Academic and Instructional Innovation
Academic and Instructional Innovation works with faculty, staff, and students to support teaching and learning, faculty development, and professional growth.
Academic and Instructional Innovation (A&II) is a team of instructional designers, educational technologists, and system administrators, who can help you apply teaching best practices to your curriculum, make your courses current, relevant, and efficient, and help students get the most from their learning experience. We want to help you create fun, rewarding, and transformative teaching experiences—and most importantly, to help you succeed.
The A&II team is dedicated to giving you support with pedagogical topics and educational technologies that today’s student learning experience demands. Whether you’re teaching for the first time or have years of experience, we can help you!
What we do
- Support faculty in designing, delivering, and assessing courses and programs
- Facilitate effective use and leveraging of academic technology
- Support faculty in enhancing teaching, learning, and assessment
- Provide professional development
We offer support for academic technologies including Canvas, Panopto, Poll Everywhere, Respondus LockDown Browser & Monitor, Turnitin, VoiceThread, DesignPlus, and Zoom.
We can help you enhance, illustrate, and reinforce your teaching approach by tapping into different styles of learning to increase student engagement.
Learn more about in-person, online, hybrid, and flipped courses.
We support students with academic technologies from Canvas, Respondus LockDown Browser, and Turnitin to Panopto and video assignments. We provide classroom training, help guides, and resources for students.
The C2S Initiative provides students and faculty in selected SMU academic programs with an iPad as well as resources to support active and effective use of the iPads. The “U” in our logo refers to each of our students and how we support them in use of an iPad to connect them to the people, resources, and systems that will facilitate learning from many sources, at any time, from anywhere.
The SMU Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Mini-Grant Research Program supports faculty with $500 to engage in a small research project with the focus on improving SMU student learning. A research project may be related to pedagogy, technology, or course improvement with the intention of improving student learning.
A&II works in conjunction with faculty and other staff to educate on the uses of AI in teaching and health sciences and scholarship on this emerging technology.