LAS Teaching Excellence Resources

UIC - UH & ARC Buildings with Sun

Develop Your Teaching Practice and Promote Student Success!

  • Build Build your Blackboard Site and Syllabus as Accessible Resources for ALL your Students.

  • Adopt Adopt Inclusive Teaching Strategies, a Growth Mindset, and Support Sense of Belonging.

  • Engage Engage in a Communication Plan with Students that Promotes Connection and Academic Success.

  • Leverage Leverage your research experience, resulting in research-informed and research-engaged teaching.

  • Design Design Transparent Course Objectives, Learning Outcomes, and Assessments .

  • Reinforce Reinforce the competencies gained in your course and their relevance to academic and career success.

LAS Syllabus Policies & Expectations Heading link

UIC requires that all courses have a syllabus. 

Syllabi from the 0 to the 500 level, including independent studies and guided research courses, must comply with the UIC Syllabus Policy.

The resources below have been created to facilitate compliance.

As per the UIC Syllabus Policy, the elements outlined below should be included in each syllabus, along with other evidence that the course content generally aligns with UIC’s course level policy and number of contact/credit hours policy.

Syllabus Checklist

 

  • Instructor and Course Details
    • Course rubric, number, title, and credit hours
    • Instructor name and contact information
    • Student Drop-In (Office) hours and other instructor availability
    • Course modality and schedule, including times, dates, and locations
  • Course Information
    • Course description and prerequisite statement
    • Course goals and learning objectives
    • For general education courses, include approved Gen Ed Learning Outcomes. Go to this Interactive Dashboard to search for the specific learning outcomes for your General Education course.
    • Required and recommended course materials
  • Course Policies and Classroom Expectations
    • Grading policy and points breakdown, including a list of core assignments and
      assessments
    • Policy for missed or late work, including acceptance of revised work, if applicable
    • Attendance/Participation policy
    • Other course policies (as appropriate)
  • Class Schedule – Weekly calendar of class topics, assignments, due dates, and deadlines. Must align with course level and contact/credit hour policies.
  • Accommodations – Statement about disability services and accessing accommodations
  • Classroom Environment – Community agreement/Classroom conduct policy

For instructor convenience, LAS has developed campus-approved, fillable syllabus templates (Basic and Annotated) that fully comply with the UIC Syllabus Policy.

In addition, the templates include optional sections and information that, while not required by the UIC Syllabus Policy, are highly recommendable, lead to increased transparency, and result in a more inclusive syllabus.

Faculty are not required to utilize these templates. If a syllabus satisfies the checklist above, it will be considered compliant with the UIC Syllabus Policy.

LAS-Specific Competencies Heading link

Academic transferable skills gained through a liberal arts and sciences education.

This LAS EPC-endorsed competencies document outlines transferable skills that we can reasonably assume UIC LAS students will have developed or mastered upon graduation, regardless of major.

Faculty should consider consistently presenting these competencies as part of their courses’ learning objectives and reinforce them throughout the semester. Departments may consider using this resource when detailing the academic profile of their majors, minors, and certificates.

LAS Writing in the Discipline Major Requirement: Guidelines Heading link

Students must complete at least one course in their LAS major that emphasizes skills in writing in the discipline. Each major must have at least one credit-bearing course at the 200 level or above designated to satisfy the Writing-in-the-Discipline requirement.

For current LAS Guidelines go here.

LAS Guide to Student Drop-In Hours Heading link

LAS GUIDE for transforming your traditional office hours into Drop-In Hours.

Unlike the traditional framework for office hours, Drop-In Hours are designed to encourage and facilitate student communication with faculty. Research documents how quality interactions with faculty positively affect grades, persistence, and retention.

The goal is to promote help-seeking behaviors, timely academic support, encourage a growth mindset, and increase sense of belonging in your classroom.

Connect with students and help them succeed in your course and at UIC!

LAS General Education Resources Website Heading link

Faculty and Teaching Assistants are pivotal in promoting the value of the Gen Ed Core, strengthening students’ appreciation of and engagement with the topics examined and work assigned. Faculty should explicitly connect the dots for students between the learning objectives of the Gen Ed Category(ies) approved for the course and the specific content of their course.

For helpful resources and tips, see our LAS General Education Resources website.

Campus Instructional Design and Technology Support Services Heading link

UIC provides numerous services to support course design, the technologies required for on-campus, hybrid, and asynchronous online instruction, and the implementation of open education resources.

Instructional Design Services

Instructional designers use educational research and innovative instructional practices to help instructors enhance student engagement, satisfaction, and learning outcomes.

Course Design & Reviews

If you would like to partner with the instructional design team for a course design or course review project, please contact us, and the senior instructional designer will set up a meeting to discuss your course needs.

CATE has designed a course to share best practices, resources, templates, and technologies to create a quality online course. This course has been developed as an online course to help model best practices and research on online learning. The online asynchronous course contains the following modules:

  • Module 01 – What makes a good online course?
  • Module 02 – How do I begin planning my online course?
  • Module 03 – What does good online teaching and facilitation look like?
  • Module 04 – How do I build an online course site?

If you are interested in being enrolled in the Designing & Teaching an Online Course, please complete this Google Form to be enrolled. Each module contains guidance and advice that you can use to design your online course by yourself or with the help of an instructional designer.

If you would like to partner with the instructional design and media production studio, please schedule a 25-minute or 50-minute consultation with an instructional designer to discuss your course design needs.

LTS’s core mission is to facilitate the meaningful use of new technologies to improve teaching, learning, and research outcomes. Collaborating with colleges, departments, faculty, and staff, LTS will now provide consulting, design, and training for specialized educational technologies. We will also support active learning spaces and offer general assistance with all teaching and learning applications.

For more information on the services the LTS Support Team offers, go here.

The Studio assists in multimedia production, including general consultations about multimedia use for instruction, graphic design, media conversion, closed captioning, and video production.

Media Production Services:

  • Lightboard Studio
  • Video Production
  • Closed Captioning
  • Media Conversion
  • Media Software (E.g., Camtasia, Panopto, Adobe Premiere, etc.)

For more information, go here.

LAS EPC approved detailed guidelines for online teaching and the creation of online courses. Please consult these guidelines to create an online general education course.

The Generative AI landscape is rapidly changing and becoming ubiquitous in higher education and the professions.

UIC Resources

UIC Technology Solutions manages and makes available these AI Resources for all faculty and students.

CATE also offers the Enhancing Teaching and Learning with Generative AI Tools (Workshop Slides).

Use Guidelines

CATE and the U of I System offer the following resources to help guide faculty and students on best practices and potential risks.

ChatGPT: Perspectives and Strategies for Prohibiting, Reducing, or Embracing it in Your Curriculum

UIC Information Technology: Statement on Responsible and Acceptable Use of AI

Generative AI Guidance for Instructors

Generative AI Guidance for Students

See also the University of Michigan’s  Getting Started with Generative Artificial Intelligence: Instructor Guide.

UIC’s Open Educational Resources Program

“Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that are freely available online for everyone to use, whether you are an instructor, student, or self-learner. Examples of OER include: full courses, course modules, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, quizzes, lab and classroom activities, pedagogical materials, and many more resources contained in digital media collections from around the world.” – OER Commons

The UIC Open Textbook Faculty Incentive Program supports undergraduate students by creating incentives for teaching faculty to use alternative lower-cost educational materials rather than high-cost textbooks.  This may include the adoption or adaption of existing OER materials.  If needed, it will support the creation of new Open Educational Resources (OER) to fill in gaps of your adopted / adapted OER materials.

To help students assess their online readiness and increase their readiness before taking an online course, the Studio has developed an Online Learning Readiness Training for Students. This training module is designed for online students who are enrolled in one of the following course modalities: online asynchronous, online synchronous, hybrid, and synchronous distributed.

You can utilize this training module in two ways:

Send an email to your students before the term starts with a link to the Online Learning Readiness Training for Students: Email Template to Send Students a Link to the Training.

Or place the shareable link in your course site: Shareable Link to Online Learning Readiness Training for Students.

Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence (CATE) Heading link

Additional Inclusive Teaching and Learning Resources Heading link

These resources explain inclusive, growth mindset, and transparent frameworks for your courses.  The focus is on cognitive and non-cognitive student academic success and sense of belonging strategies.

The Science of Learning Research Center has developed a Higher Education Learning Framework Matrix Handbook. The focus is on how students learn to learn.

They also provide a very useful Summated Matrix, including teaching, student, and assessment perspectives for each topic.

Topics include:

1. Learning as becoming

2. Contextual learning

3. Emotions and learning

4. Interactive learning

5. Learning to learn and higher order thinking

6. Learning challenge and difficulty

7. Deep and meaningful learning

Research-informed teaching (RIT) can take different forms:

 

  • research-led -where students are taught research findings in their field of study.
  • research-oriented -where students learn research processes and methodologies.
  • research-tutored -where students learn through critique and discussion between themselves and faculty.
  • research-based learning -where students learn as researchers.

For more information on RIT best practices and considerations, see the following:

 

Integrating research, teaching, and practice in the context of new institutional policies: a social practice approach.

Does research-informed teaching transform academic practice? Revealing an RIT mindset through impact analysis

What does research-informed teaching (RIT) look like?

What’s SMART?

A SMART goal functions as a driver toward a larger achievement and has five components. The goal must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based.

Overarching goals such as “I want an A in this class” do not fit this framework.  Examples would be “I will visit the Math and Science Tutoring Center once every week;” or “I will visit my professor’s Student Drop-In Hours with questions four times this semester;” or “I will visit the Writing Center with a draft of my work each time I have a writing assignment.” Faculty who work with their students to establish individual or community SMART goals have found a notable improvement in student success in the course.

SMART Goals Template for Students

People who have a growth mindset believe that ability/skills/knowlege can be changed and developed and that performance can be improved with effort, helpful feedback, normalizing of mistakes or failures, and using effective strategies for learning. In contrast, people who have a fixed mindset about ability believe that people either have ability or do not have ability and nothing can be done to change it (Dweck, 2006).

Research demonstrates that when students have a growth mindset about their ability to grow and develop new skills and expertise, they are better able to persist through setbacks and are more likely to embrace challenges as opportunities for growth.  

The following resources guide faculty to integrate a growth mindset framework in their coursework in the syllabus,  classroom, and Student Drop-In Hours.

Growth Mindset Framing and Feedback Tools

Growth Mindset Culture Practice Categories

A pivotal time to encourage students to adopt a growth mindset is right before and right after the two first substantial assessments in your course.

This resource offers concrete language for “psychologically attuned assessment wrappers” with specific sections for pre-assessment AND post-assessment messaging.

Many universities make an “Assignment Calculator”  available to students, which helps address time management and organizational issues.

Assignment Calculators break down projects into manageable steps based on due dates. Each step includes helpful hints and “how-to” links.

Any interim due dates provided by the professor (for working thesis, bibliography, first draft, etc.) take precedence over dates suggested by the Assignment Calculator.

The link to an Assignment Calculator may be included on your Blackboard page. Students may be encouraged to use this tool as the semester’s work starts to build up.

These are two examples of Assignment Calculators:

Stanford Learning Lab Assignment Calculator

Boise State Assignment Calculator

American Association of Colleges and Universities: Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE)

 

VALUE is an authentic approach to assessment designed to articulate and measure the skills, abilities, and dispositions that students need and that parents, policymakers, and employers demand.

 

VALUE rubrics are open educational resources (OER) that enable educators to assess students’ original work. AAC&U offers a proven methodology for applying the VALUE rubrics to evaluate student performance reliably and verifiably across sixteen broad, cross-cutting learning outcomes.

The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Cluster examined student STEM course data and the practices and policies affecting success rates in entry-level courses, emphasizing closing achievement gaps for historically underserved student populations.

The following learning memo highlights the cluster’s work to examine how an analysis of DFW rates reveals equity gaps and understand how these grade markers correlate with student retention and graduation outcomes.

Campus Teaching-Related Policies Heading link

Dean of Students: Services and Forms Heading link

Student Support Resources Heading link

Students often need support. UIC has ample mechanisms, services, and centers to support academic success and personal wellbeing.  LAS has curated some of the most important categories and sites for you.

Student Support Resources