Transforming Your Research Into Teaching (TYRIT) is a unique, hybrid course focused on learning the skills of course design and developing a college-level course based on the area of your research expertise. In this course, you will be matched with peers across the country who are developing courses in similar areas for peer review and inspiration. You will also have a learning community, either based out of your institution, or a cross-network learning community to have weekly synchronous meetings for discussion of your projects and what you’re learning. The course runs for 6 weeks in June and July 2021 (with an additional week for project presentations), has one one-hour meeting per week, and requires around 1.5-2 hours of self-directed video and project development work per week. By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Write learning objectives for an educational goal and communicate level of understanding by using different verbs.
• Design a course sequence that enhances thematic goals of your course
• Choose assessment strategies and consider how their validity or reliability might be improved
• Choose resources and develop instructional approaches that are inclusive of diverse students

Course Structure

The course is a hybrid, multi-institutional program with structured support for project development. More than 10 universities are running parallel learning communities of this course, including this community specifically for participants from the CIRTL Network community. Each week, students from across these institutions will learn new content asynchronously, through videos, readings, discussion forums, and peer group work. Those peer groups will bring together students in similar disciplines from across all collaborating institutions, amplifying your ability to learn from new and different perspectives. To date, the following institutions are running local learning communities:

Columbia University
Dalhousie University
Indiana University Bloomington
Iowa State University
University at Buffalo, State University of New York
University of California Irvine
University of Colorado Boulder
University of Houston
University of Illinois Chicago
University of Iowa
University of Massachusetts – Amherst
University of Nebraska Lincoln
Washington University in St. Louis

Interested students from these institutions should register locally, not here (you can contact CIRTL’s helpdesk at info@cirtl.net with registration questions).

Course Schedule

The cross-Network learning community meets online on Wednesdays from June 16, 2021 to July 28, 2021 at 4-5PM AT / 3-4PM ET / 2-3PM CT / 1-2PM MT / 12-1PM PT. In addition to these learning community meetings, students will be expected to do additional asynchronous work on their own and collaborate with disciplinary peer groups each week.

Workload

Instructors estimate students may need to spend approximately 1.5 hours per week on coursework outside of learning community sessions.

Accessibility

We strive to be inclusive of anyone interested in participating in our activities. If you have specific accessibility needs, please contact us at info@cirtl.net in advance so that we may make the necessary accommodations.

Learning Outcomes

All CIRTL programming helps participants achieve CIRTL learning outcomes, which are organized around our core pedagogical ideas. Read more about our learning outcomes.

Associate: Evidence-based teaching

• Describe and recognize the value of realistic well-defined, achievable, measurable and student-centered learning goals.
• Describe several assessment techniques and recognize their alignment with particular types of learning goals.
• Describe several known high-impact, evidence-based effective instructional practices and materials and recognize their alignment with particular types of learning goals.

Associate: Learning-through-diversity

• Describe and recognize the value of drawing on diversity in the development of teaching plans (including content, teaching practices and assessments) to foster learning.
• Describe how an instructor’’s beliefs and biases can influence student learning.
• Describe several learning-through-diversity (LtD) techniques and strategies.
• Describe the impact of diversity on student learning, in particular how diversity can enhance learning, and how inequities can negatively impact learning if not addressed.
• Describe the scope of diversity in learning environments, of both students and instructor.
  *Including but not limited to backgrounds, race, gender, ability, socio-economic status, ethnicity, gender preference, and cognitive skills

Practitioner: Evidence-based teaching

• Integrate one or more evidence-based teaching strategies into a teaching plan so as to accomplish learning goals.

Practitioner: Learning-through-diversity

• Create a teaching plan that incorporates content and teaching practices responsive to the students’ backgrounds.
• Examine and describe own beliefs and biases, including how they may influence their students’ learning.
• Integrate one or more Learning-through-Diversity techniques and strategies in a teaching plan so as to use students’ diversity to enhance the learning of all.