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Grants will help transform online courses

Nineteen instructors chosen in first round of funding

February 2, 2021
Author: Imran Ghori
February 2, 2021

A new initiative provides 19 UC Riverside faculty members with grant funding to transform their existing remote courses into more robust online learning experiences.

The Office of the Provost, Undergraduate Education, and Exploration Center for Innovative Teaching & Engagement, or XCITE, announced in January the recipients of the first round of Remote Course Conversion grant funds, providing each participant $8,000.

“The transformation of each course will be different for each instructor, but the goals will remain the same for all of these grants,” said Richard Edwards, director of XCITE. “Working in tandem with one of XCITE’s instructional designers, one goal will be for faculty members to reimagine their courses to take full advantage of online pedagogy and the new instructional tools here at UCR, such as Canvas and YuJa.”

Faculty members will complete a course and earn certification at the Online Learning Consortium to gain additional insight and experience to develop courses that build on national best practices for high quality online education, Edwards said.

With the conversion to remote learning due to the pandemic over the past year, the campus has invested in programs like Canvas, YuJa, Slack, and Gradescope, which support high-quality online courses.

Each instructor will work with an XCITE consultant to design their courses, which will be taught in and delivered in Canvas and may incorporate additional technology.

Course development will include an emphasis on active learning and authentic assessments; asynchronous options to maximize flexibility for students; and accommodate student needs including use of captioning and a design that meets universal standards. 

Instructors were selected based on certain priority areas: undergraduate education, gateway courses, or requirements for majors; and undergraduate courses with high re-take rates, lack of available seats, or large waitlists.

The grants are made available through the UC Office of the President. Another round of funding is expected to be announced in the spring quarter.

Here are the list of grant recipients and courses:

Katie Burnette, BIOL 5: Introduction to Cell and Molecular Biology Laboratory

Matthew Casselman, CHEM 8A: Organic Chemistry

Joab Corey, ECON 003: Introduction to Microeconomics

Annie Ditta, PSYC 011: Psychological Methods: Statistical Procedures

Kelly Downey, CS 10: Introduction to Computer Science, Mathematics, and Engineering 1

Analia Flores and Joyce Fu, STAT 040: Elements of Data Science

John Franchak, PSYC 12: Psychological Methods: Research Procedures

Katja Guenther, GSST 001S: Introduction to Gender & Sexuality Studies B

Hyun Hong, BUS 165C: Intermediate Financial Accounting

Kevin Kou, CHEM 0080B: Organic Chemistry B

Worku Nida, ANTH 001: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

Noel Pereyra-Johnson, POSC 182: Politics of Economic Policy

Covadonga Prieto, SPN 130: Digital Dialectology

Victoria Reyes, SOC 168: Development of Sociological Theory

Sandra Ruiz, CS 005: Introduction to Computer Programming

Mariam Salloum, CS9P: introduction to Computing (Using Python)

Annika Speer, TFDP 050S: Introduction to Public Speaking

Chikako Takeshita, GSST 021: Gender and Sexuality

Ran Wei, PBPL 010:  Intro to Geographical Information System (GIS)