SoTL Seed Program

The call for proposals is now closed! Our next call for proposals will open in April, 2023.

The UBC Institute for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISoTL) and the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT) offer a support program for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). The SoTL Seed Program provides faculty interested in exploring the impact of their pedagogical choices with graduate research specialists, collegial collaborations, and complementary funding for projects.

UBC faculty and staff are invited to apply. Priority is given to faculty members, those who teach at the undergraduate level, and those who have not had an active Seed project in the last 12 months. Recipients are expected to participate in events to share the outputs of their work with the wider UBC community. The life cycle of a project is typically one to two years.

Trends in the SoTL Seed Program

Common areas of practice being investigated:  

  1. Peer feedback or other forms of innovative assessment.
  2. Multimedia in the classroom: The impact of technology integration (e.g., apps, collaborative tools, iclickers, and visual media) on student learning experience.
  3. Active learning: Pedagogies fostering student engagement through student-centered approaches.

Common areas of impact being explored:

  1. Diversity and inclusion: Exploring more equitable practices and pedagogies.
  2. Student attitudes, engagement and motivation: Better understanding of students’ level of satisfaction, confidence, motivations, and perceptions about pedagogies or disciplinary knowledge.
  3. Disciplinary specific skills: Improving how students retain key concepts in a course, or mastering particular professional skills.
  4. Student actions and behaviours: Understanding and/or facilitating student participation (in class, online discussions, etc.), or time spent on particular tasks.

We encourage you to review past and ongoing projects to learn about the breadth of work being done at UBC.

Criteria

SoTL Seed projects should propose meaningful questions about student learning or teaching activities designed to facilitate student learning, with the goal of gathering evidence to answer those questions, and then sharing the results to contribute to broader bodies of knowledge on student learning.

The following criteria are used to evaluate the proposals:

  1. Impact: Is the work likely to contribute to teaching and learning at UBC?
  2. Novelty: Does the project have the potential to advance our knowledge of teaching and learning in higher education?
  3. Practicality: Can the goals be accomplished with the designated time-frame? Is the process outlined able to accomplish the stated goals?

When developing your SoTL Seed application, be clear to specify what exactly you are hoping to investigate. For example, have you found students in your class are performing in an unanticipated way? Or are you interested to see how a new assignment/activity may be impacting the understanding of course topics?

Be clear in what you plan to investigate, what you hope to learn from the inquiry process, and how this work connects to your teaching practice. It is also important to specify the context in which the project will take place (e.g., course level, enrolment, teaching team, etc.), and how your project would inform previous work.

Support

Awarded projects receive support which includes:

  • Up to 70 hours of project support from a SoTL Specialist. SoTL Specialists are graduate students with SoTL and behavioural research experience who can assist with project design, ethics applications, surveys, focus groups, analyses and more.
  • Limited support for instructional and learning design, provided by the Curriculum and Course Services at CTLT.
  • Cohort-based meetings in which informal feedback is offered by cohort peers.
  • Up to $200 CAD in discretionary funds to support research expenses such as participant costs and disciplinary data interpretation.
  • Up to $500 CAD to support presentations in SoTL meetings and conferences.

Application

The call for applications is closed. We invite you to view a PDF version of the previous application form to prepare yourself for future applications. Our next call for proposals will open in April, 2023. If you have any questions about the application process, please contact us at ctlt.isotl@ubc.ca.