The Ohio State University
AC-7: Incentives for Developing Courses

The OSTEP Learning Communities (Mid-career and Senior Faculty, Lecturer, Globalization, and Course Design fellows — see http://ucat.osu.edu/professional-development/learning-communities/) provide ongoing incentive programs for faculty and staff to develop new courses, or to revise current offerings, including courses that have a sustainability focus. The OSTEP Faculty/Professional Learning Communities offer faculty and staff a year-long opportunity to focus on making data driven improvements to a particular course as part of a community of peers. As part of the incentives program, participants are provided funding support to attend conferences, including conferences focused on sustainability. A specific three year program called OSTEP Community on Sustainability Across the Curriculum was developed to provide faculty with opportunities to focus on infusing sustainability issues into an existing class or designing a new class to focus on those issues. Participants worked on their target classes as part of a community of peers. The program was designed to expand the inventory of classes at Ohio State that focus on sustainability as a lens through which students will examine and act upon our shared world systems, including but not limited to energy, environment, food systems, economic justice, and globalization. Participants were supported in developing course content, student activities, and appropriate pedagogies by establishing collegial relationships across disciplines and reinforcing a faculty culture that brings the scholarship of teaching and research together. For instance, one of the many conferences the faculty could attend included the 2015 Annual Meeting of Liberal Education, Global Flourishing, and the Equity Imperative Conference. At this conference, participants probed “… higher education’s role in engaging students with the world’s “grand challenges” and “wicked problems” and in helping to create a more just and sustainable future for the United States and for societies around the globe.”

Each participant receives $1000 for teaching enhancement activities (e.g., attending a teaching conference; purchasing books on teaching; et al.).