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Provost's Initiative on Teaching Advancement (PITA) Grants

The PITA Program enhances the educational experiences of students by providing resources to test and/ or implement innovative, instructional programs that are aligned with the Campus Strategic Plan. Examples of projects supported by PITA grants include those that accomplish the following:

  • Strengthen excellence in instruction through mentoring, assessment, and peer evaluation. Of particular interest are projects that involve one or more of the college-level Teaching Academies.
  • Promote the enhancement, redesign and modification of existing courses. Examples of course enhancements include the incorporation of an innovative educational technology or the development of a community engagement component.
  • Develop new courses and pilot classes intended to become part of the core curriculum of a department or program.
  • Advance the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), a scholarly inquiry into the relationship of teaching and learning. Research topics include those that examine the effectiveness of specific instructional practices or that develop methods to measure instructional effectiveness.

PITA Colloquium

Since 2006, the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning and the Teaching Advancement Board have sponsored an annual PITA Colloquium to provide an opportunity for grant recipients to share their work and results with the campus community. Recipients gave a general overview of their projects and major findings. Discussion focused on topics such as generalizability of the projects to other disciplines, impact of the projects on home units, valuable lessons learned and contributions to the knowledge base in teaching and learning. The PITA Colloquium will be discontinued in 2011 in favor of utilizing the annual Faculty Retreat as a platform for sharing the good work of the PITA program with a larger campus audience.