COLA

Colleges' Online Learning Academy (COLA) Fellowship, Michigan State University, Summer 2024.

The Colleges’ Online Learning Academy (COLA) is a summer fellowship run by MSU’s Enhanced Digital Learning Initiative (EDLI) for graduate students who want to engage deeply with digital teaching and learning. Fellows attend workshops, create teaching deliverables, review each other’s work with a teaching mentor, and present at a closing gallery walk. I completed the fellowship in August 2024.

Reflection

Attending COLA was a transformative experience for me, both professionally and personally. The workshops gave me new strategies and tools for engaging, effective, and accessible teaching, especially in online and multimodal settings. Preparing and refining my teaching materials pushed me to evaluate my course content critically and make it accessible, inclusive, and pedagogically sound, and I learned to bring digital tools into my teaching in a purposeful way.

COLA also shaped my teaching philosophy. Reflective exercises and conversations with peers and mentors helped me name my values as a teacher, above all the importance of an inclusive, supportive environment where students feel valued and motivated. The experience also inspired me to continue with the Certification in College Teaching.

Deliverable 1: Rental Market and Budget Project for MTH 101

MTH 101 teaches practical quantitative skills such as percentages and measures of center, along with Excel. In this project, students use real HUD rental data for the Lansing–East Lansing area to compute measures of center in Excel, build a personal budget with the 50/30/20 rule, choose housing for two fixed budgets, and reflect on the trade-offs. The project is designed around the principles of Universal Design for Learning, and I shared it with the MTH 101 course coordinators.

Deliverable 2: Teaching Philosophy

I wrote my first teaching philosophy statement during COLA (2024 version, PDF). My current statement is on the teaching philosophy page.

Workshop reflections

  • Promoting Student Classroom Engagement (May 30, 2024), Hala Sun and Min Zhuang, EDLI. Reflection (PDF)
  • Accessibility of Online and Digital Resources (June 3, 2024), Caitlin Kirby, Sarah Wellman, and Imari Cheyne Tetu, EDLI. Reflection (PDF)
  • Multimodality (June 13, 2024), Natalie Vandepol and Imari Cheyne Tetu, EDLI. Reflection (PDF)

The full COLA portfolio is also available as its own site: dilankaraguler.github.io/COLAPortfolio.