For immediate release
From The Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning
The Association of American Universities (AAU) announced that UCI is one of the selected twelve AAU member campuses within the AAU STEM Education Network to receive mini-grants in the form of $10,000 for two years. The new program, called Active Learning Launch for STEM (ALL-STEM) is designed to support faculty who wish to improve student engagement in their large lecture courses. To illustrate institutional commitment, UCI will be matching the funds of the AAU STEM Mini-Grant to provide double the funding.
This award is an outgrowth of the AAU Undergraduate STEM Education Initiative, a major project that in 2011 began to encourage STEM departments at AAU universities to use teaching practices proven to be effective in engaging students in STEM education. The University of California, Irvine is one of twelve campuses to receive this grant that will further propel our excellence in STEM fields.
The Active Learning Launch for STEM project at UCI will address barriers to active learning adoption and quickly scale-up the usage of these approaches, particularly in large, lower division STEM courses. Faculty who are accepted into the program will be provided funding from the grant and guidance from the Center for Engaged Instruction to redesign their courses over summer in small faculty learning communities.
In parallel with the course design projects, graduate students in the same discipline will partner with the faculty members and the Teaching and Learning Research Center to design a small discipline-based education research project to study the effectiveness of some aspect of the active learning implementation. This funding allows both faculty and future faculty to work together to create effective and evidence-based teaching that will continuously improve undergraduate education at UCI.
As a university with a focus on diversity, inclusion, and improvement, and in light of the four strategic pillars that motivates the university, this grant will allow UCI to strive to be the best version of itself in terms of academic achievement and campus climate.
Find more information on the grant and the other campuses involved here.