UNCA receives grant to create online and hybrid versions of seven humanities courses

Press release from UNC Asheville:

UNC Asheville is one of just 317 organizations in the U.S. to be awarded a highly competitive CARES Act grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The nearly $300,000 grant will fund professional development and curricular digitization, enabling key humanities courses to be delivered in engaging hybrid and online formats. Most importantly, the grant will ensure the preservation of adjunct instructor positions in the humanities.

All UNC Asheville students take three foundational liberal arts courses during their first year, including a first-year seminar, a course in academic writing and critical inquiry, and the introductory Humanities Program course, a study of the ancient world. In their intentional focus on first-year students, the courses serve to bolster academic success and retention. Students pursue three additional classes in the Humanities Program over the course of their college careers, ensuring that a majority of UNC Asheville students experience their impact in any given semester.  The grant will fund important redesign of these seven courses for hybrid or online delivery so that they can stimulate student interest and curiosity in any format.

“Humanities courses are essential elements of a UNC Asheville education because they engage students in exploring the meaningful questions about life from global perspectives about what it means to be human. We are happy to be partnering with the first-year seminars that provide opportunities for topical inquiry as well as the first year writing courses for their emphasis on self reflection and effective communication,” said Katherine C. Zubko, NEH Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, who also directs the program.

“We are dedicated to improving the Humanities Program with engaging digital classes and video lectures, using best practices to stimulate lively and thoughtful online discussions, and transferring everything we learn by doing that to make our in-person classes that much better as well. This funding will help with all of that.”

Faculty are hard at work this summer on methods and approaches to better suit online and hybrid learning formats, engaging in training workshops on technical skills, course design, and other pedagogical components to support their own course and student needs.

In the Humanities Program, a dedicated digital coordinator, Humanities Lecturer Renuka Gusain, and associates will assist faculty with refining and recording lectures for asynchronous (“on demand”) online presentation, finding illustrative images, video and sound that are creative-commons designated, and looking at ways to condense information and make it more accessible to all students.  Some of the funding will purchase needed digital equipment, and a significant portion will compensate faculty teaching in the grant-supported courses for the time they are devoting to professional development and redesign of their courses.

“We had to make a quick transition this spring, adapting in-person courses to remote instruction, but what we are doing now is to take things to a much higher level with classes that are intentionally designed for a digital environment,” said Melissa Himelein, UNC Asheville’s dean of social sciences, and former director of the University’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), who is serving as the NEH grant’s project director.

“Most UNC Asheville faculty are new to online teaching, having focused primarily on creating active learning-focused in-person classrooms. We are fortunate to have a highly skilled instructional technology team led by Laurie Miles and Anne Ogg, along with several talented faculty, helping with this effort.”

Most gratifying, noted both Zubko and Himelein, is the NEH CARES Act grant’s focus on retaining adjunct faculty and lecturers in the grant-supported courses.  UNC Asheville’s seven humanities courses supported by the Cares Act grant are:

●      First Year Seminar – an interdisciplinary experience addressing the nature of a liberal arts education.
●      Academic Writing and Critical Inquiry – emphasizing writing as a tool of discovery and analysis, and assisting students in developing effective communication skills.
●      The Ancient World – pondering timeless questions of contemporary relevance, such as the relationship between humans and nature, and how one lives a good life.
●      Selves and Communities, 300-1700 – utilizing literature, art, music, and material culture to consider such issues as the transmission of knowledge, creation of religious institutions, and gendered expressions of divine and human love.
●      Global Modernities – focusing on the impact of and resistance to modernities across the world, including Atlantic revolutions, Islamic reforms, European Enlightenment, and Asian imperialisms.
●      Critical Perspectives on Contemporaneity – one of two senior capstone courses which students choose between.
●      Cultivating Global Citizenship – also a senior capstone course; both courses consider issues focused in the contemporary world.

For more information, please visit humanities.unca.edu.