Duke Learning Innovation, in partnership with Bass Connections, is launching a new Faculty Fellows program to support faculty interested in designing Collaborative Project Courses (including redesigning existing courses). Participating faculty will receive $5,000; support and guidance from pedagogy experts and faculty experienced in this form of teaching; and the opportunity to collaborate on course (re)design with a group of faculty from across campus.
Collaborative Project Courses are courses in which student learning is driven by collaborative research, analysis, and communication on applied projects that extend across an entire semester. Such courses often bridge the classroom and the world beyond the university, giving students a chance to bring their academic knowledge and skills to bear on complex problems under the mentorship of faculty, graduate students and sometimes community members.
Collaborative Project Courses help students grasp the relevance of their work while also demanding rigorous study and original research, often alongside engagement with a community of practice. When done well, this approach creates a dynamic learning environment and inspires students to take greater ownership of the learning process.
Collaborative Project Courses often raise new challenges for faculty – challenges related to course design, the framing of projects, the provision of guidance to teams and the management of group dynamics. This new Faculty Fellowship will establish a cohort of faculty who will learn and work together, with support and advising from Duke Learning Innovation, to develop Collaborative Project Courses for Fall 2020 or Spring 2021.
Participants in the program will reimagine an existing course, or design a new course, which includes project-based pedagogies in which students work together to create new knowledge, tangible works and/or creative or artistic products.
Recognizing the time that it takes to design project-based courses, Faculty Fellows will receive $5,000 to be used at the faculty member’s discretion (e.g., for summer salary to design the course, funding to pay a doctoral student for assistance in course design, discretionary research funds, funds to support course activities or a TA, travel funding to explore best practice models or seek professional development).
Deadline: Oct. 15, 2019
Faculty of any level and rank and from any Duke school may apply. We hope to form a diverse cohort of faculty who can learn from one another.
The course that participating faculty design can be either a new or an existing course and can be targeted at undergraduate, graduate and/or professional school students. We expect participants to offer the course in either Fall 2020 or Spring 2021. For existing courses, faculty should have support from their unit for offering the reimagined course on a regular basis, at least three times in the subsequent five-year period. New courses can be more experimental in nature, but there should be commitment from the unit for offering the course multiple times (assuming sufficient enrollment).
We also welcome faculty who are co-teaching a course to apply. In such an instance, one or both faculty may apply. If both faculty participate, the pair will receive $7,500 to use at their discretion.
