The Center for Teaching & Assessment of Learning Foundational Course Initiative (FCI) aims to transform the UD first-year experience to better support and engage our undergraduates at scale. Our goal is to create foundational courses that utilize the most effective strategies for teaching and actively engage 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 the course’s discipline.

• • Strategic Priority #1: Reimagine the way that content is delivered.
  • Strategic Priority #2: Foster student community and sense of belonging within courses.
  • Strategic Priority #3: Build real-world examples and assessments into courses.
  • Strategic Priority #4: Support instructors of foundational courses to develop instructional approaches that foster skills, strategies, and habits of mind that first- and second-year students need to become successful learners.

Guided by the scholarship of UD faculty who specialize in learning, this program utilizes individual reflection, work in faculty-teams, CTAL’s Course Design Institute, and personalized instructional design support. Participation in this FCI will result in courses that provide explicit attention to the learning process and support students as they become self-directed learners who better understand how they themselves learn. 

Faculty involved in the Foundational Course Initiative are given the title of Provost’s Teaching Fellow, and participate in a two- or three-year, collaborative course design process, which includes a partnership between an individual faculty member and educational professionals from CTAL. The goals of each course in the initiative are driven by the vision of the faculty, program educational goals, disciplinary values, and are informed by relevant institutional data and research from evidence-based inclusive teaching practices. While during its first two years, FCI partnered with individual faculty– moving forward we will recruit departmental instructional teams to drastically scale the ability to improve student learning across all sections of a selected course and to ensure greater resiliency of instructional changes beyond the life of the grant.

Began June 2022

Began June 2023

Began June 2024