2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This evidence-based practice paper examines how teaching innovation can be fostered through a faculty initiative that supports teaching and learning through a community of practice as well as an annual funding program.

A number of factors influence faculty adoption of effective teaching practices, including, amongst others, institutional infrastructure and culture, faculty’s knowledge and skills of effective teaching practices, time required, and opportunities to network and engage with fellow faculty on teaching practices. Research has also explored the impact of communities of practice and professional development or learning communities on systemic change in teaching practices.

[Name redacted] is an initiative at [Name of university redacted] whose mission is to foster learning communities comprising of undergraduate and graduate students, teaching assistants, and academic and non-academic staff with the objective of enhancing and promoting excellence in the learning and teaching experience in the Faculty of Engineering. [Name redacted] has an annual budget to administer a teaching and learning innovation program which has the following two broad objectives: enhance a culture of teaching and learning improvement founded on evidence-based practices and develop a culture of pedagogical continuous improvement. The program supports projects—completed individually or in teams—that can provide concrete teaching and learning enhancement through the development of alternative assessment strategies, implementation of new instructional approaches, integration of design activities and learning opportunities, development of instructional resources or materials, software or hardware, and advancing the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Since its inception in 2018, 34 projects (including those in progress) involving 32 different faculty members (approximately 20% of the Faculty’s academic staff), of which 25 served as project lead, have been funded. To examine the impact of the program, we distributed a survey to the 25 project leads. The survey included a combination of Likert scale and open-ended questions asking about faculty’s experience(s) with their project(s). 18 faculty responded to the survey (72% survey participation rate) and we analyzed their responses to answer the following questions:

(1) What motivated faculty to apply for one (or more) project(s)?
(2) How did the project(s) contribute to enhancing student learning and encouraging faculty to think more critically about teaching and learning?
(3) How can the program be improved to support faculty further in their teaching?

In this paper, we provide further details on the type of projects that were completed/are in progress, how the resources/budgets were used, the role of [Name redacted] in supporting faculty, and discuss the results from the survey and our findings. We hope that the study contributes to understanding the motivational factors of engineering faculty, the support they require, and strategies to grow such programs further to advance teaching innovation.

The preferred presentation method is a traditional lecture.