With Georgia State University ranked as #1 public university for best undergraduate teaching and the #2 most innovative university in the country—these achievements beg the question: How does Georgia State do it better?
Part of the answer is simply the outstanding faculty and staff dedicated to the development of faculty, staff, and student opportunities. The Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Online Education (CETLOE) is committed to this very mission, with Brennan Collins as an Associate Director of Digital Pedagogy and Atlanta Studies specializing in curriculum development.
As a faculty member with over 17 years at Georgia State University, Collins has not only witnessed the evolution of much of Georgia State’s unique commitment to the student experience—he has helped mold it. As the former Associate Director of Writing Across the Curriculum, and a long-term member on CETLOE’s Teaching Effectiveness team, he has worked with hundreds of instructors to improve teaching and learning at Georgia State. A current focus is working with faculty to provide students with more interdisciplinary and project-based learning.
An example of this work is the Experiential Project-Based Interdisciplinary Curriculum, or EPIC, a program that seeks to make general education more meaningful and provide opportunities for students to work on long-term projects. In 2018, Risa Palm, former provost and senior vice president of academic affairs, brought together 20 faculty, staff, and upper-level administrators to discuss how Georgia State needed to adapt to new technologies and the modern career landscape. Collins was on the curriculum subcommittee, and the group put together ideas to design a more meaningful, and tangible, core curriculum.
One point of concern was the very common tendency, in all universities, for different disciplines to not interact despite having plenty of real-world professional overlap. Collins wants to give students a sense of connection with, rather than obligation to take, their core courses. The EPIC program works with faculty across the disciplines to better show students how the content and skills they are learning in their courses overlap and build upon each other.
EPIC also focuses on project-based learning. Long-term, meaningful project-based work, he said, provides the opportunity for collaboration that provides vital and unique professional experience. EPIC Project Labs open this opportunity more broadly to more university grade levels—first-year to graduate students. “The idea is to give students a chance to earn course credits working on some sort of public facing project, with students and faculty that aren’t necessarily from their own discipline,” Collins explains.
Some of the project labs themselves have gained wider attention and recognition. One such lab is Pollitik, a public opinion lab where students working with Professor Ryan Carlin found fascinating results in analyzing public opinion surveys regarding international leaders, and whether the public, in their respective countries, rally around leaders who contracted COVID-19. The analysis was published in the Washington Post.
Collins’s lab, Mapping Atlanta, has worked on projects adding to the public’s understanding of history through public-facing mapping projects. This has included a mapping project connected to the Department of History’s UNESCO World Heritage Civil Rights Trail proposal and an Ebola oral history map as a part of a digital exhibit from the David J. Sencer CDC Museum.
The benefits are not only for students, either.
“Most faculty understand that when you have students for a semester, you teach them something and then they leave. If you transition to long-term projects where students can participate for multiple semesters or years, you have experienced students to help write articles, create websites, and onboard other students,” Collins explained. “Whether it’s a passion project or professional research, if you start deliberately building a lab over time, you have more help—with students taking responsibility and creating something larger than you get with one or two graduate assistants.”
To Collins, collaboration and community involvement provides the real-world connection and experience that students sometimes lack in higher education. For more information about EPIC, visit epic.gsu.edu, and learn more about Georgia State’s broader efforts to help faculty deliver innovative teaching and learning at cetloe.gsu.edu.
-By Kate Billard