Faculty Learning Communities are groups of 6–12 faculty who meet about once a month throughout an academic year to explore a topic connected to teaching, learning, and pedagogical innovation. Each FLC is facilitated by an SAS faculty member or instructor who's passionate about the topic.
Join the AY23-24 SAS FLC on AI Technology in Education!
Are you unsure if you could, or even should, incorporate AI technologies into your courses? What are the ethical and equity-minded considerations around AI technology use in education? Are you still wondering what the best AI policy statement should be for your syllabus? If so, you’re not alone! Please join a cohort of instructors in a faculty learning community that will support you as you explore how AI technologies, like text generating AI, will impact how you design your courses.
While the aim of this FLC is not to reach consensus around the right way to approach AI, we will look at various perspectives on AI technologies in education and experiment with the technology. Our supportive environment will provide a space to explore alongside colleagues:
- How AI technologies can potentially impact your own courses
- The potential affordances and disaffordances of AI technologies
- Ethical considerations of incorporating or not incorporating AI technologies in your courses
Our faculty learning community is open to all SAS instructors. We will meet once a month during the academic year on zoom. At the end of the year, you will be well-positioned to continue the conversation on AI within your respective disciplines.
By participating in this community, you will:
- Be more informed about emerging literacies and how we can support our learners and ourselves in a shifting technological landscape
- Consider the impact of AI technologies as you navigate your course design and instructional decisions
- Examine various perspectives of how/if AI should be integrated into college teaching and learning
- Generate ideas and start to develop approaches around the use (or non-use) of AI technologies in your courses
We’re looking forward to spending time thinking and learning about the impact of AI technologies on education with you this academic year. Space is limited so please sign up to reserve your spot in the faculty learning community by Sept. 20th. If you have any questions, please reach out to teachinglearning@sas.rutgers.edu.
Past Faculty Learning Communities
2021–22 Faculty Learning Communities
21-22 Topics
-
Creating Opportunities for Under-Resourced and Post-Traditional Students
-
Return to Campus and Building a Resilient Learning Community
-
Faculty Learning Community for Undergraduate Leaders
Specific topics, readings, and goals are set by FLC members, aided by a peer facilitator.
2020–21 Faculty Learning Communities
2020–21 Topics
- Teaching Difficult Topics
- Remote Teaching
- Fostering Inclusive Classrooms
- Teaching Scholars Learning Community for Early-Career Faculty (cohort-based: for faculty, including teaching faculty in their first 6 years of teaching)
- Learning Community for Undergraduate Leaders (cohort-based: for current Undergraduate Directors/Undergraduate Chairs)
Specific topics, readings, and goals are set by FLC members, aided by a peer facilitator.
In recognition of the current moment of reckoning with racial injustice in America, the Office of Undergraduate Education will encourage each community to spend some time discussing issues of diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism as they relate to the FLC topic.
2019-2020 Faculty Learning Communities
Students in Transition
Students arrive at Rutgers from myriad educational systems and learning experiences. Whether from a New Jersey high school, a community college, or a secondary school in another country, our students must complete a challenging transition into a new learning environment rich in differing terminologies, course structures, and academic goals.
If you're a faculty member who teaches, mentors, or advises students transitioning to Rutgers, this Faculty Learning Community will connect you to colleagues with similar experiences and goals to understand what others are already doing, to consider scholarly research on student transition, and to explore the best use of student support services and programs. We hope you will join so that we might work to share and align language, learning goals, and instructional approaches to simplify and support student transition to Rutgers.
The community will be facilitated by Dr. Gregg Transue, Director of Introductory Biology Programs in the Division of Life Sciences (including General Biology and the Gateway course Preparation for General Biology). Gregg oversees the instruction of more than 2,000 new students each semester. He is a seabird ecologist who has been involved with introductory biology students and courses at Rutgers since 1982.
Writing in the Disciplines
Writing remains a challenge, even for many of our best students. As students advance in a discipline, this challenge grows: in addition to the mechanics of writing and basic critical thinking skills, students must master discipline-specific conventions for writing and reasoning, integrate what they’re learning, and understand how to reach the academic or professional audience they’re writing for.
Facilitated by Professors Kristen Syrett and Crystal Akers of Linguistics, this Learning Community will bring together a diverse group of faculty to explore the variety of approaches taken at Rutgers to teaching disciplinary writing; identify research-based strategies for developing students’ disciplinary writing skills; and think about how and when to incorporate disciplinary writing into program curricula.