In Fall 2022, the Division of Academic Enhancement – now newly named the Office for Student Success and Achievement, received the inaugural Active Learning Change Grant at the University of Georgia. This change grant resulted in seven UNIV courses undergoing a course redesign with Active Learning as the central pedagogical emphasis. Of those seven courses, two of them went through a course redesign in the Center for Teaching and Learning’s Active Learning Summer Institute (ALSI) in Summer 2022, and the five other UNIV courses underwent course redesigns in Fall 2022 and Spring 2023.
“Student success is a core value in our unit. Our faculty’s participation in this initiative demonstrates their enthusiasm for adopting evidence-based, research-supported strategies in their teaching,” states Cara Winston Simmons, director of the Office for Student Success and Achievement. “These strategies engage students more deeply, leading to long-term gains both inside and outside the classroom.”
For those UNIV courses to meet the criteria of a course redesign through the Active Learning Change Grant, the faculty participated in multiple Active Learning Workshops, in conjunction with faculty development workshops and trainings administered within the unit during monthly faculty meetings. This resulted in all 5 faculty each engaging in at least three Active Learning Workshops in Fall 2022/Spring 2023.
One student who took UNIV 1203 stated, “This course offers lots of helpful information about how to be successful within school. I believe the greatest strength of the course is how it is able to be applied to multiple situations, including the workforce. This allows it to be useful years down the road.”
In spring 2024, Nicholas Colvard, assistant head of faculty, and Cara Winston Simmons, director presented a talk titled: Active Learning Taking a Central Focus for UGA OSSA Faculty at the 2024 USG Teaching and Learning Conference. In this talk Colvard and Simmons shared with the attendees the process of the Active Learning Change Grant application and the faculty professional development trainings that were proposed in the change grant. Additionally, they shared which UNIV courses underwent the backwards course design with Active Learning as a central pedagogical focus. Attendees were interested in faculty reception and engagement in the Active Learning trainings, as well as how instructional load of faculty members accounted for this expectation of curriculum changes in the respective UNIV courses.
Our OSSA faculty have continued to apply these pedagogical techniques and strategies across our other UNIV curriculum, allowing for more students to develop the skillsets to becoming active learners in all of their classes at UGA. UNIV courses are part of a larger initiative to strengthen active learning through the QEP and the Office of Active Learning across the university community.
