How can digital technology and online resources enhance the distinctive liberal arts education that ACM colleges offer?
Throughout the ACM, collaboration across campuses, information sharing, and peer networking have flourished as faculty and staff have worked to address that question.
Using innovative pedagogies that incorporate technology, campuses have been connecting faculty, sharing resources, closing geographic gaps, and reaching more students. Consortial efforts have supported and facilitated these efforts.
Online Course Design & Pedagogies Workshop
In response to the uncertainty around navigating in-person, remote, or hybrid teaching methods during the COVID-19 pandemic, the ACM offered members an Online Course Design and Pedagogies Workshop, led by ACM college faculty and staff. The series aimed to deliver the concepts, skills, and techniques through which liberal arts faculty and academic support staff can redesign and reimagine residential face-to-face course content for the online environment. The workshops were delivered in summer 2020 and are now available for streaming.
FaCE Grants Support Faculty Innovation
Technology-enabled education has been a major thrust of the Faculty Career Enhancement (FaCE) program, which has provided grants for projects designed and led by faculty and staff at ACM colleges in areas such as digital humanities, online resources for teaching musicology, collaborative courses in data science, using video conferencing for students to interact with peers in other countries, developing a makerspace, and digital storytelling.
Online Applied Calculus Project
The ACM Online Applied Calculus Project is a consortial effort to explore ways in which online learning can enhance the educational mission of ACM colleges.
A major effort of the project was to develop Calculus: A Modeling Approach, an online course designed primarily for students in the natural sciences and social sciences — such as economics, environmental science, psychology, medicine, ecology, and chemistry — who want to apply quantitative modeling tools in their discipline. Developed and first taught by math professors Chad Topaz (Macalester College) and Kristina Garrett, the course was offered to ACM students during the summer in 2013 through 2016.
