AQIPing
The AQIPing has officially begun for me. AQIP stands for Academic Quality Improvement Plan and is an alternative to the traditional reaccreditation process. It stresses continuous improvement, unlike what some have called “the 10 year nap.”
Yesterday the action project team I’m co-leading met for the first time. Our project is to transform the IDEA Center, which is currently more of a technology training and support center for faculty, into a full-fledged Center for Excellence and Innovation in Teaching and Learning. Our task is to “define good teaching and then apply effective professional development activities that promote mastery of sound principles of pedagogy and technology to enhance student learning.”
The committee is made up of faculty and a representative from the library. We plan on starting by defining for ourselves what good teaching is, reading what others have written about what good teaching is, and trying to come up with a way to identify and take advantage of internal experts.
Communication with the college community is important in this process, so I’ll be blogging about it here and eventually we’ll set up a group blog that team members can post to and that anybody can read. In fact, our next meeting will be in a lab so I can teach the other folks how to use a blog. Having set up blogs for other groups before my main concern is that enthusiasm peters out and we end up with YAAB (yet another abandoned blog).
OK, off to define good teaching! Um, anybody know where to look?
