MSU COLA Fellows

MSU COLA Fellows Program

Prior Fellows’ Work

We are sharing select graduate students’ deliverables from the 2025 COLA cohort, the fifth year of the fellowship. We welcomed 23 students, primarily from the College of Arts and Letters  (n=14), with others from Broad (n=6) and Social Science (n=2). Half of our participants had previous teaching-related professional development at MSU, and most (77%) reported prior teaching experience. Students completed a series of COLA workshops, developed two teaching-related deliverables, completed a peer review process, and presented their work. Most COLA fellows reported overall satisfaction and many benefits from the COLA fellowship. You can view the full evaluation here, or a summary evaluation at the bottom of this page.

Deliverables

Fellows were tasked with creating two deliverables related to their teaching practice. In 2025, COLA participants developed teaching philosophies, instructional artifacts (including assignments, course modules, course outlines, and D2L pages), syllabi, professional websites, and conference presentations.

Bar chart titled "2025 COLA Deliverables" showing the number created for different deliverables. Teaching philosophy: 15, Instructional artifact: 13, Syllabus: 12, Professional website: 5, Conference presentation: 1.

Teaching Philosophies

A teaching philosophy document for submitting with academic job positions was our most popular type of deliverable in 2025. Below is a sample teaching philosophy created by a COLA fellow in the writing field.

COLA Teaching Philosophy StatementDownload

Instructional Artifacts

Fellows generated a lot of materials for use in courses that they were actively teaching or planning to teach, ranging from course outlines to comprehensive course modules with content, in-class activities, and assignments. Ensuring these kinds of materials are well-aligned with learning goals, translate into activities across modalities if applicable, and are understandable to students are key pedagogical tasks that the COLA fellowship supports. Here is a sample course module outline developed for an English language course:

COLA Module 2025Download

Syllabi

As with other teaching artifacts, alignment and clarity are key tasks for developing quality syllabi. Here is an example syllabus for an asynchronous online course from a COLA fellow in the Broad College of Business:

COLA 2025 SyllabusDownload

Professional Websites

Evaluation

Fellows completed pre- and post-surveys evaluating their skills on three scales: inclusive pedagogy, technology, and scholarly teaching identity. We compared their responses using a paired Wilcoxon signed-rank test for each scale, and found a statistically significant improvement (p ≤ 0.001) with a large effect size (r ≥ 0.80) across all scales. Example questions included:

  • Technology: I can use digital tools to enhance student engagement
  • Scholarly teaching identity: I have materials that demonstrate my teaching skills
  • Inclusive pedagogy: I understand how to design inclusive and accessible online learning experience
A column graph titled "COLA Fellows' Skills Improved" with light green bars representing pre-survey evaluations of students' COLA skills, and dark green bars representing their post-survey evaluations. The three skills represented are "inclusive pedagogy", "technology", and "scholarly teaching identity". The dark green bars are all between 4-5 on a 5-point scale, which is significantly taller than the light green bars which are all between 3-4.
Figure 1. COLA fellows generally reported neither agreement nor disagreement with their self-evaluated skill levels prior to the fellowship, and agreed or strongly agreed that they had the skills after the fellowship. 

Most COLA fellows reported overall satisfaction and many benefits from the COLA fellowship, with 89% reporting that they met their COLA goals and 74% being extremely or somewhat satisfied with the fellowship overall. Fellows reported benefits such as specific knowledge gained from workshops, support from their peers and mentor, and the fellowship structure resulting in tangible deliverables:

“My cohort was really supportive throughout the fellowship. We had great discussions during our weekly meetings about deliverable ideas and shared insights from the workshops. It was helpful to hear how other people from different disciplines were thinking about similar teaching challenges.” 

“I loved the asynchronous workshop options. It was a great way to make COLA doable during an ever-changing summer!”

“As someone teaching my first course this summer, the strategies I learned directly improved my class design and student engagement…I really appreciated how everything was immediately applicable rather than just theoretical.”

Recommendations for improving future iterations of the fellowship included adjusting the pacing to begin deliverable drafting early, including more hands-on activities in some workshops, and introducing collaborative projects among fellows in their cohorts. Overall, the 2025 COLA fellowship successfully advanced graduate students’ skills in inclusive pedagogy, technology, and scholarly teaching identity, while producing a range of practical deliverables that directly impact our fellows and improve undergraduates’ course experiences.