For the third year, our Faculty Learning Community (FLC) brought South’s lab experts together to explore best practices for lab instructional support, increase student engagement, and share resources to design meaningful and transparent exercises. A universal challenge across our disciplines is making content feel relevant and applicable to students’ lives and future careers. To bridge the gap, we explored practical strategies to enhance course relevancy by linking learning objectives to everyday experiences, career readiness, and effective course design. We considered content delivery methods, the role of AI in learning, and teamwork-focused activities to refine our course design and align it with real-world professional expectations. This roundtable discussion explores our takeaways from this year’s meetings, revealing how the FLC discussions have influenced us in our unique lab experiences and disciplines to answer the question of why our courses matter. During our roundtable,
This roundtable discussion will focus on the development of a Social Sciences Research and Data Analysis Minor at a small, liberal arts college. A short summary of the program will be provided, which will be followed by interactive dialogue with the aim of gaining insights into participants’ views of the benefits, detriments, and challenges of developing such a program. Participants will gain insights into the benefits of developing programs that meld machine intelligence and human intelligence.
