Call for Proposals — Summer 2023 Online Courses

UPDATE: Extended deadline — calls for proposals will be accepted until May 20 at 12pm.

We seek proposals from all interested faculty to develop online courses to be offered during Summer Session 2023 and beyond*. The call for proposals is open to all senate faculty and lecturers.

This opportunity is focused on supporting proposals for courses that will help significant numbers of UC Santa Cruz students make progress toward their degree. This can include online versions of major requirements or bottleneck courses in programs, pairs or clusters of courses, high enrollment or impacted courses, or key for degree progress for incoming first-year or transfer students (like prerequisites, major and declaration requirements, or classes not articulated at CCCs). Multiple proposals from faculty in the same department will be considered and additional approval will be sought from the chair should the proposals be favorably reviewed.

We are acutely aware of the housing shortage and high cost of living in Santa Cruz, and believe students need to be able to make progress toward their degree regardless of the location and time zone they are in, or working and family obligations many have during summer. For this reason, we are only seeking to fund online courses that are asynchronous, or that combine asynchronous and synchronous instruction, with a focus on courses that haven’t already been designed, developed, and approved by the academic senate as online courses. Courses with more than 50% of synchronous components, or any in-person components, are not eligible for this call in order to deliver on the stated intention of online instruction in the service of increased access during summer.

A committee will review proposals and awardees will be required to submit a request for online course approval to the Senate Committee on Courses of Instruction (CCI) by early January, 2023 per the course approval calendar.

Faculty whose proposals are accepted will receive one course release (tenure track faculty) or course equivalency (lecturers)** and staff support to develop the course. Courses will be developed in Fall 2022 for their initial offering in Summer 2023. Summer courses can run in 5-, 8-, or 10-week sessions.

Faculty retain intellectual property rights of their developed course materials as defined in the UC policy addressing the Ownership of Course Materials. Faculty participation in this opportunity is voluntary and a condition of the program is that the awarded instructor agrees to make their course available to be offered for five consecutive summers. The awarded instructor has the first right of refusal to teach the course. If they refuse, the department chair can select an alternative instructor. While uncommon, if this happens, the course materials will be made available to the alternative instructor for the offering term only. The original version of the course will be retained by the awarded instructor and left unaltered.

Courses will be developed in a small cohort of faculty led by a faculty fellow and supporting staff. The cohort will work together for six weeks, meeting once weekly in what we expect will be a meaningful learning community. Each participant will also be meeting individually with their assigned instructional designer every week throughout the quarter. Loaner equipment will be made available to awardees for recording lecture videos at home, or they will be given access to studios on campus. The cohort will meet every Friday between September 30 and November 4, 2022, from 10 to 11:30am. Participating in the cohort sessions is a requirement of the program.

The deadline for proposals is Thursday, May 12 (end of day).

Proposal Guidelines

Using this form, provide responses to the following prompts:

1. Provide a brief overview of the course, including demand based on previous offerings; for new courses, estimate demand.

2. Explain how the proposed online course satisfies the criteria of this call listed in the 2nd paragraph. The proposal is not expected to satisfy all of the listed criteria, but rather to present strong reasoning for the criterion it meets.

3. Explain why this course would benefit from being offered in an online format during summer. Are there specific student learning outcomes that you are attempting to amplify through the offering format? If you have data from previous in-person or remote offerings of the course that are guiding your thinking on using an online format, you are encouraged to include it.

You will also be asked to append the current course syllabus to your proposal and to confirm that you have discussed both the departmental need for your proposed course and the offering commitment with your Department Chair. For proposals that are favorably reviewed, the committee will seek chair confirmation prior to notifying award recipients.

Questions? — Contact Online Education at online@ucsc.edu.

* For faculty unable to take course release in 2022-23, release can be deferred until 2023-24 with the initial offering in Summer 2024.

** Total compensation for the academic year is subject to a limit of 100% effort.