Center for Excellence in Learning & Teaching (CELT) Pedagogy Mini-Grants

2024 Mini-Grants for Artificial Intelligence (AI) Integration in Pedagogy

Led by faculty fellow Romy Guthier, these grants, awarded to 30 faculty members from across the university, encourage faculty members to explore and integrate AI technologies into their teaching this fall. Participants will experiment with modest uses of AI tools to enhance classroom learning and engagement. Following the implementation, faculty will have opportunities to share their experiences and insights with peers, fostering a collaborative environment for innovation in AI pedagogy.

2022-2023 Open Education Resources

Brent Shell has been leading CELT's mini-grants for Open Education Resources (OER) since 2022, and we are pleased to announce that we will be working with a new cohort for the 2024-2025 academic year. This year we have awarded funding to a multi-disciplinary group of over twenty faculty members to creatively develop open education resources to reduce the financial burden on students and expand their access to learning materials. The funds support the work involved in finding, creating, using and sharing OER as replacements for required commercial textbooks.

Contemplative Pedagogy: Strategies for Improving Students' Engagement

2021-2023 Contemplative Pedagogy

Marlowe Miller, CELT's first Faculty-in-Residence, lead two cohorts of faculty members during the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 academic years. Faculty studied and incorporated contemplative pedagogy practices into their courses to support each other and future faculty members who are interested in expanding contemplative pedagogy on campus.

Members of the 2022 Contemplative Pedagogy cohort shared their classroom techniques on how they implement contemplative pedagogy across different disciplines in a talk titled: Contemplative Pedagogy: Strategies for Improving Student Engagement with the UMass Lowell community. Check out this video to learn more!

2021-2022 Hybrid Pedagogy

We awarded mini-grants to faculty who proposed to teach a “hybrid” course in the Fall of 2021 and/or the Spring of 2022 (including labs). Participants collaborated as a cohort to support each other as well as faculty interested in exploring this teaching mode in the future. A “hybrid” course is one which meets synchronously, alternating on-campus, in-person meetings with virtual meetings during the week, throughout the year.