The first semester of the undergraduate degree programs at Duke Kunshan University will begin in Fall 2018. Learning Innovation, together with the Duke Kunshan Programs Office and Duke Kunshan’s Dean of Curriculum and Faculty Development, created a successful six-month development program called Learning Innovation Fellows for the first cohort of 22 Duke Kunshan undergraduate faculty.
The program goals were to:
- Build community and collegiality among the faculty.
- Build faculty knowledge about Duke Kunshan’s 7 Principles and its majors, curriculum pathways and interconnections between their various courses.
- Ensure faculty have basic understanding of the academic and language capabilities of their expected students.
- Help faculty create courses with well-designed learning outcomes, aligned with activities and assessments.
- Introduce faculty to active learning techniques and rich collections of resources and literature they may explore later on their own.
- Ensure faculty submit excellent course syllabi for the 40+ courses of the first year’s interdisciplinary curriculum by the course committee review deadline in early May 2018.
Because the majority of the faculty were located across the globe, the Fellowship was comprised of weekly online activities along with two residencies which brought all the faculty to Durham (2.5 days in February, 5 days in March).
The primary strategies and activities used to accomplish the goals were:
- Providing online readings, videos and other resources on course design, pedagogy and student-centered teaching approaches.
- Guiding online forum postings and responses on various teaching and curriculum issues based on the readings and resources.
- Establishing scaffolded interim deadlines for submitting sub-sections of their syllabi, with rounds of peer and expert review and feedback.
- Organizing discussions with Duke Kunshan’s Director of Recruitment, the Director of the Writing and Language Programs, the Assistant Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Associate Dean of Academic Advising.
- Assigning readings and discussions related to two books: Small Teaching by James Lang and The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present by John Pomfret.
- Designing in-person activities during the residencies to demonstrate active learning techniques to guide the faculty fellows through curriculum, major and course development processes.
The following video provides an example of some of the online content Learning Innovation produced and shared with the new Duke Kunshan faculty during the online sessions of the fellowship.
After the fellowship, Learning Innovation staff continued to connect with the Duke Kunshan undergraduate program by participating in the interviews for the second group of Duke Kunshan faculty (to be hired Fall 2018) and frequent collaboration with Duke Kunshan’s Center for Teaching and Learning (led by former Learning Innovation consultant Haiyan Zhou) and Student Information Services and Systems team.