The mission of Rotman Digital is to support digital teaching and learning at the Rotman School and to stimulate and nurture the development of new techniques and pedagogies. Consistent with this mission, RotmanDigital is soliciting proposals for research and preliminary prototyping and development of tools and techniques for more effectively stimulating, guiding and assessing learning outcomes. Proposals are invited in the following three domains from all faculty members with a full time appointment at Rotman St. George Campus:
- Assessment in the LLM Era. It has been argued that Large Language Models (such as ChatGPT from Open AI) pose a threat to the integrity of the academic assessment enterprise, and ample efforts to provide guidelines for their legitimate uses are ongoing. LLMs also offer opportunities for engaging and assessing learners in different LLM-informed ways. Rotman Digital seeks proposals that articulate, develop and test opportunities for making LLMs part of the educational experience of students. These may be through the co-optation of LLMs in the classroom or on assignments or the development of assignment questions that necessarily require skills LLMs cannot replicate.
- Content Design and Interactivity. Learning Management Systems have come of age. It does seem that we at the University of Toronto made a good choice with Canvas/Quercus. There is now a new generation of content creation and content interaction tools and platforms (e.g. Perusall, Honor Education, Hypothesis) that are re-shaping the landscape of course creation technologies inacademia. Notably, some enable high levels of interactivity among students and between students and instructors around a piece of content. This allows instructors and students alike to feel more connected to one another and to the content of the course – according to claims made by platforms users and creators. Rotman Digital seeks proposals for prototyping courses, modules and classes using such new content development tools. The emphasis will be on those which highlight their capacities for connecting students to content and instructors and each to the other.
- Learning and Learner Analytics. Rotman Digital and the Rotman School have made significant investments over the past five years in tools and platforms that register and track data about our students’ background, experience and learning outcomes in our programs. Rotman Digital seeks proposals for projects that use such data to make broad predictions and/or specific inferences about the effects of learner background and learning environment on the achievement of program, course and class-level learning objectives and on the achievement of career goals for our students.
Scope and Duration.
Proposals for funding of up to $30,000 and for a period of up to 3 years will be considered. A proposal (of no more than 2 pages [1.5 spacing, 12 pt], with the option to include supporting appendices) should have a clearly stated research or development objective, articulated stages for pursuing and accomplishing the objective, and a detailed budget. If relevant, the budget should specify support required to defray the cost of any software or platform license deemed necessary.
Please submit your proposal by April 7th, 2023, by email to rotmandigital@rotman.utoronto.ca.