Faculty Learning Communities are groups of faculty members we are organizing based on a  Community of Practice model.  A Community of Practice is composed of members who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis (Wenger E., McDermott R., Sander W., 2002). If you are interested in joining a Faculty Learning Community or interested in starting one, email cheryl.diermyer@ucr.edu.

Community-Engaged Learning and Teaching Community of Practice - June 9, 2023, XCITE Commons, Tomás Rivera Library, 133

• Who: Faculty (Tenure, Ladder, Associate, Assistant, LOSE, LPOSE)
• What: The Community-Engaged Learning and Teaching COP explores the guidelines set by the Carnegie Foundation to be a certified Community-Engagement campus and how these guidelines can be integrated into learning and teaching at UCR. The COP will set the specific topics. Topic samples are:
  • The UCR definition of Community-Engagement [Jan]
  • Assessing Institutional Engagement [Feb/March]
  • Community-Engaged Learning and Teaching [April/May]
  • Enhancing Opportunities for Community-Campus Partnerships [June]
• Why: Community-Engagement is a provost campus initiative. Community-Engagement provides students with the opportunity to engage in partnership with community scholars and faculty to address community-identified needs, enhance community well-being, enrich the scholarship of the institution, and deepen students’ civic and academic learning.
• When: The Community-Engaged Learning & Teaching COP will meet from January 9th - June 9th, 2023. The COP will set the frequency and time of meetings.

2023 RIDLE Call and Application

To continue campus commitment to the campus growth initiative and enrich online teaching and learning, XCITE is announcing the 2023 Rethinking Instructional Design for Learning Engagement (RIDLE) course grants that will fund new and existing courses designed to be taught online.

The final RIDLE community of grant awardees will begin meeting in Spring 2023.

New in 2023

Priority will be given to proposals that offer solutions for “bottleneck” courses - those courses that students need for graduation but find difficult to get into or pass

Funding will include a Studio in a Box option to provide equipment and training to set up your personal studio for teaching online in any environment.

Goals of the RIDLE Program:

• Promote greater online course access for students
• Establish an inclusive and diverse environment that encourages collaborative exploration of innovative pedagogical practices
• Support student success through pedagogical innovation and the design of equitable and inclusive teaching
• Guide deeper thinking about issues related to online teaching and learning
• Assist faculty in designing learning that shifts students from a passive to an active role in the online classroom

Opportunity to Collaborate and Engage

The RIDLE program offers UCR faculty a community think tank for transitioning face-to-face courses to online or hybrid and for improving their existing online courses while focusing on student engagement.

Research tells us that higher levels of teaching presence is achieved when teachers engage students in shaping their learning. According to the Association of Chief Academic Officers report (2021), engaging students was the most frequently cited challenge and a key priority for the future. Nearly three-fourths (74%) of faculty identified increasing student engagement in class as a priority.