The Challenge
Create a "Math Pathway" for Social Sciences
Like most universities, UNC Charlotte offers their students alternative "pathways" to achieve their math proficiency - a business pathway, and education pathway. But they didn't have a pathway for their social sciences program
and building one would require coordination and input
from stakeholders.
The Solution
The Social Sciences Math Pathways Workshop
The UNC Charlotte Department of Undergraduate Education and The Center for Teaching and Learning sponsored a three day workshop that brought together statistics faculty as well as social sciences faculty from receiving courses to have conversations about what is most beneficial for students and what skills are necessary for student success. Using strategic planning and visual learning design tools, we helped the faculty craft a vision for the project. In addition, we facilitated the creation of learning design patterns to use as building blocks to use as templates for course interactions.
“It allowed us to take this huge, long marathon and break it down into these short, manageable sprints that we could do very well on. Then we could take a breather, collect ourselves, see how far we've come, and then build on it.”
-Micheal Smalenberger, Department of Mathematics and Statistics Instructor at UNC Charlotte
UNC Charlotte students get stuck because they have to repeat courses that are not the best fit for them. They don’t find them engaging because they can’t figure out how statistics will help them be better at their chosen profession. Often they have to retake the course, but sometimes this is where they get tripped up and it causes them to drop out of the university. This three-day workshop provided a managed environment that allowed math faculty, social sciences faculty, and UNCC instructional designers to collaborate and innovate in ways that were not previously thought possible.
The Math Pathways Workshop helped craft a curriculum that will prepare students to be successful not only in their careers, but also to be successful in life. A forum where diverse faculty stakeholders participated in creating a unified vision and shared goals for the program. It provided:
- A common design language (LEMTM) that enables UNC Charlotte faculty and staff to collaboratively design, diagnose, and communicate course learning interactions
- LEMTM design patterns for learning interactions that will be used to create course learning designs.
Powered by LEMTM
- UNC Charlotte benefitted from our strategic planning system and its accompanying visual planning tools to help define the project goals. The resulting unified vision helped support collaboration and effective learning design.
- We assisted UNC Charlotte faculty with the design and creation of the statistics courses using the LEMTM suite of visualization tools. LEMTM allowed faculty to communicate, understand, critique, and improve proposed learning designs as they worked towards their stated goals.
