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PLATO Program
The University of Mississippi

Team-based course development

We are looking for teams of 2-4 faculty in the same department and teaching the same general education, high-enrollment course to work with adaptive courseware suppliers to transition lecture-format delivery into interactive and adaptive lessons in adaptive courseware.

Benefits to departments and faculty teams

Stipend – PLATO will provide each faculty team member a stipend based on the year of the grant and the level of course build. See the chart below to find your stipend amount.

Interactive content and more meaningful use of class time – Adaptive courseware is an interactive delivery of course content that frees instructors to use class time addressing higher level learning, conducting discussions, and having students engage in collaborative problem-solving.

Successful students – The combination of adaptive courseware and the blended, flipped course format has proven to increase student success and student satisfaction.

Faculty development – PLATO will provide several faculty development opportunities each semester and in the summer months. These include hands-on workshops, communities of practices, webinars, and conferences.

Research opportunities and support – Adaptive learning is a relatively new and unstudied area of teaching and learning, thus there is a lot of interest on the part of universities, suppliers, policy makers, and charitable foundations on how to best implement it on scale, integrate it into the curriculum, and measure its usefulness. Both the APLU and SRI have funding available to support faculty research in their use of adaptive learning. In addition, PLATO has made a commitment to fund graduate assistants to help with research and to help with the use of adaptive courseware data to improve teaching and learning. Graduate student funding terms are ½ stipend each semester for each course (not section) taught using adaptive courseware.

Community of practice – Faculty who participate in the PLATO Program will regularly meet with others on campus doing the same work. There are also department and course-specific communities of practice at the national level who are supporting each other in adaptive learning.

Conference travel support – PLATO will help fund faculty who wish to attend edtech conferences, APLU meetings, or their own disciplinary conferences at which they are presenting on adaptive learning.

Responsibilities of faculty teams

Duties related to PLATO Program – You will be asked to work with the program manager to review suppliers, choose adaptive courseware that works for your course, and scale the use of adaptive courseware so that at least 50% of students who take that particular course are doing so using adaptive courseware any given semester. You will be asked to meet with the program manager and other PLATO Program faculty on a monthly basis, participate in APLU site visit meetings, participate in campus-wide PLATO Program events, and take part in faculty development events related to adaptive teaching and learning.

Duties related to your class – We ask that you

  • integrate adaptive courseware as the primary delivery source of course content, practice, and review;
  • have your students complete pre- and post-semester surveys regarding the use of adaptive courseware (we will provide those to you);
  • report to us student success rates in the classes in which you’ve integrated adaptive courseware;
  • include collaborative problem-based and/or active learning in your class sessions;
  • use the instructor dashboard to track student progress and intervene when students are falling behind or in trouble;
  • use the data analytics to review content areas and assessment questions that give students trouble.

Please email adaptivelearning@olemiss.edu or posulliv@olemiss.edu if you are interested in becoming a PLATO faculty fellow or faculty team.