Innovative Teaching Strategies
4-week course for instructors and teaching assistants
Winter 2026: January 5th to January 30th
What is Innovative Teaching Strategies?
Join Academic Technology Services for Innovative Teaching Strategies (ITS), a four-week hybrid course that runs Winter and Summer semesters. Participants can expect to dedicate 3-5 hours per week to explore UD-licensed technologies and innovative instructional methods. This course provides a practical, collaborative approach to enhancing classroom confidence applicable to both physical and digital learning environments.
Course format
ITS is a hybrid course format with asynchronous content available in Canvas.
This course offers optional synchronous coffee hour sessions each Thursday at 1:30 PM.
During the synchronous Zoom sessions, ATS instructional designers and class participants engage in a learning community-based virtual hour. In addition, optional learning labs based on participant feedback will be offered.
Who should participate?
Whether you’re a new educator, experienced instructor, or teaching assistant who supports faculty, this course meets you where you are in your teaching and learning journey.
Participants will explore licensed tools such as Poll Everywhere, Perusall, Gemini, and Copilot from both student and educator perspectives to develop skills within a foundational framework: instructor presence, student engagement, assessment techniques, and digital media.
By experiencing these technologies from multiple perspectives, you’ll better understand how they can support your teaching and learning practice and when it might make sense to incorporate them into courses.
Weekly modules
Week 1: Instructor Presence & Communication
Week 2: Student Motivation & Engagements
Week 3: Digital Media & AI Video Creation
Week 4: Individual & Group Assessment
Will this course help with AI literacy?
Building on our foundational framework, this session now includes AI-enhanced resources to support developing AI literacy skills.
You’ll receive ready-to-use prompts and boilerplate templates to use AI to assist with the development of course content. The modules help you explore practical use cases and examples for designing effective learning assessments, and illustrate approaches for developing collaborative AI policies with student input.
This course provides opportunities to explore AI tools as an assistant in generating learning content that aligns with objectives and what students should achieve in their courses.
Hear from our course participants
I really enjoyed the pacing and length of the workshop. It was in a sweet spot.
The assignments were engaging and I really liked being able to comment and chat with other students on their posts.
Thank you for offering this course!
It was amazing!
I just wanted to write in here to say how grateful I am that you created this course; how much work I know you put into it and how valuable it was to pause and think more deeply about my class.
We, at UD, are so lucky to have your team.
Custom community of practice
Departmental or discipline-specific learning cohorts are available upon request. Similar to the ITS course, this cohort learning experience provides a customizable optional weekly Zoom coffee hour as the cohort’s community-based learning component. These optional coffee hours provide the opportunity to collaborate with ATS instructional designers and other higher education professionals in alignment with the learning modules and designed cohort needs.