Several prior COLA fellows offered to share their reflections, evaluations, and fellowship deliverables publicly. Browse them all or jump to a category:

Reflections

Engaging in meaningful reflection on teaching, learning, and professional development is a key component of the COLA fellowship. Quotes from reflections are shared to demonstrate the breadth of COLA topics and ways that students benefitted.

Reflections on Learning from Workshops

I was familiar with face-to-face (F2F) and online teaching, but this was the first time I encountered the term “hyperflex modality.” This modality is a valuable tool for building an inclusive classroom, allowing flexibility in how lectures are delivered and accessed.

2024 Participant

During the workshop, I was also reflecting on assessment and how to not only create accessible and inclusive class materials but also tests and exams for students. You can have the most inclusive and accessible materials, but if the exams fail to do the same it can be really frustrating for students.

2022 Participant

We learned how to use ‘backward designing’ to do our lesson plan. That’s really an effective way to decide which modes of learning can be effective. In backward designing, we need to select learning goals first, then how we can assess that particular lesson. When we are done with those, we can easily select the modes of learning is best suit for.

2022 Participant

Reflections on Other Benefits

It was helpful to learn that many other graduate students feel at least slightly nervous about teaching. Having this community was a wonderful reminder that I am not alone. Additionally, working with graduate students from a wide variety of disciplines made that feeling of isolation far easier to understand and work with.

2022 Participant

I very much enjoyed and learned a lot from the interactions with other fellows and writing reflections on my teaching–which I want to continue doing this semester. I also appreciated how the program was flexible with time and modality.

2022 Participant

COLA’s fellowship was so terrific in helping motivate/push me to make my dissertation summer deadlines. Not only the accountability, but since my dissertation data collection involved making an online course, it also helped/pushed me to think about multimodality, accessibility, and other relevant issues that I might not have given as much thought without this.

2023 Participant

The EDLI team also uses COLA reflections to understand what opportunities there are for improvement of the fellowship. Based on student reflections and requests, we continually update our workshop offerings, improve the structure of the interactions with cohorts and mentors, and evaluate which technologies we are using in guiding students through the fellowship.

Evaluations

Each year, fellows take surveys to evaluate our success. In 2023 and 2024, we surveyed students using scales designed to measure students’ scholarly identity, digital pedagogy skills, and self-efficacy for inclusive teaching. Example items are in the table below.

• Scholarly identity: I have materials that demonstrate my teaching skills.
• Digital pedagogy skills: I am confident in choosing the most suitable online or digital resources to enhance my teaching.
• Self-efficacy for inclusive teaching: I am able to accommodate the diverse needs of all students in my class.

We conducted Wilcoxon Signed-Rank tests on students’ pre- and post-survey responses for each scale. The 2023 results (n=13) were not statistically significant for any scale, with scholarly identity p=0.18, digital pedagogy p=0.07, and inclusive teaching p=0.06. In 2024 (n=13), all scales had a statistically significant increase, with p<0.01 for each scale. The means of students’ pre- and post-scores are shown in the graph below.

In 2022, we used a measure of teaching self-efficacy adapted from Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy (2001) on pre- and post-surveys. Questions are rated on a nine-point scale from “nothing” to “a great deal”. Some example questions are:

• How much can you do to get students to believe they can do well in the coursework?
• To what extent can you craft good questions for your students?
• How much can you use a variety of assessment strategies?

A paired samples t-test from 14 respondents indicated a significant increase in participants’ teaching self-efficacy in online courses by the end of the summer (M = 6.93, Variance = 0.82) compared to the beginning of the COLA program (M = 6.21, Variance = 1.36), t(13) = 2.25, p < .05.

Tschannen-Moran, M., & Woolfolk Hoy, A. (2001). Teacher efficacy: Capturing and elusive construct. Teaching and Teacher Education, 17, 783-805.

Deliverables

Common deliverables that students have created for the COLA fellowship include course modules, syllabi, assessments, literature reviews, professional websites, diversity statements, and teaching philosophies. Examples of some of these deliverables are below.

Websites

Some COLA fellows create websites to share their teaching and learning portfolios. These could feature students’ deliverables, reflections on the fellowship, and other teaching materials.

• Dilan Karaguler is a Mathematics PhD student and shares her COLA porfiolio here.
• Md Iqbal Hossain’s COLA portfolio appears on his main website here.
• Patrick Bertone-Haywood’s website features his deliverables and workshop reflections.
• Another website example is the screenshot below:

Course Assignments and Modules

Course assignments and modules created through the COLA Fellowship use skills from our workshops, such as designing for accessibility, multiple modalities, and/or using backward design. Course materials might include a full course map with one detailed example of a lesson plan, or focus on one course assignment or learning objective. Here are two examples:

• This course assignment is from Mathematics. It outlines principles of Universal Design for Learning that it incorporates for accessibility.

• This course module is from Fluid Mechanics. It considers student attendance in various modalities. View the full module at the link below.

Teaching Philosophies and Diversity Statements

• This teaching philosophy example comes from an instructor of writing and rhetoric.

• This teaching philosophy is from an instructor of engineering courses.

• This diversity statement is from an instructor in the sciences.