The Engaged Learning Collaborative

Teaching well has rarely demanded more creativity. Faculty everywhere are working through similar questions: How do we design courses that support attendance? Keep digital distraction and inappropriate AI use from crowding out real learning? Get students to read and do the work outside of class? Help students develop the foundational skills they will need for the rest of their academic careers? Re-engage students who’ve drifted away, and steer them toward the support resources that exist to help them?
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The Engaged Learning Collaborative is a community for tackling these questions together, and for answering them with evidence rather than guesswork. A core premise is that we can hold a high bar for learning and help far more students reach it by making our courses, teaching practices, and policies ready for today’s students, improving learning and successful course completion, and closing gaps in student success. A unique feature of the Collaborative is that our conversations will be grounded in evidence about our actual students, including how experiences and outcomes differ from student to student and course to course. Student pedagogical partners will carry out projects for the group to surface student-driven insights, and our Teaching and Learning Innovation Lab, staffed by undergraduate student researchers, will contribute classroom observation and other data. We will also meet periodically with colleagues from key student support units, so we can align our teaching with the resources in place for our students.

How We'll Work Together

We'll gather several times a semester for working sessions built around focused topics and peer course examples. During the sessions, we'll use evidence, student partner insights, shared experience, and peer course examples to surface ideas for new course interventions.

In the second half of the fall semester, Collaborative members who are ready to go further can apply for more intensive support to design and implement new practices. This includes:

  • Funding from the Engaged Learning Fund, which supports faculty investment in designing, implementing, and evaluating a new approach
  • A partnership with a postdoctoral teaching fellow who works directly with faculty to help develop, implement, and assess new approaches, bringing dedicated time and expertise so promising ideas can move into practice faster

Implementation Partners share back with the full Collaborative what they're learning as they go, turning their individual experiments into shared knowledge for the whole group.

Fall 2026 Meetings are Fridays from 2-3:30 on September 4, September 25, October 9, November 6, and December 4.

Fall 2026 Meetings- All 2-3:30pm in CTE (135 Budig)

  • September 4

  • September 25

  • October 9

  • November 6

  • December 4