CTAL offers a variety of programs throughout the year to meet the needs of instructors at every stage of their teaching career. From graduate students entering the teaching ranks to experienced faculty fine-tuning their craft, all instructors will find participation in CTAL programs an opportunity for exploration and discovery in a collegial setting. Visit the events calendar on CTAL’s home page to view and register for upcoming programs.

The Course Design Institute (CDI) is an intensive, multi-day event during which instructors work closely with CTAL staff to further develop their courses in line with best practices in areas like backwards design, scaffolding, and assessment of student learning. The focus of CDI shifts annually in line with center and university-wide initiatives. For example, CDI 2022 participants worked on the design and delivery of large, introductory courses at UD.

Each fall and spring semester, the Center for Teaching & Assessment of Learning offers thematic seminars on topics relevant to teaching, learning, and assessment at the University of Delaware. Our seminars are designed for educators at every stage of professional experience and are organized into categories based on target audience and topic, such as: Foundations of Teaching & Course Design, Methods & Classroom Practice, Equity & Inclusion, Assessment & Feedback, Program Educational Goals, and the Learning Sciences. Seminar topics vary from year-to-year with upcoming seminars announced each June for the following academic year. Learn more about the CTAL Seminar Series.

In support of the University of Delaware’s goal to transform Blue Hen students’ first-year experience, CTAL partners with UD faculty to better support and engage our undergraduates. Our shared goal is to reimagine foundational courses that utilize the most effective strategies for teaching and actively engaging students in the learning process. In addition, these introductory courses are designed to teach UD students to be effective college-level learners within and beyond any course’s discipline. Visit the Foundational Course Initiative webpage to learn more about this multi-year program and the faculty participating in it.

Open Teaching Days provide an opportunity for UD faculty to open up their classroom to colleagues and showcase their teaching skills. Based upon a model used by other universities around the US for celebrating teaching excellence, where top faculty open their classrooms for a wide variety of “students” for a day, we are excited to launch our inaugural Open Teaching Day on September 13, 2023. Please follow this link to learn more about this program.

Spring 2023: Documenting Engaged Teaching

This professional learning community (PLC) brought together early and mid-career instructors to develop practices that support effective documentation of engaged teaching. Designed to be a complimentary effort to faculty-led conversations about the standards of teaching excellence, this PLC produced artifacts that have been shared widely with our community. For more information about PLC outcomes, time commitments, and compensation and recognition, please click here.

Program Educational Goal (PEG) and Program Learning Assessment programs are designed to support faculty in degree-granting programs engage in two processes critical to guiding and understanding student learning: (a) creating or revising program educational goals and (b) creating or revising a program assessment plan. In 2023-2024, CTAL is offering programming to support program assessment plan creation or revision. Self-guided modules are also available.

The Summer Institute on Teaching is an intensive and celebratory multi-day event that brings together educators from across the University of Delaware to build and strengthen a community around teaching and learning. The institute highlights emerging and established pedagogical practices, resources, and technology tools with an emphasis on evidence and scholarship. It also provides a showcase for the exceptional efforts and accomplishments of UD’s educators.

The 2024 Winter Institute on Learning will focus on specifications grading, an alternative grading technique that transparently links course grades to achievement of all of the critical objectives in a course. The institute is intended for faculty designing a new course that uses specifications grading or redesigning an existing course to use specifications grading.