2025 Teaching and Learning RFPs

Summary of Opportunities

Proposal Requirements and Checklist

Proposals should be five pages (not including the cover sheet) and should include:

• Cover Sheet: Include the name and affiliations of all PI(s) and the title of the course or project.
• Course or Project Overview: Provide a brief overview and explanation of your project. Include intended audience, student enrollment figures, and information on department support for the design of the course or project.
• Rationale and Improved Learning Outcomes: Write a strong and compelling rationale for the project, including how the project will improve or enhance students learning outcomes and engagement. 
• Project Activities: Describe the course or project activities.
  Below are guidelines on how to complete this section if applying to the Innovative Course Design, Innovative Module Design, and Interdisciplinary Teaching Initiatives awards.
  • Describe the course design as it currently exists or the vision for a new course.
  • Specify which student learning outcomes will be enhanced or improved through the course design or redesign. 
  • Describe how the course design or redesign will structure the student learning experience through enhanced engagement with course materials, instructors, faculty, and other students.
  • If applicable, describe new technologies and/or media and how their inclusion will enhance student engagement and learning.
  • Describe course assessments or appropriate changes to the current assessments (e.g., assignments, exams, projects, problem sets) due to the course design or redesign.
• Evidence Supporting Design: Articulate how the course/project design or redesign aligns with theories and methods in teaching and learning research and scholarship. 
• Evaluation Plan: Identify the project’s goals, outcomes, or products and briefly describe a plan for evaluating project success or impact. 
• In-kind Support Request: 
  • The CTL can offer support in learning design, project evaluation, project management, media production, and software development. The CTL encourages all prospective applicants to schedule a consultation to develop the project plan and the appropriate in-kind support level. Please contact ColumbiaCTL@columbia.edu to schedule a meeting.
  • For the SOLER Seed Grants, prospective applicants are strongly encouraged to schedule a consultation with soler@columbia.edu.
• Budget and Budget Justification: Modest financing may also be requested for projects necessitating support with software licenses, pedagogical development materials, or course assistants. Provide a detailed budget and justification for funds.
• Course/Project Sustainability: For Interdisciplinary Teaching Initiatives (ITIs) and Large-Scale projects only, include a plan that describes how the course/project will be sustained after implementation.  
• Letter of Support: Comments from the Dean or Vice Dean on the importance of the proposal plan to the department and school will provide the review committee with additional information on which to base their funding decision. For Interdisciplinary Teaching Initiatives (ITIs), submit letters of support from all relevant Deans and Vice Deans. A letter of support is not a requirement for Large-Scale proposals.

Eligibility

• Full-time and part-time faculty are invited to apply, with some exceptions below. Individual faculty, groups of faculty from the same department, and interdisciplinary teams are welcome to apply; however, teams will receive one award.
• SOLER Seed Grants are open to full-time faculty only. Review specific eligibility for SOLER Seed Grants.
• Eligible courses will run during either Fall 2025, Spring 2026, or Summer 2026.
• The CTL encourages all prospective applicants to schedule a consultation to develop the project plan and the appropriate in-kind support level. Please contact ColumbiaCTL@columbia.edu to schedule a meeting.

Award Types

Innovative Course Design

This award supports the redesign of existing courses or the design of new courses to improve teaching and learning using innovative learning strategies. We encourage faculty to innovate and experiment with projects that focus on inclusive pedagogy, collaborative peer learning and mentoring, and teaching with AI. Awardees will receive in-kind support from the CTL.

We encourage approaches that re-imagine class as a space for active and collaborative learning, where pedagogical innovations provide many opportunities for creative change within the Columbia curriculum. These novel modes of education allow for the thoughtful exploration of new teaching methods, course designs, and strategies for promoting active learning.

This request for proposals identifies innovative courses to be developed over the next academic year. Proposals from all disciplines and subject areas are welcome, but we particularly encourage those that:

• Develop ideas with significant potential to enhance teaching effectiveness and student learning and engagement
• Make creative use of custom tools, online platforms, visualizations, media, etc., to make the course more accessible and engaging to students and/or to support course assignments 
• Include consideration of professional development needs to train instructors in new or alternative pedagogies to accommodate newly designed courses or delivery approaches
• Include consideration of any necessary or novel skills or digital literacies that students will need to engage in the new course format
• Lead to measurable impact on student learning

Innovative Course Module Design (Start Small!) 

This award supports experimentation with a new pedagogical strategy or tool without attempting a full course redesign. These awards are designed to promote innovative thinking about and approaches to teaching, learning, and student engagement that involve scalable high-impact practices and thoughtful assessment of student learning.

Faculty who have ideas for course innovation are encouraged to use this Course Module Design (Start Small!) award to pilot tools and/or pedagogical strategies that could be expanded into a future Innovative Course Design proposal. Successful recipients of the Course Module Design will be given special consideration for future Innovative Course Design opportunities. 

Awardees will receive in-kind support from the CTL.

Interdisciplinary Teaching Initiatives (ITI)

The Interdisciplinary Teaching Initiatives award is designed to support faculty from different disciplines/departments/schools to work collaboratively on the design and launch of innovative teaching initiatives that will benefit undergraduate or graduate learners across two or more departments and/or schools. We encourage faculty to innovate and experiment with projects that focus on inclusive pedagogy, collaborative peer learning and mentoring, and teaching with AI. Awardees will receive in-kind support from the CTL for teams of 2-4 faculty from different departments/schools to consider, develop, and launch interdisciplinary initiatives that enhance student learning. The project must have the potential for making a significant, lasting impact across the department/school/program beyond the funding period and must be sustainable. Awardees will also commit to sharing their project as a model for changing approaches to teaching in their home departments/schools. 

The types of projects that could be supported through this opportunity are initiatives such as:

• Developing interdisciplinary project-based courses to serve as foundational or capstone courses across departments or schools
• Integrating interdisciplinary experiential learning opportunities (study abroad, internships, community engagement, research with a faculty member, etc.) and assessments of experiential learning across courses and programs
• Consideration of writing-intensive or research-intensive courses across disciplines to further collaboration, coordination, and information fluency 
• Collaborative development of teaching evaluation and review practices across departments or schools, such as implementation or revision of peer review processes, best practices in using student evaluation data (for administrators and faculty), teaching observation training for departmental reviewers
• Planning and curricular alignment of digital projects (such as capstones, digital humanities research, and maker space assignments) in majors or Core courses across disciplines or schools with learning design and assessment

Proposals must involve faculty from two or more departments or schools and may be in collaboration with centers or institutes. Proposals are welcome from all departments and schools at Columbia, as are all disciplines and subject areas. Principal Investigators (PI) must submit letters of support from all relevant Deans and Vice Deans.  

Successful proposals will: 

• Demonstrate thoughtful interdisciplinary collaboration around teaching initiatives or curriculum development, involving two or more instructors and/or administrators from different disciplines/schools/departments 
• Describe how the interdisciplinary collaboration will improve student learning at the undergraduate or graduate level 
• Include appropriate learning goals and methods of assessing student learning based on the teaching initiative 
• Have the potential to become sustainable 

Large-Scale Teaching & Learning

The Large-Scale Teaching & Learning award offers in-kind support of coordinated efforts around teaching initiatives. The project must have the potential for making a significant, lasting impact within a department/school/program beyond the funding period and must be sustainable. We encourage faculty to innovate and experiment with projects that focus on inclusive pedagogy, collaborative peer learning and mentoring, and teaching with AI. The types of projects that could be supported through this opportunity are large-scale initiatives such as:

• Curriculum review (course requirements for majors and/or program curricula), including assessment practices, capstone courses, mapping courses and student pathways, and creating departmental learning outcomes;
• Integrating experiential learning (e.g. study abroad, internships, community engagement, research with a faculty member) and assessments of experiential learning at the course and program levels;
• Consideration of departmental teaching evaluation and review practices, such as implementation or revision of peer review processes, best practices in using student evaluation data (for administrators and faculty), teaching observation training for departmental reviewers, development of teaching portfolios, and ensuring equitable and inclusive processes for the review of teaching;
• Development of pedagogical facilitation skills, such as facilitating active learning and student engagement with material, peers, and instructors; inclusive teaching practices at the departmental and individual course levels; contemplative practices in teaching and learning; student reflective practices to build student metacognition for learning; and promoting and assessing learning in discussion-based courses;
• Development of robust support and resources for graduate student instructors, such as department or school-based orientations to teaching, practice teaching sessions, and peer teaching support initiatives for graduate students;
• Planning and curricular alignment of digital projects (such as capstones, digital humanities research, and maker space assignments) in majors or Core courses with learning design and assessment.

SOLER Seed Grant

This opportunity empowers faculty to engage in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Research – that is, to lead formal research efforts to better understand and improve teaching and learning in Columbia courses. Projects generally center around measuring the impact of a novel instructional approach; the approach may be high-tech or low-tech, and the research questions may be discipline-specific (i.e., related to discrete learning objectives) or discipline-generic (i.e., related to broader themes about student attitudes and behavior). Strong proposals are grounded in established theories, feature an experimental design, and present quantitative or mixed-methods approaches for measuring student outcomes. The opportunity also supports variations on SoTL Research that integrate elements of these related fields: (1) Learning Analytics, i.e., extracting insights from academic technology data streams; and (2) Applied Learning Sciences, i.e., bridging the divide between the laboratory and the classroom by connecting researchers who primarily study teaching and learning to Columbia courses. 

Read more about these fields and SOLER’s relevant work here. 

In-kind support features prominently in this opportunity, as SOLER will assist awardees through ongoing, in-depth consultations. Services include framing research objectives and matching study designs to specific aims, developing or refining methods of assessment or evaluation, navigating the Institutional Review Board approval process, devising methods for data analysis and visualization, and developing a plan to disseminate findings. Read more about the SOLER Seed Grant RFP requirements.

Submission Procedure

Faculty submitting a proposal must complete the proposal submission form. In this form, you will be asked to attach your proposal with a letter of support, if applicable, as one PDF. This is a multipage form, so we recommend that you preview the submission questions for the grants (in PDF format) linked below.

• Innovative Course Design
• Innovative Course Module Design
• Interdisciplinary Teaching Initiatives (ITI)
• Large-Scale Teaching & Learning – for school, department, or program projects
• SOLER Seed Grant

Deadline

The deadline is Monday, May 5, 2025 at 5:00 P.M.  We look forward to continuing to support Columbia faculty as they develop new and exciting enhancements of teaching and learning at the University.

Review Process

Proposals will be reviewed by a committee of faculty representing a range of disciplines and schools who will provide a recommended set of awards to the Provost.

Notification

Awards will be announced by Friday, June 6, 2025. Faculty will be notified and assigned a CTL contact for the project. The CTL contact, together with a team of staff with appropriate expertise for the specific project, will provide support in instructional design, pedagogy, media and/or technologies, and assessment.

Reporting

Awardees are required to submit a summary report of project success. The report should reference assessment and evaluation data and describe insights and conclusions, answering such questions as:

For Innovative Course or Module Redesign Projects:

• How did the project improve student learning in the course? 
• What were the direct or indirect methods used to evaluate the improvement of student learning? What were the findings? 
• How closely did the final outcomes match the goals of the project? Please feel free to include information about how the project outcomes exceeded your goals or how they may have changed as a result of unexpected developments. 
• Which project activities went as planned? Which didn’t?
• Reflecting back:
  • If you could redo this teaching innovation project given the same resources, what might you do differently?
  • What lessons did you learn (or what advice would you share with colleagues?) about embarking on a course or module redesign? 
• Looking forward: 
  • With the above data and reflections in mind, how has this project–the experience, the data, your reflections–influenced your future course design decisions and/or teaching practice?
  • How might you reasonably sustain the benefits of these course redesign decisions in the future?
  • Based on what you learned on this project, what are some small changes you might make to other courses that you teach?

For Large-Scale and Interdisciplinary Teaching Initiative Projects:

• How closely did the final outcomes match the goals of the project? Please feel free to include information about how the project outcomes exceeded your goals or how they may have changed as a result of unexpected developments. 
• Which project activities went as planned? Which didn’t?
• How has this large-scale project influenced the teaching and learning practices in your department / school / program so far?
• Reflecting Back: 
  • If you could redo this large-scale project given the same resources, what might you do differently?
  • What lessons did you learn (or what advice would you share with colleagues?) about implementing large-scale change in your department / school / program?
• Looking Forward: 
  • Consider how you can leverage your large-scale project to further advance teaching and learning in your department / school / program:
  • Given that large-scale projects focus on making a significant, lasting impact within a department / school / program, what steps toward sustainability will you take to build on the outcomes of your project over the next year?
  • What other teaching and learning efforts might this large-scale project help you implement in your department / school / program?

Awardees will be invited to present on their projects at CTL events including the annual Celebration for Teaching and Learning Symposium in order to share the lessons learned with the broader Columbia community. Additionally, awardees might consider submitting an article for publication or presenting at a disciplinary or pedagogical conference. Please note: faculty who wish to make student data public as part of this dissemination may need to obtain IRB approval.

Support for Applicants

• Contact the CTL at ColumbiaCTL@columbia.edu to request a consultation. CTL consultants will help applicants select the appropriate opportunity, answer questions about the application process, and/or provide feedback on proposals.
• Register for a RFP Town Hall offered on Tuesday, April 8 from 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM or Friday, April 25 from 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM. At this Q&A event, CTL and SOLER staff will answer questions about the types of awards and the application process.

Appendix 1: SOLER Seed Grants (SSGs) 2025 RFP Requirements

Eligibility:

The Principal Investigator (PI) as well as Co-PIs (see below) must be full-time Columbia faculty members.

Postdocs, graduate students, part-time or adjunct faculty, and staff may be included on proposals as co-investigators but may not serve as PIs or Co-PIs. 

Applicants are strongly encouraged to schedule an individual consultation with SOLER prior to submitting the application in order to develop the project plan and define the scope of in-kind support. Please contact soler@columbia.edu to schedule a consultation. 

Proposal Requirements:

I. Project Summary

• Project title
• Designate one investigator as the Principal Investigator (PI). Include the PI’s full name, title, department, and email address.
• List all other personnel (e.g., collaborators, graduate students, postdocs) as co-investigators. Use an asterisk to indicate any co-investigator designated as a co-PI (for example, if the application involves a collaboration between two faculty members). 
• Abstract: Describe the project in non-technical language; articulate the problem the project addresses and your corresponding research question or objective; specify what makes the project innovative; describe your plan to ascertain student impact or other insights; state your overall hypothesis or predictions. 

II. Project Scope

Framing

• State the problem that the project addresses and your corresponding objective.
• Identify specific research questions and explain how they align with the overarching objective. For each research question, state your corresponding hypothesis. 
• Describe the overall methodology that will be used in this study, covering such factors as retrospective vs. prospective data collection, interventional vs. non-interventional, randomized vs. non-randomized, observational, experimental, etc.

Participants

• Identify your target participants (e.g., students).
• Specify how participants will be identified and contacted.
• Estimate how many participants will be impacted during the grant period.
• Briefly describe how the innovation will continue to benefit student cohorts beyond the grant duration (e.g., through curricular changes).

Rationale and Literature Review

• Describe how the project aligns with national and/or Columbia strategic initiatives.
• Highlight key findings of relevant educational research. Include citations as appropriate.
• Describe any prior work your team has done in this space.

Assessment and Evaluation Plan for Specific Aims

• Describe novel or to-be-adapted measurement tools (e.g., surveys).
• Outline key comparisons and briefly describe data analysis procedures.   

Role of Key Personnel

• Specify the expectations and obligations of all project personnel.
• Outline expected needs for in-kind support from SOLER facilitators. 

III. Project Timeline

Use a timeline to depict the schedule for your project. The timeline should include start and finish dates for your project as well as the dates or periods during which various project tasks will occur. Indicate how you will monitor the effectiveness of the project as it evolves. All elements of the project should be completed within 12 months of receiving funds.

IV. Budget Overview and Justification

Provide a detailed budget and justification for funds. Funding can be used for expenses such as equipment, media development, compensation for study participants (typically students), and compensation for research assistants. Please mention other sources of funding, if any. 

V. Letter of Support (1-Page Maximum)

A short letter of support from the PI’s department chair must be uploaded as a separate PDF along with your application. The letter should specifically indicate (1) that students in the relevant course(s) may be recruited for the study, and (2) that the department will implement procedures to ensure that the financial and administrative responsibilities of the research will be met.