- About CELTUA
- Calendar and Events
- Full and Part-time Faculty and Staff
- Grad and Undergrad Students
- Grants and Awards
- Overview
- Past Recipients and Project Summaries
- E. Phillips Knox Teaching Award
- Small Grants to Improve Teaching
- Grants for Graduate Award Holders to Improve Teaching
- Visiting Teacher-Scholar Grants
- Summer Fellowships for the Improvement of Instruction
- Department / Program Grants for the Significant Improvement of Instruction
- Learning Assessment / Course / Curriculum Effectiveness Grants
- Faculty Exchange Relocation Grants
- Engaged Learning and Top 25
- Assessment
- Publications and Library
- Consulting and Resources
Engaged Learning and the Top 25 project
"The Engaged University" is a vision of Miami's curricular and co-curricular efforts devoted to helping students develop toward being creators of knowledge rather than receivers of knowledge. This vision, as articulated in President Hodge's inaugural address and his 2008 Annual Address (PDF file), raises new expectations for the teaching and learning process. We should be engaging students in scholarly inquiry across the curriculum from the beginning of their college careers, gradually giving them more responsibility for the process, with an eye toward increasing their intellectual maturity.
In keeping with this challenge, President Hodge and Provost Herbst announced a new initiative: The Top 25 Project: Engaging Students in their Learning. This project focuses on our highest-enrollment courses, ones that in many universities end up spending, as President Hodge says, "too much time telling students what we think they need to know, and not enough time using their curiosity to drive their learning." Instead, the ToP 25 Project aims to develop learning models that are inquiry driven, call for active learning, and place the student at the very center of the learning experience. Through redesign of high-enrollment courses that are departmentally owned and operated, the project aims to create systemic change in undergraduate learning at Miami.
A group of faculty members who were inspired by this vision formed the Community of Practice on Engaged Learning (COPEL). COPEL has served as a forum for Miami faculty and staff educators to intensively explore and discuss how to (re)design their learning environments to have a lasting and far-reaching impact on student learning at Miami. Throughout the 2008-2009 academic year, COPEL participants engaged in personal reflection and joint readings, activities and discussions to: (1) generate ideas for promoting engaged learning within their own units and across the university; (2) develop partnerships with colleagues across campus who share similar interests; and (3) create a shared repertoire of resources for themselves and hopefully for the Miami community (e.g., body of knowledge, methods, stories, cases, tools, trouble-shooting strategies). The core members of COPEL also collaborated with colleagues within their own department. Read more about their vision of engaged learning at Miami.
Some of the other ways Miami engages students in their learning, and some of the benefits, from the student's perspective, of this type of learning can be seen on our undergraduate student page.