Center For Teaching Excellence Helps Professors Move Classes Online

Aggies helping Aggies: For over 140 years, and continuing now, The Association provides help in time of need. From helping A&M professors take their classes online and keeping student workers on the payroll, to making sure a student could stay enrolled and the sudden need to put Muster online-only for the first time in history, Association donors make it possible.

Transitioning hundreds of courses for thousands of students to an exclusively online format required remarkable collaboration between departments at Texas A&M University. The university looked to experts across campus to assist faculty members during this unprecedented time. 

The Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) stepped up to serve in this capacity, as the Center’s primary role throughout the academic year is to provide learning opportunities and professional development for faculty, staff, post-doctoral fellows and graduate students through consultation services, trainings and workshops. The staff of the CTE supports all those involved in the instructional mission of Texas A&M University with information on practices proven to engage the students they teach in the transformational process of learning.

The CTE partnered with the Office of Academic Innovation to provide university-wide training for faculty to convert all face-to-face courses to an online format. All of the training and resources were compiled in a matter of one week and delivered the next week to ensure classes could resume on March 23, just one week after students were supposed to return from spring break. The Center has created new web resources – guides and videos – to share strategies for teaching and learning success in the online environment. Additionally, the CTE is working with faculty to co-present best practices when transitioning quickly converted classroom curriculum to more intentionally constructed online learning as summer sessions begin planning. 

Read about how the CTE adapted during this time to assist with Texas A&M’s Keep Teaching Initiative at tx.ag/KeepTeachingInitiative.

Support from The Association of Former Students helps the Center for Teaching Excellence with operational costs and graduate student assistance for the planning, implementation, and assessment of: faculty and graduate student professional development workshops and trainings, award ceremonies recognizing excellence in teaching, teaching related conferences, and faculty learning communities for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).

The Association of Former Students has a bold vision to engage 100,000 donors annually for Texas A&M by the end of 2020. To learn more, visit tx.ag/100Kby2020. To help us help more Aggies and offer more support for programs like the Center for Teaching Excellence, make a gift at tx.ag/Give.