Over ten years ago, Sabancı University adopted the global effort to rethink the role of the faculty and the students in undergraduate education and prioritize “Scholarship of Teaching and Learning” (SoTL) that values evidence-based student learning. Many courses in the first-year core curriculum at Sabancı University, managed by the Foundations Development Directorate (FDD), adopt learner-centered active learning approaches based on SoTL, working with more than 1,000 freshman students every year. Especially, the Science of Nature (NS 101/102) Courses have been the flagship of this effort; the NS courses are offered in a theme-based modular format, emphasizing an interdisciplinary and student-centered course structure based on active learning.
Such a learner-centered approach is unique especially for large freshman courses in Turkish universities, and over the last 10 years we have accumulated a variety of experiences and data with our freshman students, which we believe are worth sharing. We have also developed and established professional development programs for instructors and assistants of the core curriculum courses to enlighten them about the philosophy behind the course design and to help them improve necessary skills to become effective facilitators in the student-centered learning environment.
The Workshop on Learner-Centered Approaches in College Education in the AI Era is aimed at sharing our experiences and providing a professional development opportunity for college-level educators, who are interested in SoTL and in applying innovative approaches to their courses. We plan to compile and anonymously share the participants’ experiences and resources they find in the process on this website, which we hope will benefit the larger educator community within Türkiye and beyond.
