Interdisciplinary Team-Teaching Grant (ITTG)

Special Call: Interdisciplinary Team-Teaching Grant (ITTG) – CLOSED

The special call for proposals is closed. ITTG grants will not be funded in the 2022 TLEF funding round.

As part of the 2020 TLEF round, UBCV is launching a special strategic call for proposals to academic units for Interdisciplinary Team-Teaching projects. Funding will be earmarked for courses at UBCV, with projects funded for one year. In alignment with UBC’s Strategic Plan (Strategy 14: Interdisciplinary Education), we encourage faculty members and/or departments who are interested in development of enhanced interdisciplinary content delivery for existing courses to apply for funding and central support resources through this call.

Strategy 14 facilitates integrative, problem-focused learning by development of students’ competencies and transferable skills helping to prepare them for the future. Students gain expert thinking faster when they are given well-designed opportunities to integrate concepts they have learned across several courses to tackle new, larger issues and problems. Under the auspices of this project, the working terminology for ‘interdisciplinary’ is:

Conscious and purposeful integration of knowledge and methods from different disciplines, making connections and contrasts visible and explicit for students. UBC examples of courses and programs: Language Sciences course (Werker and Turin), Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control (APSC 377/POLI 377) (Sens and Yedlin), (INDS 502A) Interdisciplinary Approaches to Arts and Health, (INDS 502C/SOWK 570K) Historical Memory and Social Reconstruction, Cognitive Systems Program, Arts One and Science One, Biomedical Engineering

More specifically:

  • There is active engagement and collaboration of instructors in development, delivery and assessment of outcomes. The interdisciplinarity should not simply be additive but integral to the aims and outcomes of the course.
  • There is the recognition that each discipline can influence the knowledge (output) of the other.
  • Other terminology used: integrated, collaborative and inclusive learning; collaborative specialization.

Financial support

This special call will fund grants up to a maximum of $20,000 each to deliver interdisciplinary team-teaching of an existing course or courses during the 2020/21 academic year.

Examples of eligible requests for support may include:

  • Faculty or Departmental costs to revise course(s) to include an interdisciplinary element. E.g. honorarium, TA to provide time, course release (full or part)
  • Team-teaching delivery costs including, but not limited to: additional instructors, guest lecturers, community leaders or elders, TAs, etc.
  • Data collection and analysis aligned with the project and showing the impact of interdisciplinary teaching on student learning
  • Engagement with students and other key constituents
  • Development of materials to communicate learning outcomes to students and other key constituents

In-kind support will be provided by the CTLT, including:

  • Support for evaluation of impact of funded projects
  • Faculty development support to help faculty engage with interdisciplinary team-teaching practice
  • Learning design support

Funds will be released in April 2020. Courses supported by this fund will be offered in Term 1 or 2 of the Winter 2020 academic year. The proposals will provide evidence, through final reporting, that shows value added and indicates a direction of travel for UBC in supporting interdisciplinary teaching. As well as support for individual projects, there will be a cohort element, whereby from time to time all project teams are brought together for peer support, sharing, and feedback.

Application Process – CLOSED

  • Applicants to the ITTG Special Call must submit a proposal by 3:00 pm on November 14, 2019 along with a copy of the current syllabus/syllabi of the course or courses that will be impacted by their project. The proposal template is available on the TLEF website: ITTG Proposal Template.
  • All applications must be submitted using the TLEF online application system. Please look for the Special Call: Interdisciplinary Team-Teaching Grant link on the application page.

Criteria and adjudication

Proposals will be reviewed by the Provost’s Office and the University TLEF committee based upon the following criteria:

  • The proposals recommended for funding will significantly contribute to addressing one or more of the key elements of Strategy 14 – Facilitate the development of integrative, problem-focused learning by:
    • Focusing on competencies and transferable skills (critical thinking, collaboration, communication)
    • Providing education for a diversifying economy, social context, and job market demand
    • Supporting continuous learning to keep pace with the information age and learner expectations
    • Approaches utilizing experiential and blended/online models of education
  • Include (at least) two faculty or external/community experts from distinct academic disciplines/units or learning areas.
  • Build from a starting point of one (or more) existing UBC credit courses.
  • Contain a rationale for why the applicants wish to engage in this development.
  • Articulate the benefits for students taking this updated course.
  • Clearly indicate how the course design and delivery will be modified (upload the current syllabus/syllabi with the application).
  • Clearly describe changes to learning goals and how these are assessed in the updated course.
  • Outcomes-based criteria will be used to evaluate project success.
  • The proposed budget is reasonable and in line with the objectives of the project.
  • Students have been/will be involved in development and/or implementation of the proposal.
  • Identify who will do what within the project plan, and demonstrate achievable goals within the time and resource constraints of the grant.

Eligibility

  • UBCV faculty are eligible to apply as Principal Applicants for this Special Call TLEF funding.
  • Principal Applicants to the TLEF cannot hold more than one TLEF grant concurrently. Co-applicants can be involved in more than one active TLEF project at a time.
  • This special call is for undergraduate and graduate teaching opportunities for interdisciplinary learning.
  • Teaching and Learning materials developed with the support of the TLEF must be made available for re-use within UBC. TLEF project teams are encouraged to license and share materials developed with TLEF funding under an appropriate Creative Commons license.

Ineligibility

  • Existing interdisciplinary and/or team-taught courses/programs (e.g., Arts and Science Interdisciplinary Courses (ASIC), Arts/Science One, etc.)

End of project evaluation criteria

Funded project teams will be required to provide an evaluation of the project after the course has been offered as well as contribute to an evaluation of the overall projects funded as part of the ITTG special call:

  1. Overall evaluation through discussion and information gathering at a minimum of two ITTG project focus groups.
  2. Individual project report on value to students & faculty as per the proposal criteria.

FAQ:

Yes, unlike the regular Small TLEF competition, course release costs can be fully funded from this call, subject to the maximum grant cost of $20,000. The special call will fund 100% of the Course Release cost for a department.

In order to support a variety of team-teaching/interdisciplinary options funding can be for a course release, honorarium or to pay external community leaders or elders.

Options might include bringing in another faculty/discipline to an existing course; linking two existing courses (i.e., redevelop elements of both courses and timetable/teach them together; utilize an existing ‘topics course’ / deliver an interdisciplinary team-taught course.) This proposal is for existing courses which would be delivered in academic year 2020/21. Funding is not available for courses that have not yet completed Senate approval.

Through this pilot, the evaluation of successful proposals will help to determine the direction of support for interdisciplinary education at UBC.

Our working assumptions of the terminology is as follows:

Interdisciplinarity – conscious and purposeful integration of knowledge and methods from different disciplines, making connections and contrasts visible and explicit for students

  • Active engagement and collaboration of instructors in development and possibly delivery
  • Recognition that each discipline can affect the knowledge (output) of the other
  • UBC examples: COGS, Language Sciences course (Werker and Turin), Arts One and Science One, MDS, BME

Yes as a co-applicant. The principle applicant must be a UBC faculty member from the Vancouver campus to access these TLEF funds.

There are many examples of existing interdisciplinary courses at UBC, as well as programs, such as Language Sciences course (Werker and Turin), Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control (APSC 377/POLI 377 - Sens & Yedlin), (INDS 502A) Interdisciplinary Approaches to Arts and Health, (INDS 502C/SOWK 570K) Historical Memory and Social Reconstruction, Cognitive Systems Program, Arts One and Science One, Biomedical Engineering, etc.