The University of Arkansas at Fort Smith (UAFS) is supporting a strategic development aimed at improving collaboration between UAFS professors and students with a $500,000 donation from First National Bank of Fort Smith.
UAFS announced on Wednesday (21 August) the creation of a Centre for Teaching and Learning, a strategic development aimed at increasing teacher expertise and student engagement through innovative educational strategies.
“Since I arrived, I have hoped that we would create a center for teaching and learning on this campus,” said UAFS Chancellor Dr. Terisa Riley. “It is an important component of faculty development and an opportunity to truly invest in our people. By strengthening our mission, vision and commitments through this educational center, we are laying the foundation for our faculty and students to succeed in their academic endeavors.”
First National Bank of Fort Smith donated $500,000 to equip the center.
“At First National Bank, we believe in the ability of education to advance our region like few other initiatives can,” bank President Sam Sicard said in a statement. “When Chancellor Riley outlined the vision for the Center for Teaching and Learning at UAFS, I knew this was an opportunity for First National to invest in the future of our community and ensure we continue to develop knowledgeable and qualified individuals who want to live, work and serve in our region after they graduate.”
UAFS Provost Shadow Robinson said a center for teaching and learning is one of the few places on a university campus that has the potential to directly impact every faculty member and, in turn, every student. The center will provide the kind of professional support to help experts in their field, such as UAFS faculty members, become expert classroom teachers, Robinson said.
“It’s an opportunity to learn how to better engage today’s students,” he said. “It will help our teachers understand the students they will be interacting with on a daily basis.”
As part of the programs that will be available through the center, the university is now offering LinkedIn Learning to every full-time faculty, staff and student at the university. LinkedIn Learning offers more than 16,000 online courses taught by industry experts. The university is looking to hire a faculty member to be its first teaching and learning fellow. The fellow will begin the process of leveraging internal and external expertise to offer collaborative programs, a press release said.
Initially, the centre’s programming will be housed in Boreham Library. It will use internal and external expertise to deliver collaborative programming.
“The approach of a teaching and learning center is not to be the one with the most knowledge,” Riley said. “Instead, the role is to find out where the expertise exists on and off campus and how we can use that expertise to meet the needs of our faculty and our students.”
Robinson said the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic have increased the need for ongoing training of teaching staff.
“Literally every student who graduates between 2020 and 2030 is affected,” he said. “Every traditional student who enters our classrooms in the next decade will have had 15 months of emotional and psychological development impacted by the pandemic.”
Robinson said students who had already changed before the pandemic began are now changing even faster.
“And now we see different student populations from year to year,” Robinson said, noting that this is also due to rapid changes in the field of artificial intelligence.
The center will help educators understand how to incorporate AI into the classroom and prepare students on how to use it in today’s jobs. Riley said the center’s opening comes at just the right time to impact the student body due to changes in students’ backgrounds brought about by the impact of the pandemic and the development of AI.
“We know that developing and enhancing our faculty’s pedagogical understanding and educational innovations makes a huge difference in student learning,” Riley said. “It has a tremendous impact on student success.”
UAFS hopes the center will deepen relationships across campuses that contribute to student success through joint workshops with the Student Health Clinic, Counseling Center, Center for Academic Success, Babb Center for Career Services and more. The center will help faculty find holistic methods to prepare students for hands-on learning experiences, internships and career pathways, empowering faculty to become even more engaged with students, Robinson said.
“Today, students expect more than a professor who is an expert in a particular field or even a leading researcher,” says Robinson, who taught and researched nuclear physics for 15 years. “They expect a professor who can link the course content to their careers or graduate programs.”
