The 2022 award recipients are Danielle Franco, associate professor in chemistry; David Johnson, assistant professor in health management and systems sciences; Daniela Terson de Paleville, associate professor in health and sport sciences; and a group submission by Natalie Christian, Rachel Pigg, Mikus Abolins-Abols and Jeffery Masters in biology.��

Now in its second year, the TILL Teaching Innovation Award grants winners $1,000 and an invitation to share their work at the annual Celebration of Teaching and Learning conference.��

��“I continue to be impressed by the innovative methods our faculty are investigating to help students learn,” said Marie Brown, interim associate provost for teaching and innovation. “At the Delphi Center, we see first hand how much work instructors put into designing their courses. We want to recognize those who are exploring new ways to meet student needs.”��

“By its nature, teaching is an iterative process,” Christian added. “We always learn from our successes and our failures in the classroom, and can use that information to make our courses better.”

Christian was recognized with colleagues Abolins-Abols, Masters and Pigg for their work restructuring the intro biology curriculum to include course-based undergraduate research experiences.��

For Terson de Paleville, who won for designing active learning course activities centered around the flipped classroom and team-based assignments, teaching innovation is critical to creating an inclusive classroom.

“One size does not fit all in education,” she said. “The same material can be presented in many ways, or even better, can be discovered and understood by students of all ages, cultural, ethnic, and previous academic backgrounds, students with disabilities, neurotypical and neurodiverse students.”��

Franco found that going the extra mile to provide students with new ways to engage with course material, such as the virtual reality simulations she created for her chemistry course, made the concepts more accessible to students.

“The most rewarding part of implementing this innovation is the feedback from students,” she said. “They thought that the simulations were very engaging and helpful.”��

One of the criteria used by the award selection committee is the potential for other instructors to adopt the teaching strategy across diverse academic disciplines. Johnson won for such an innovation, the development of a versatile assignment and evaluation rubric using the principles of the Paul-Elder model of critical thinking.��

“Our hope is that by celebrating innovation in teaching faculty across campus will be empowered to explore new strategies in their own courses,” Brown said. “It’s an exciting time for instructional innovation, and I look forward to seeing what strategies, tools and practices our talented faculty implement in the year ahead.”��

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Story written by Brooke Whitaker, marketing manager at UofL’s Delphi Center.��

The 2021 award recipients are Angela Storey, assistant professor in anthropology; Kathy Gosser, assistant professor and director of franchise management in management and entrepreneurship; Rachel Hopp, assistant professor in biology; and Brian Robinson, James Lewis, Nicholas Hawkins, and Gary Eisenmenger in engineering fundamentals.

“We are celebrating faculty who are exploring ideas that help students learn. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, UofL faculty have found new ways to deliver quality instruction while connecting with students online,” said Delphi Center for Teaching and Learning Executive Director and Vice Provost Gale Rhodes. “We were blown away by the applications we received for the first year of this award.”

The TILL received 22 applications for the award, which grants winners $1,000 and an invitation to share their work at the annual Celebration of Teaching and Learning Conference.

Applicants said that innovation is critical to meet the changing needs of students.

“It is important to be a responsive teacher and to situate our work within the specificity of our students, this time, and the context of our world. Specifically, finding ways to put power into the hands of our students is important for me in making decisions about how to teach,” Storey said.

Gosser found that giving her students flexible ways to engage with course content, such as the podcast she launched in her course, increased student participation.

“They tell me that they can exercise while listening, make dinner with their roommates and all listen, and even drive,” she said. “One student told me it doesn’t even feel like school. Their reactions have been my motivation to keep improving my delivery and my guests.”

“We were acutely aware that students were already fatigued by the remote nature of their education, and it was heartwarming to hear that our course was helping students feel interested in their work again,” Robinson said.

During the pandemic, the team from the J.B. Speed School of Engineering used classroom response systems to build a collaborative online environment similar to the makerspace used for face-to-face courses.

Hopp also explored ways to bring active learning methods to her online course.

“I decided I was not going to slip back into the old passive ways of instruction just because those were the simplest ways to deliver the material online,” she said. “Instead, I created an online environment that closely mimicked our Belknap Academic Building-classrooms where students stay in small, table-like groups for discussion throughout class while still being connected to the larger class audience and the instructor.”

Rhodes hopes that faculty across campus continue to build on these new ideas in their own courses.

“A common thread for these winning innovations is that they can be used as models in nearly any content area,” she said. “I hope in the year ahead that we will see faculty across campus test, refine and scale these practices in addition to exploring their own ideas.”