Year in Review: CETL’s Annual Report, 2023-2024
We invite our community to review the milestones of our 2023-2024 academic year work.
In the 2023-2024 academic year, the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning demonstrated its strength and reputation as a leading center for teaching nationally and globally. Through strategic hires and relationship-building over several years, CETL reaped the benefits of its more prominent profile on- and off-campus, positioning its work as instrumental in promoting exemplary teaching and meaningful learning at the University of Mississippi.
You can access our full report at this link.
Reach
About 30% of UM faculty (N=331) attended at least one CETL workshop or reading group in 2023-2024. On average, they attended slightly more than two events. Another 256 graduate students and 118 staff members, undergraduate students, and others attended.
Impact
In the 2023 calendar year, the Inclusive Teaching Learning Community funded 15 course redesign applications. We calculate that in the Fall 2023 semester alone, those faculty taught about 750 students in the courses they redesigned. One of the participants is a course coordinator for a very large-enrollment general-education course, so it’s clear that the reach of that single ITLC community is wide and significant. We could have accepted many more participants, but because this is funded with a $4000-per-course grant, we are limited in our impact.
Graduate Student Programming
Attendance at Graduate Teaching Orientation nearly doubled in Fall 2023, with 134 graduate students participating. We awarded 27 students with 48 graduate teaching credentials, which provides documentation of their efforts to develop teaching expertise and skills in preparation for the academic job market. We established our first graduate consultant program in Fall 2023, with the addition of Amitesh Singh (Physics/Astronomy) to our team. Amitesh helped co-facilitate graduate workshops and the graduate reading group. Our Fundamentals of Teaching program, designed for the first level of the Graduate Teaching Credential, engaged about a dozen students across multiple sessions to discuss evidence-based teaching practices.
Community
Our new-in-Fall 2023 program, Thank an Instructor, received 564 notes of gratitude from students over three rounds (before fall 2023, after fall 2023, and after spring 2024). These made an enormous impact on faculty, who responded to the messages with things like, “Thank you so much for relaying this to me. I am deeply touched by this message. It gives me the inspiration to want to try even harder.”
Service
CETL staff completed 70 individual consultations, with topics ranging from syllabus and course design to NSF grant proposals to graduate student teaching.
Communications
In the 2023-2024 academic year, our team appeared on 11 podcast episodes, wrote 43 blog entries that have received (only since January 2024, when we moved to Substack) nearly 15,000 views, and fully redesigned our website in the new Marcomm format—one of the very first campus offices to do so using the full suite of design tools in the new format, Cascade 8.