Foundational Course Initiative

About the FCI

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. 

Provost’s Teaching Fellows

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.

Meet our current Provost’s Teaching Fellows

Began June 2021

Lauren Genova

Stride cohort, Course: General Chemistry

Haritha Malladi

Stride cohort , Course: Intro to Engineering

Kedron Thomas

Spark cohort , Course: Intro to Cultural & Social Anthropology

Began June 2022

Amy Biddle

Stride cohort , Course: Animals & Human Culture

Katie Burke

Stride cohort , Course: General Chemistry Lab

Dana Chatellier

Stride cohort , Course: General Chemistry

Erin Connor

Stride cohort , Course: Animals & Human Culture

Monica Dominguez Torres

Spark cohort, Course: Intro to Art History: Pyramids to Cathedrals

Phil Jones

Spark cohort , Course: Intro to American Politics

Will Kenkel

Spark cohort, Course: Intro to General Psychology

Robin Kucharczyk

Stride cohort , Course: General Chemistry (AAP)

Agnes Ly

Spark cohort , Course: General Psychology

Jason Mycoff

Spark cohort , Course: Intro to American Politics

Kassra Oskooii

Spark cohort, Course: Intro to American Politics

Began June 2023

Amy Bustin

Spark cohort , Course: Spanish I, II, & III

Arjit Bose

Stride cohort , Course: Fundamentals of Physics I

Jennifer Thorpe

Stride cohort , Course: Nutrition Concepts

Alisha Rovner

Stride cohort , Course: Nutrition Concepts

Kami Silk

Spark cohort, Course: Introduction to Communication

Liliyrose Veneziano Broccia

Spark cohort , Course: Italian I, II, & III

Provost’s Teaching Fellow Alumni


 

Cresean Hughes

2021-2023, Course: Intro to Criminal Justice

Jennifer Trivedi

2021-2023, Course: Intro to Cultural & Social Anthropology