The Center for Innovation and Learning
Mission
The Center for Innovation and Learning aims to design, develop and integrate resources that enrich learning and teaching at Wofford, and to provide a locus for conversations, both within the Wofford community and with other institutions, about excellence and innovation in a residential liberal arts education.
Purposeful integration of research, curricular innovation, and support in The Center for Innovation and Learning is a step toward the academic synthesis a 21st century liberal arts college can offer both its own community members and society at large.
Our mission is four-fold: to support innovation in teaching, provide an environment for the support of teaching and learning, provide writing and research assistance in identifying and pursuing grant opportunities, and to assess for the effectiveness of innovations undertaken in the service of student learning.
New Faculty Mentoring Lunch Series
The Center will collaborate with this series of lunches held throughout the year to help initiate new faculty to the institutional culture and folklore of the College.
Support for Teaching and Learning
The Center for Innovation and Learning Fellows Program will provide both release time as well as financial and material support to faculty who propose innovative course projects. Funded projects will focus on teaching strategies and learning outcomes but they will not be selected solely on the grounds of technological innovation. Rather than promoting technology for technology's sake, we will collaborate with faculty to identify appropriate tools and resources that are likely to enrich teaching and learning.
Center staff and associates will help faculty identify and pursue supportive grant funding from external granting agencies. We will assist in the writing of grant proposals and we will provide pertinent research that supports grant proposals. Our goal is to ensure that the College and its faculty are positioned to submit grant proposals to the federal government and other sponsoring agencies.
Assessment
The Center institutional research team will collaborate with faculty to assess for effectiveness and improvement in student learning as well as in faculty improvement and revitalization. We will disseminate assessment results to appropriate publics – students, faculty, alumni and partner with faculty who wish to present and publish in the scholarship of teaching. Research findings from NSSE, CLA, and from internal Wofford assessments will be made available to appropriate campus constituencies on an annual basis with a view towards providing faculty and departments with understandable and actionable data that reflect the student’s learning experience.