About the Center for Academic Innovation

The Center for Academic Innovation provides learning design consulting and faculty development opportunities to help faculty to create engaging programs, courses and lesson plans grounded in evidence-based best practices for every modality. Our team aims to build strong collaborative relationships across the university to help faculty reach their pedagogical goals and support their commitment to excellence.

Teaching and Learning:

• Provide a strategic and coordinated approach to faculty development – Facilitate a unified and strategic faculty development approach for all delivery modalities (in-person, online, and various forms of blended learning).
  • Effective teaching practices 
  • Artificial Intelligence and other new / emerging technologies 
  • Open Education Resources / Open pedagogies
  • Learning design consulting 
  • Accessible Design
• Cultivate a community of teaching and learning – Provide opportunities for faculty communities to come together, develop relationships, and explore best practices for learning in community in-person and online.
  • Annual Teaching and Learning Conference
  • Communities of Practice
  • Relationship-rich and Active Teaching Strategies
• Create and maintain a central faculty development calendar – Provide a single, centralized calendar for faculty development, with a mix of events led by our team as well as those led by community members.
• Curate and manage instructional resources – Our USM Design for Learning site, our virtual faculty professional development hub, provides an extensive set of curated resources on educational technology, effective teaching practices, and more.
• Facilitate the use of educational technology resources – Equip and empower faculty to effectively implement and innovate in the use of educational technologies as teaching tools.
• Provide support for new part-time faculty orientation and on-boarding
• Provide a data and assessment infrastructure to support and measure the impact of our initiatives – In collaboration with the Office of Academic Assessment and others, we track, evaluate, report out, and use data to inform programming choices and future faculty development initiatives.

USM Online

• Facilitate Entrepreneurial Initiatives – Serve as a collaborative partner connecting academic programs, Enrollment Management, the Career Hub, and other departments across campus to move teaching and learning initiatives from concept to implementation.
• Program design and course design consulting
• Provide Project Management Expertise – We support campus initiatives such as the USM Online Core, program modality tracking, online licensure programs, and administration of the MyUSM website.
• Design Support for multi-campus programs
• Micro-credential development