Communication Across the Curriculum aligns with the first and third 4-VA goals:
1: Collaborate on research projects to leverage university resources and become competitive for external awards.
This project is a collaboration between three institutions that have created a valuable resource for all three campuses, while also allowing us to conduct research about the need for and effectiveness of those resources. This lays the groundwork for additional external grants that will allow us to integrate communication skills development resources for faculty into our existing campus resources.
3: Share courses, expand local expertise, and increase efficiencies for course capacity.
This project has allowed our three campuses to work together as well as draw on the expertise of an external Communication Across the Curriculum consultant to share faculty development resources, expand the local communication skills development expertise across all of our campuses, and find efficiencies for building these resources for our campuses. Our goal in mind has always been to find ways to better equip faculty to integrate communication skills, which are consistently rated as the most important but hardest to find skills in college graduates, into courses across all disciplines in order to better prepare all of our graduates for their future careers and to be engaged in their communities.
By working toward both of these goals, we directly address the 4-VA initiative for collaborative research by bringing together faculty and students from three 4-VA schools plus an additional colleague from UNC-Charlotte for this research project. We also indirectly contribute to the course redesign initiative by providing a resource that will help faculty who are designing other courses to more easily integrate communication skills into the curriculum. We also indirectly contribute to course sharing; though we are not developing a specific course together, we have developed a set of resources that will be shared across institutions and be made available for presentation in other courses. Additionally, by working together on this initiative, we have built relationships across our programs that will continue to facilitate the sharing of innovations within our respective introductory communication courses.