Celebrating our Faculty Fellows

In labs and lecture halls, in online courses and seminar classes, faculty are experimenting: bringing virtual reality into their syllabi, rethinking what "active" really looks like in a learning environment, asking hard and honest questions about what AI means for their disciplines, and doing the careful, essential work of making sure every student can fully access and participate in the learning experience faculty have worked so hard to create.

This issue of The Connected Professor is, in many ways, a celebration of that work and of the community of educators doing it together.

Teaching can be energizing and exciting … and it can also be extremely isolating. Too often, innovative ideas stay locked inside a single classroom. The instructor who had them never knows there are colleagues just across campus, or across the state, doing similar work and maybe struggling with the same issues or experimenting in the same way because they read the same article.

The LT Faculty Fellow Programs are built to change that. Whether faculty join us through the Generative AI Initiative, the eXtended Reality Initiative, the Mosaic Active Learning Initiative, the Digital Gardener Initiative, the ALCOVE Initiative, the Learning Analytics Initiative, or the Digital Accessibility Liaisons, they step into something bigger than professional development. They step into a network — one that spans all nine IU campuses, now includes more than 600 fellows, and continues to grow because the work it produces is real, meaningful, and visible.

Each program offers structured support, personalized mentorship, a modest stipend, and (perhaps most importantly) a community of colleagues who are asking the same type of questions you are. The topics in each program vary. The challenges differ by discipline and context. But the model is consistent: bring curious, student-focused faculty together, give them time and support, and watch what they create.