign project should be arranged with Tim Riley or Carolyn Aslan. Proposals should be sent electronically by department chairs to Carolyn Aslan (ali-admin@cornell.edu) by November 22, 2024. They should be five to ten pages long and address:

Courses: Identify the targeted courses or course sequence. Include information about the courses and their context, such as: course numbers and titles, numbers/levels of students affected, numbers of cross-college student enrollments or cross-departmental enrollments, inter-connection with existing college or university initiatives, impact on majors/minors, relation to distribution requirements and/or department/college learning goals and curriculum, etc.

Changes and rationale: Describe the changes being made to the courses and the rationale for those changes. List any specific learning challenges that are being addressed.

Faculty: Identify the faculty lead(s) for the project, and the other faculty who will be working on courses in the project. Discuss any plans for department meetings or workshops to discuss progress and share teaching ideas.

Timeline: Create a timeline similar to the one below (see table) indicating which course and faculty member(s) the postdoc will be working with each semester. It can be beneficial to include two iterations of a course in the grant timeline to allow time to revise and improve the course. In our experience, a postdoc can effectively work with one, sometimes two, courses each semester depending on the size of the teaching team and the extent of the transformation. The postdoc should be assigned to work with at least one course each semester.
 

Backup faculty and courses: Sometimes plans need to change if faculty go on leave or course schedules are altered. Please indicate two back-up courses and faculty members that could be substituted for the primary courses listed in the timeline.

Assessment: Describe plans for assessing the proposed pedagogical changes and their impact on students (and faculty). An assessment plan is essential for improving and refining initial instructional designs, and also for convincing students, faculty, and others that the project is/was worthwhile; see Appendix B for some ideas. If you are uncertain about the best ways to assess impacts, we are happy to meet with you and help develop a plan.

Sustainability: Discuss the long-term sustainability of the proposed changes, such as archives of course materials, and faculty succession plans that will allow innovations to outlive the original team of innovators.

Department review process: Proposals must be submitted by the department chair, after review by the department faculty. Describe the process used for departmental review. This typically involves discussion at one or two faculty meetings, followed by a vote.

Proposals will be reviewed by internal reviewers with experience in active learning and higher education initiatives. These reviews will be shared with the college deans, who will review and prioritize projects from their colleges. Final funding decisions will be made by the Vice Provost for Academic Innovation based on information from the reviewers and the colleges, as well as university priorities.

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Project support from the Center for Teaching Innovation

The ALI’s support services are provided by the Center for Teaching Innovation (CTI). A central ALI team within the CTI consults with ALI departments on proposal development, course design, research-based teaching methods, and strategies for assessment and sustainability. They help train ALI faculty and, especially, teaching postdocs, and provide education technology support, as needed. CTI organizes ongoing activities that encourage faculty and postdocs from different ALI projects to interact with each other and share ideas. CTI helps departments measure their progress, and the impact of their redesigned courses on student learning and experiences, through methods such as class observations, mid-semester student surveys, and data from student learning assessments. 

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Project reporting and dissemination

Chairs of ALI departments submit annual (in June) progress reports to the ALI, for review by the ALI director, the Vice Provost for Academic Innovation, and the relevant college deans. Reports detail changes that have been made to courses, assessments of their effectiveness, and plans for further improvement, as well as impacts on teaching and discussions within the department as a whole.  Postdocs also submit end-of-semester progress reports on their work to the ALI director and associate director. Department chairs submit a final report after their projects conclude.

ALI faculty are invited to discuss and explain their course redesign projects to other Cornell faculty at university events hosted by the Provost or CTI, or college events such as the CALS Learning Experience. ALI faculty and postdocs are encouraged to disseminate teaching resources and research results from their projects through publications, and presentations at disciplinary conferences. Presentations and teaching workshops within your department are also highly encouraged.

Appendices A through D

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¹ Benefits will also be provided where they are not normally covered by the colleges.