Reflecting on CATE’s Priorities and Impact on Instruction
INSTRUCTIONAL INNOVATION
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[CATE] created and administered a needs assessment questionnaire in Spring 2022 to help us assess UIC instructors’ most pressing needs and challenges, the types of resources, services, and professional development opportunities they’d like to see.
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The CATE team endeavors to use a data-driven approach to inform the work that we do as a teaching and learning center. We strive to foster and model a culture of assessment at the center by conducting self-review and engaging in a cycle of continuous improvement based on data and feedback from our stakeholders. Check out our one-page infographic report documenting our mission, charge, and priorities, and the work we have done to engage with and support the UIC teaching community in the past year.
We focused our support last year on three major areas: instructor teaching development and professional learning, graduate student and postdoc professional development, and learning technologies and systems. The report highlights the resources we have created (such as online resources to support online and in-person instruction, and teaching guides spanning topics from assessment to inclusive teaching), programming we offered (such as department requested workshops and campus-wide orientation for new Teaching Assistants), consultations where we engaged with instructors on topics such as effective teaching strategies, instructional design, and multimedia, the in-classroom audiovisual and educational technology support given by our staff on the ground, and streaming and recording technology classroom upgrades in classrooms across UIC.
In addition, the team created and administered a needs assessment questionnaire in Spring 2022 to help us assess UIC instructors’ most pressing needs and challenges, the types of resources, services, and professional development opportunities they’d like to see, and to gather feedback on our marketing and outreach efforts. We will be using this data to continue to refine the center’s programming and services. This data will also serve as an important starting point for discussions between CATE and individual departments for what they need with regards to teaching in the coming year.
If you have any questions about our report or what we offer to instructors at UIC, feel free to reach out to us at teaching@uic.edu.