About the Nonprofit
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Mission:
The Academic Affairs Center for Teaching Excellence supports Our Lady of the Lake University faculty, staff, and administrators in designing, developing, assessing, and maintaining high quality, innovative academic programs and courses that are optimized for effectiveness and efficiency, while being reflective of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition.
Vision:
Inspired by our founding Congregation of Divine Providence and the innovative history of the university, Our Lady of the Lake University’s Academic Affairs Center for TeachingExcellence aspires to lead the university in becoming the Catholic institution of choice for blended and online courses and programs.
Foundational Beliefs:
1. A culture’s primary mode of communication powerfully shapes the lived experience and sense-making processes of the individuals and groups within that culture, including the shared conceptions of time, truth, value, and other key behavior-influencing cultural anchors.
2. We are living in the transition between a primarily print-based communication culture and a primarily digital-based communication culture. Thus, many taken-for-granted assumptions about “reality” that typically would be shared universally within a single culture are not in place in the cultures and sub-cultures that are spanning these two distinctively different modes of communication.
3. This disruption in shared assumptions within a single culture or sub-culture, often referred to as the “digital divide,” exists in all of the cultures and sub-cultures within which our faculty, staff, and students are living.
4. Responding to our founding Congregation’s call to serve and provide high quality educational opportunities through methods appropriate to our times to those among us who otherwise are underserved means offering high quality educational opportunities that span the digital divides in the cultures and sub-cultures that we serve, building bridges that empower our students to traverse confidently, skillfully, compassionately, and mindfully across all of the cultural divisions that they encounter—including the division between those who exist in a primarily print culture and those who exist in a primarily digital culture.
5. Using evidence-based best practices to design and facilitate learning opportunities in on-site, blended, and online formats results in consistently higher quality courses and program outcomes.
6. Designing courses and programs that can be offered in any format provides more course options and greater scheduling flexibility for students and greater efficiency and cost-savings for the university.
7. The Catholic Intellectual Tradition is anchored in the dialogic process of seeking truth and wisdom, which brings all participants closer to God. All OLLU programs and courses should be designed to reflect clearly this tradition.
