[Title of your Project] 

Author(s) and Department(s) 

Course Name and Course Description
Date

Project Abstract:  Describe in three to four sentences the goals and outcomes of redesigning your course to be inclusive of the cultural-racial-social context of your curriculum and to be responsive and respectful of the diversity of your students, enabling them to be more successful in their learning.

This project is part of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities' Affordable Learning Initiative, sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, under the collaborative leadership of Tennessee State University, MERLOT @California State University Long Beach, and MIT OpenCourseware, 2022.

Background on the Redesign

Why Redesign Your Course?

• Course Characteristics: What type of characteristics are you looking to change in the redesign?  Why is it important to culturally contextualize your course for your students and institution?
• The Learning Problem: You may want to identify a particular learning problem that your students face or difficulty in teaching a particular concept that is hard for students to visualize.  

Course History/Background

• How do prerequisites impact this course and how does course completion affect the next set of courses?
• What is the department’s historical context for student success in these courses? What programs or majors are associated with it? How long has it been offered?

High Demand / Low Success Issues

• Describe the high demand/low success issues which are affecting the course you are redesigning?

(Upload syllabus from pre-designed course here.)

Student Characteristics

• To the best of your abilities, describe the population of students who take the course, including the range of majors, and their incoming knowledge and/or skills that they typically have coming into the class.  

Advice I Gave My Students to be Successful

• What are the instructions you give your students so they can plan for a redesigned course learning experience? Consider providing as much detail as possible in a brief bulleted list of strategies.

Impact of Student Learning Outcomes/Objectives (SLOs) on Course Redesign

• List approximately 5 - 10 learning outcomes which will determine what students will know and be able to do as a result of this course. The assessments you facilitate in your course should be appropriate measures of these learning outcomes.
  

Alignment of SLOs With Course Redesign

• Briefly describe how the course redesign will align with the SLOs.
  

Assessments Used to Assess Students' Achievement of SLOs

• How are you planning to assess the students' achievement regarding the SLOs?
• What course activities are you planning to measure?
• Upload a rubric used for redesigned activities (optional).

Accessibility & Affordability Considerations

Accessibility

• Share how you have considered designing the course to serve students with varied abilities. Does the technology support all students, including students with disabilities? Consider tapping into campus resources for video captioning or appropriate syllabus design for sight-impaired students.

Affordability

• Are the course materials and technologies used readily available and affordable for your students? Describe the potential cost savings when using more affordable learning materials. To learn more: AL$, COOL4Ed, or MERLOT

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusiveness Considerations

How do you plan to build an Africana-contextualized collection of MITOCW and open educational practices that are adopted by faculty and are shared with the world?  

• What concepts in your curriculum can be contextualized with social-cultural-racial information and practices.
• What are examples that can be used to illustrate these concepts relevant and meaningful to HBCU students?
• Who are the researchers, artists, and scholars who contributed to the knowledge base of a discipline are presented, are HBCU Scholars included?
• When you create assignments for your students to demonstrate their understanding of the disciplinary concepts and operations, how will the assignments be relevant and meaningful to HBCU students?
• When you design and implement pedagogical practices to engage your  students, including how you have your students engage with each other, how will these pedagogical practices be respectful and responsive to the social-cultural-racial expectations of their communities?

About the Instructor

• Instructor name(s).
• Please provide a 4-5 sentence description of your professional background and interests, your teaching philosophy, or anything else you'd like to share regarding your teaching and learning experiences.
• Suggestion: Add a CV, a picture, and/or video.

Course Redesign Teaching and Learning Resources

MERLOT's Pedagogy Portal
The MERLOT Pedagogy Portal is designed to help you learn about the variety of instructional strategies and issues that could help you become a better teacher. The resources you'll find in the Pedagogy Portal should apply to teaching a variety of disciplines. Open Educational Practices Portal

MERLOT and SkillsCommons provides a collection of over 1,000 ePortfolios  across a wide variety of disciplines,  with about 700 ePortfolios openly sharing the innovative teaching processes and the student learning outcomes  from course redesign strategies.

MERLOT
MERLOT is a collection of free and open online teaching, learning and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community. The MERLOT collection of open resources spans across a wide variety of disciplines and education levels. What sets MERLOT apart is a combination of peer reviews, member comments, learning exercises and other valuable information and metadata associated with the materials.

Implementing the Redesigned Course

Which Aspects of Your Course Have You Redesigned?

• What are you now doing or planning to do through the redesign of your course? For example, "I used to lecture with some question/answer periods for 50 minutes. Now I "flipped" the classroom and have my students solve problems in groups of 4 during the class and I present 10 minute mini-lectures when students are confused about key topics."
• What concepts in your curriculum did you contextualized with social-cultural-racial information and practices.
• What are examples did you use to illustrate these concepts relevant and meaningful to HBCU students?
• Who were the Africana researchers, artists, and scholars who contributed to the knowledge base of a discipline are presented in your course?
• What are the  assignments you created for your students to demonstrate their understanding of the disciplinary concepts and operations and how do the assignments expand the inclusiveness of learning for Africana students?
• How do your pedagogical practices inclusive for the Africana students and are respectful and responsive to the social-cultural-racial expectations of their communities?

Adopted Technologies?

• Describe the technology tool(s) you have incorporated into your course redesign and why.

Which Professional Development Activities Have You Participated in During Your Course Redesign?

• Examples: Professional Learning Community (PLC) webinars, technology workshops on campus, conferences, etc.
• Key learning concepts learned that you applied to your course redesign?

Additional Resources for the Redesign?

• Describe, for example, how you might have incorporated or consulted with institutional research, instructional designers, department or campus colleagues, librarian, and/or the accessibility technology center.

(Upload your revised syllabus here).

Course Redesign Impact on Teaching and Learning

• How has the course redesign strategies affected your instruction and your students’ learning? Did your redesign strategy solve the issues that motivated you to redesign the course?
• Describe how your students mastered the student learning outcomes. Were the students more successful in the redesigned course than in previous courses? Explain.
• Did you experience unexpected results after teaching the redesigned course? If so, what were they?
• Consider attaching a more in-depth report describing the impact of your activities and experiences during the course redesign as a document/link/image. If possible consider including samples of students' work that reflect the impact of the redesign.

Assessment Findings

• Compile and upload graphs/tables/charts reflecting your findings with a short description. You might include a course comparison of pre/post student achievements before redesign.
• Share how students responded to culturally contextualizing your course curriculum, pedagogy, and/or assignments.  

Student Feedback

• What did your students say or how did they respond to the redesigned activities? Consider including your students' comments about their learning. Include survey results if you are able to capture them. Include student video feedback (optional).
  

Challenges My Students Encountered

• What challenges did the students encounter in the redesigned activities? E.g., technical challenges, organization of course, and redesigned activities.

Lessons Learned & Redesign Tips

Teaching Tips

• What advice do you have for others who might want to teach with this redesigned course? (technology training and support, planning, creating learning outcomes, etc.)
  

Course Redesign Obstacles

• What challenges did you confront and how did you overcome them?
  

Strategies I Used to Increase Engagement

• What pedagogical strategies did you use in your newly redesigned course to engage students?

Instructor Reflection

• Reflect on your participation in redesigning the course, the development of an ePortfolio, and your participation in the Course Redesign “Professional Learning Community” webinars and discipline-based meetings. 
• Share any plans to disseminate/publish the findings of your course redesign activity.