Center for Teaching Year in Review 2015-16
by Derek Bruff, CFT Director
The fall semester is right around the corner, which makes this a good time to look back at the academic year we’ve just completed. I’m happy to share the CFT’s 2015-2016 Annual Report which gives a sense of the reach and impact of our work here at Vanderbilt and beyond. It doesn’t capture everything that happened at the CFT last year, but there’s a lot packed into its six pages!
We had a big year! A few highlights:
- In 2015-16, the CFT reached 412 full-time faculty members across campus through consultations, programs, and events. That’s 32% of all full-time faculty outside the School of Medicine.
- We also interacted with 518 PhD students this year through our various offerings. That’s 24% of all PhD students at Vanderbilt.
This year saw the CFT’s first formal Course Design Institute, a three-day workshop in which 13 faculty members (re)designed courses to engage students not only as consumers of information, but producers of knowledge.- The CFT rolled out seven new teaching guides this year on such topics as teaching first-generation college students, test-enhanced learning, and digital timelines. These guides helped us reach almost 1.9 million pageviews over the year.
- Back in August 2015, we launched our Blackboard support services, offering technical and pedagogical support for instructors and students across campus using Blackboard, Vanderbilt’s primary course management system.
The CFT continued to expand its services for departments, programs, and schools, offering 53 workshops for such units around campus. (If your unit has particular teaching needs we can help with, please let us know how we can help.)- CFT staff gave more than a dozen invited talks in the US and abroad, presented at several academic conferences, and published multiple peer-reviewed articles. And CFT assistant director Stacey Johnson published her second book, Adult Learning in the Language Classroom.
- We hired three new full-time staff this year: assistant director Vivian Finch and instructional technologists Lee Scarborough and Rebecca Panter. We also said good-bye to long-time CFT administrative assistant Melissa Penix, who retired at the end of 2015.
Read more in our 2015-2016 Annual Report.
I’m incredibly proud of the work of my CFT colleagues and the impact the CFT has on students and faculty at Vanderbilt. I’m looking forward to another big year in 2016-17!
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