The Creative Course Collaboration (C3) Lab is an experience where teams of faculty members collaborate to make good courses even better, especially for first-year students. Guided by a faculty colleague and supported by instructional designers, C3 teams draw on the best ideas from colleagues on campus as well as the scholarship of learning and teaching.

While each team will explore many of the same critical questions (e.g., “How can we help more students succeed in the course without lowering the bar academically?”), they will probably come up with different answers. The bottom line is that in the C3 Lab, dedicated teachers help each other step back from a course and intentionally create learning experiences that help students learn even more.

C3 Core Premises

C3 is built on 3 core premises:

  1. Even though our courses are good, they could be even better.

  2. We can build even better courses—and help students learn more—by tapping into:

    • Colleagues’ fresh perspectives
    • Expert campus resources
    • New technologies
    • How new generations of students learn
    • Best of scholarship of learning and teaching
    • Best practices from across campus

  3. Faculty become inspired and innovative teachers when they:

  • Collaborate with other teachers
  • Engage in the scholarship of learning and teaching
  • Seek access to gifts of the Spirit

The Vision

  • Create a culture of inspired inquiry and innovation. 
  • Create a culture of friendship, collegiality, and collaboration.
  • Team members will become intentional designers of learning experiences. 
  • Team members will become practitioners of the scholarship of learning and teaching.
  • Harness technology to so that the modern BYU-Idaho student engages and learns more.
  • Create innovative and engaging General Education courses that help BYU-Idaho students from all backgrounds succeed.

The Team

  • 1 Course Steward (team lead, 3 hours PDL)
  • 2-4 Faculty (1-2 cross-curricular, 1-3 hours PDL)
  • 1 C3 faculty facilitator
  • 1 Course designer
  • Student representation

More info...

The Committment

  • Each C3 team meets together for 2-3 hours per week
  • Team members spend a few hours each week in study and development.

The Process

  • The team will wrestle with questions, topics, or issues. 
  • The team studies research, best practices, literature, and tools.
  • The team meets to discuss, brainstorm, and collaborate.
  • The team creates solutions, designs materials, and instructions.

Measurable Outcomes

  • Establish clear outcomes and objectives for the course.
  • Design 1-3 intentional course improvements to be measured.
  • Create a course that meets the General Education Guidelines and Requirements (See Attachment Below)
  • Create materials and structure that will enable any faculty member the structure and flexibility to teach the course successfully while preserving room for personal creativity and experimentation. 
 GE_area_guidelines_and_criteria_(clean)_(1).docx

Summary

We believe that BYU-Idaho's teachers and courses are some of the best in the country. The C3 Lab provides an opportunity for inspired faculty to step back and take a fresh look at modern student needs, current research, and high-impact practices.  It will build on the considerable successes already present in any course as well as in other courses on campus.  The process will be collaborative, creative, invigorating and effective.  All who participate will walk away with a new awareness, with new skills, new ideas, and new tools that they can begin to implement in their own courses immediately or use to guide their teaching team through revisions of their own.