Announcing the 2019 Teaching Innovation Grant Recipients

The Educational Development Council, Morgan Teaching and Learning Center, and the Academic Technology Center are pleased to announce a total of $75,000 in Teaching Innovation Grants for 2019, awarded to nine projects that will advance distinctive education at WPI and around the world: 

• Five faculty from multiple departments, in collaboration with librarians and instructional designers, will pursue their projects within a Faculty Learning Community on Open Educational Resources (OER). OER are important tools for diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education that reduce financial barriers and give traditionally underserved students equal access to high quality learning materials. Grant recipients will create OER materials for lower-level computer science courses that have high NR rates, produce interactive modules and activities supporting “culture across the curriculum,” create resources for using project-based learning in philosophy courses, launch an international community of materials engineering educators using OER, and develop materials for content delivery in Statics that will increase the presence of women and minorities within technical examples.

• Four Independent Project grants have been awarded to a total of nine faculty members. Projects range from creating a more inclusive, relevant, and coherent English language curriculum for international undergraduates; developing and testing a model for linking humanities modes of inquiry with authentic laboratory experiences in the biological sciences; developing pathways for students to move study of Latin America closer to the center of their WPI experience, and using interactive physical models of solids to bridge the gap between mathematical proofs and physical intuition in group theory.

For more details please browse the complete list of grant recipients and project descriptions. Congratulations to all of the award winners!

Grants are made possible by pooling funds from the Morgan Teaching and Learning Center, IT Division, and the Educational Development Council. Many thanks to the selection committee comprised of the Educational Development Council and representatives of the Academic Technology Center: Marja Bakermans (BBT), Ari Trey-Masters ('20), Nikhil Karanjgaokar (AE/ME), Jill Rulfs (BBT), Kate Beverage (ATC), and Mary Beth Harrity (ATC).