Proposal

Narrative

Since its inception in Fall 2007, the Supplemental Instruction (SI) program in the Center for Learning and Student Success (CLASS) has grown to support a plethora of historically difficult courses at FAU. SI consists of peer-facilitated study sessions in which students discuss difficult course content with a peer leader, learning how to integrate what to learn with how to learn. Our SI program typically supports 20 courses and on average 2,000 unique FAU students per semester. Through data analysis conducted by the Office of Institutional Effectiveness and Analysis, we are proud to report that students who attend 6 or more SI sessions are likely to receive half to a whole letter grade better than their peers who did not attend SI. There is also a statistically significant performance lift in some courses for students who attend 2 - 5 SI sessions. Beginning in fall 2016, CLASS entered a collaboration with the FAU Center for Online Learning and Continuing Education to develop an innovative form of SI that allows online students to connect to in-person SI sessions. Since that time, hundreds of FAU students have joined online via Zoom in one of our SI classrooms outfitted with lecture capture technology. Last year, we were awarded a similar proposal to outfit GS 222 with additional lecture capture technology to further enhance the student learning experience. The new technology in GS 222 enhances the student learning experiences and its design incorporated many lessons learned from our original implementation in GS 226. This proposal is asking for funding to upgrade the outdated technology in GS 226 to the same systems in place in GS 222. FAU is committed to excellence. Our center cannot continue to deliver excellent hybrid services in a room with outdated technology. To date, we have experienced a large number of technology issues in GS 226, most likely due to the fact that all of the equipment is reaching the end of its lifecycle. See attached for more.

Facilities

GS 226 is classified as an SI classroom and is managed by the Center for Learning and Student Success. GS 226 is only used for our academic support services as well as departmental trainings. Thus, GS 226 is already outfitted with the furniture and infrastructure to support the addition of the requested technology solutions. The Center for Teaching and Learning, where GS 226 is located, is outfitted with a security system and magnetic locking entrances to ensure the security for all of our technology solutions.

Hardware Requirements

Please see attached quote from OIT.

Software Requirements

Please see attached quote from OIT.

Personnel Costs

Installation will be completed in collaboration with the FAU Office of Information Technology. Please see the attached quote for the one-time installation costs. Please note that after installation operations associated with this project will be supported by existing staff, so no increase in personnel costs is anticipated.

Other Costs

N/A

Timeline

As soon as the awarded funds are made available, installation will be scheduled with the contractor. When we renovated our other SI classroom, the vendor took a long weekend to install the systems in an effort to not interrupt our operations.

Sustainability

This proposal consists of mainly one-time hardware costs. Since we have individuals in our center who are familiar with the requested technology, it also does not require any additional personnel costs. Therefore, this proposal is sustainable from a financial perspective. We anticipate that the requested technology will be used for 3-5 years before needing any upgrades. Future upgrades may be submitted as future Technology Fee Grant proposals or funded through Undergraduate Studies. Therefore, this proposal is also sustainable from a technology perspective.

Resource Matching

N/A

Implementing Organization

The Center for Learning and Student Success will work in concert with the FAU Office of Information Technology to implement this project.