Submit a Proposal

Blended Learning Initiatives in the Humanities and Social Sciences

 

Faculty teaching courses in the humanities and interpretive social sciences are invited to send us a proposal describing their idea for a project in blended learning and/or digital scholarship. The primary purpose of the project should be to integrate digital tools in order to enhance student learning and/or teaching methodology. Faculty may propose to: design a new course; entirely overhaul an existing course by introducing to it new digital tools; or develop specific course components to facilitate a particular learning goal or to overcome a teaching challenge.

 

Deadlines in 2016-2017: Tuesday, October 25, 2016, and Tuesday, February 21, 2017
Send your proposal to: Evelina Guzauskyte (eguzausk@wellesley.edu) and David O’Steen (dosteen@wellesley.edu)

 

While the deadlines help us support projects in a timely fashion, requests submitted outside of the two announced deadlines will still be considered. A meeting with LTS staff is strongly recommended, preferably before the proposal has been submitted, or soon after, to discuss project goals and development. Please contact David O’Steen to set up this meeting.

 

What should the proposal include?

 
The 1-2 page proposal should include the following:
 
  • A description of the pedagogical goals of the course. Please be specific in explaining how the selected blended learning methodology and/or the particular digital tools you have in mind will enhance your course.
  • Any specific digital tools, platforms, or approaches you have in mind (e.g. digital zines; clickable digital texts; video essays, etc.).
  • Basic information about your course. Is this a new or an existing course? When do you plan to teach it (e.g. Spring 2017)?
  • Your availability to develop the project in collaboration with an LTS staff member (e.g. during the winter break, during the fall semester).
  • A budget. Specify anticipated expenses, such as the number of hours of student research assistance, funds for purchasing materials to prepare the blended learning portion of the course (note: the grant excludes hardware purchases), and any other expenses directly related to the development of the blended learning or the digital scholarship component of the course. 
In addition, all proposals submitted by the announced deadlines are automatically considered for a course development stipend to be paid to the faculty member(s) developing the project. Past stipend amounts have ranged, roughly, from $700 to $4,000 for the more involved and extensive projects. Each proposal is carefully considered based on the complexity of the task at hand, the time the faculty will need to develop and implement the project, and/or the time the faculty member may need to dedicate to educate herself/himself about the selected digital tools and/or digital pedagogy approach, as may be appropriate.
 
LTS staff will work closely with interested faculty to help conceptualize, create, and manage projects. Support includes instructional design, selection of appropriate technology, and video recording and editing, among others. Interested faculty are encouraged to get in touch with David O’Steen with any questions about project design and availability of technological resources.
 
 

Other funding opportunities

 

What other kinds of funding are available through the Blended Learning Initiative?

Blended learning events
In the past, we have co-sponsored events such as talks and workshops, organized by faculty members about topics in blended learning, digital scholarship, and digital humanities. If you would like to bring a speaker to benefit colleagues in your field of study or the college audience more broadly, please apply to us for co-sponsorship.

Faculty conference travel
Funds are also available for faculty conference travel, as long as the purpose of attending the conference is explicitly related to blended learning, digital scholarship, and/or digital humanities. Examples of conferences for you could apply for funding include: “Negotiating Borders through Digital Collaboration,” the upcoming conference hosted by Bucknell University October 28-30, or the Blended Learning in the Liberal Arts conference hosted by Bryn Mawr in the spring. Requests to attend workshops or panels focused on blended learning/digital scholarship/digital humanities in one’s field of study can also be considered for funding.
 
Other requests
Other requests to support the development of blended learning projects will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
 

Helpful information

 
What disciplines are eligible within the scope of this grant?
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supports work in the humanities and the arts. In addition, social scientists whose work is explicitly historical and/or humanistic and engages qualitative methodologies are also eligible to apply. The examples given by the American Council of Learned Societies may be helpful for the purposes of this initiative: “[…] proposals in the social science fields […] are eligible only if they employ predominantly humanistic approaches and qualitative/interpretive methodologies (e.g., economic history, law and literature, political philosophy, history of psychology)” (http://www.acls.org/programs/overview/). Team-taught courses in the humanities/the arts and disciplines in the sciences or the social sciences are eligible to apply.
 
What do we mean by blended learning? 
Blended learning is understood here as encompassing a broad range of pedagogical approaches where digital tools are used to enhance faculty teaching and student learning. Previously, faculty have developed blended projects that involved the use of video for teaching writing skills; guiding students through small-scale digital scholarship or digital humanities projects as a way of teaching research methods; creating authentic, culturally rich audiovisual materials for foreign language classrooms; involving students in collaborative digital editing projects; and using the flipped classroom technique to increase meaningful student participation in the classroom, among others. One thing we see repeatedly in blended courses, in addition to innovative uses of digital tools, is a meaningful shift in the ways the classroom (and sometimes homework) time is used in order to create additional spaces, as well as new paths, for student learning and intellectual inquiry.