The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

SoTL Collaboratory

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Welcome to our SoTL Collaboratory!

In Fall 2019, a group of educational developers from six universities in Virginia came together to form the SoTL Collaboratory. Since then, the SoTL Collaboratory has grown into a regional community of practice (CoP) for faculty developers that engage and support faculty doing SoTL work and projects at their institutions. From 2021-2022, the project was funded in part by a grant from 4-VA.

Founding SoTL-C members meeting over Zoom

The main goal of the SoTL-C is to build a regional community of practice for faculty developers at Virginia institutions who offer programming to support SoTL scholars at their institution. This statewide network of educational developers advances teaching and learning through collective action. We have reached thousands of instructors, students, and educational developers through numerous presentations, publications, workshops, resources, and facilitated scholarship of teaching and learning collaborations. To date, we have engaged 400+ educators from 12+ institutions. In 2025, we were named a finalist for the POD Innovation Award.

From 2020-2022, our members met regularly to exchange ideas and resources, contribute to a regional SoTL support model repository which we developed into our SoTL Program Taxonomy, give feedback on our respective SoTL strategic plans, and explore ways to offer cross-institutional SoTL programming for our faculty. This work was funded in part by a grant from 4-VA.  

In 2023, the SoTL-C evolved its structure as team members’ professional roles changed. To continue our mission to support SoTL scholars across the Commonwealth, SoTL-C members from George Mason University, James Madison University, and the University of Virginia initiated the AI in Teaching and Learning project (MegaSoTL-AI), bringing together 28 faculty, staff, and graduate student researchers representing six institutions and a range of disciplines. Between 2023-2025 we carried out seven different research projects investigating the role of AI in teaching and learning.

In 2024, we were awarded a Fund for Excellence in Innovation (FFEI) grant from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) to enable us to use the research findings to develop and disseminate resources for educators across the state. These included synchronous workshops and asynchronous materials disseminated through a variety of platforms, including the University of Virginia’s Teaching Hub.  

  

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Participating Institutions

  • George Mason University
  • James Madison University
  • University of Mary Washington
  • University of Virginia
  • Virginia Commonwealth University
  • Virginia Tech

Current SoTL Collaboratory Members, 2023

Breana Bayraktar, Ed.D., Educational Developer, Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning, George Mason University

Dayna Henry, Ph.D., Assistant Director for Scholarship, Center for Faculty Innovation, James Madison University

Jessica Taggart, Ph.D., Assistant Director and Assistant Professor, Center for Teaching Excellence, University of Virginia

SoTL Program Development Tools

The SoTL-C developed two tools to support their SoTL program planning efforts. Following multiple rounds of piloting and revision with over 100 other educational developers, we landed on the following tools. We describe our full development process in Lukes et al., (2024).

SoTL Strategic Planning Worksheet

The purpose of this document is to guide faculty developers or other administrators, who are tasked with leading Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) initiatives or programming that aim to engage/support faculty in SoTL work at their institution of higher education, to reflect on their own or their institution’s past SoTL programming leadership experience(s); think through the details of their aspirational and future plans in the context of their current institution; and provide a venue to receive peer feedback on specific aspects of their SoTL strategic plans.

Strategic Planning Worksheet

SoTL Taxonomy

The purpose of this document is to offer a common language and organizational structure for understanding a variety of SoTL program models. While the SoTL Program Taxonomy was initially developed to support educational developers who may be tasked with leading SoTL program support for their institutions, this tool may also be helpful to a range of scholars and practitioners across higher education who are seeking ideas for how to support SoTL. This document contains an overview of the Taxonomy organized by program type and a detailed description of each model. This document also includes a brief example of each model to further support readers’ envisioning of program possibilities. Because this document was derived from our Community of Practice (see Lukes, Abbot, Henry, et al., in press), the examples that follow draw predominantly on our respective institutions. Examples drawn from beyond our institutions were generated during group discussions and workshops that applied this tool. 

TAXONOMY

Workshops & Conference Presentations 

*Bayraktar, B., Henry, D., & Taggart, J. (November 2025). MegaSoTL in practice…AI in teaching and learning project. Roundtable at ISSOTL25, Christchurch, New Zealand. 

*Bayraktar, B., Henry, D., & Taggart, J. (September 2025). Crafting a Gen AI Use Policy for Your Syllabus. Workshop presented online for Virginia Commonwealth University.  

Bayraktar, B., (August 2025). Communicating about ethical AI use with students. Workshop presented at William & Mary  

Taggart, J., Iskandarova, S., Koubek, K., Marquardt, J., Velayudhan, B., & Yi, F. (2025). What Instructors Want from AI + OER: Insights from Virginia Educators. Interactive session. Clover Park Technical College AI + OER Institute, online. 

Ball, T. (April 2025). Developing Students’ AI Literacy Through Engaging In-Class Activities. Short session at the Innovations in Pedagogy Summit, Charlottesville, VA. 

Yi, F., Mickel, B., Ball, T., Iskandarova, S., & Koubek, K. (2025). Navigating AI in Higher Ed: An Open AI Literacy Framework and Resource for Teaching & Learning. Open Education Conference, online. 

Allison, K., Hoopes, C., Guadagni, G., Koubek, K., Taggart, J., Bayraktar, B., & Henry, D. (2025). Evaluating Humans in the Age of AI: A Backward-Design Approach to Assessing Student-AI Collaborative Work. Teaching and Learning with AI Conference, Orlando, FL. 

*Bayraktar, B., Henry, D., Taggart, J., Ball, T., Iskandarova, S., & Yi, F. (February 2025). Empowering Educators: Communicating about Ethical AI Use in Your Courses. Pre-conference workshop at the Conference on Higher Education Pedagogy, Blacksburg, VA.  

Ball, T., Bryan, A. L., Zhou, S., *Bayraktar, B., Henry, D., & Taggart, J. (February 2025). Effectiveness of AI Onboarding Activities for First-Year Students. Practice session at the Conference on Higher Education Pedagogy, Blacksburg, VA.  

*Bayraktar, B., Henry, D., & Taggart, J. (November 2024). Uniting for Impact: Strategies for the Formation of MegaSoTL Collaborations. POD Talk at POD Network Annual Conference, Chicago, IL.  

*Bayraktar, B., Henry, D., & Taggart, J. (October 2024). From Concept to Classrooms: Initiating Successful MegaSoTL Projects. Poster presented at the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning, French Lick, IN.   

*Bayraktar, B., Henry, D., & Lukes, L. (November, 2022). Cross-institutional partnerships to strengthen educational developer toolkits. Roundtable presented at the POD Network Annual Conference. Seattle, WA.  

Lukes, L., Henry, D., & Wheeler, L. (2022, November 9-20). Strategic SoTL programming planning tools for educational developers engaging faculty [Poster]. POD Network Conference, Seattle, WA, U.S.A. 

Lukes, L. & Abbot, S. (2022, November 2-5). Lessons learned from creating a regional cross-institutional community of practice for SoTL educational developers [Poster]. International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Kelowna, BC, Canada. 

Wheeler, L., Abbot, S., & Henry, D. (2022, October, 20). Creating a strategic plan for SoTL at your center/institution [Workshop]. Virginia Educational Development Collaborative, virtual. 

Abbot, S., Lukes, L., Case, K., Wells, M., Wheeler, L., Baum, L., Brantmeier, E., & Henry, D. (2022, June 1-4). Communities of practice for sustainable educational development [Paper]. International Consortium for Educational Development, Århus, Denmark. 

Wheeler, L., Abbot, S., Lukes, L., Henry, D., Wells, M., Case, K., Brantmeier, E., & Taggart, J. (2022, June 1-4). Planning SoTL educational development [Workshop]. International Consortium for Educational Development, Århus, Denmark. 

Lukes, L., Baum, L., Case, K., Henry, D., Wells, M., & Abbot, S. (2021, October 26-29). Sustaining SoTL initiatives by building a community of practice for SoTL faculty developers across institutions [Poster]. International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Perth, Australia. 

Lukes, L., Case, K., Dauterive, J., Filer, K., Henry, D., Taggart, J., Wells, M., Brantmeier, E.J., Wheeler, L. (2021, October). Planning SoTL faculty development initiatives during uncertain times [Workshop]. POD Network Conference, virtual. 

Lukes, L., Henry, D., Baum, L., Wells, M., Case, K., Wheeler, L., Brantmeier, E., Taggart, J., Hassell-Goodman, S., Abbot, S., (2021, September). SoTL Collaboratory: A scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) resource for instructors, faculty developers, and administrators [On-Demand Presentation]. Innovations in Teaching & Learning Conference, Fairfax, VA, U.S.A. 

Lukes, L., Brantmeier, E.J., Case, K., Dauterive, J., Filer, K., Henry, D., Taggart, J., Wells, M., Wheeler, L. (2021, January). Creating a strategic plan for SoTL at your center/institution [Workshop]. POD Network Conference, virtual. 

Papers 

*Bayraktar, B., Henry, D., & Taggart, J. (2025). Navigating the AI-Enabled Education  Landscape: A Multifaceted Approach to Providing Effective Professional Learning and Support for Educators. Theory Into Practice, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2025.2528543  

Abbot, S., Lukes, L. A., Henry, D., & Wheeler, L. (2024). Presenting a theory of change for cultivating institutional‐level SoTL cultures through a cross‐institutional community of practice. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 2024(177), 91–102. https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.20581  

Lukes, L., Abbot, S., Wheeler, L., Henry, D., Baum, L., Case, K., Wells, M., & Brantmeier, E. J. (2024). Strategic planning tools for educational developers supporting SoTL cultures and programs at their institutions. To Improve the Academy, 43(1). https://dx.doi.org/10.3998/tia.3492 

Lukes, L., Abbot, S., Henry, D., Wells, M., Baum, L., Case, K., Brantmeier, E. J., & Wheeler, L. B. (2023). Impact of a regional community of practice for academic developers engaged in institution-level support for SoTL. International Journal for Academic Development. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2022.2135005 

*Authors listed alphabetically