Request For Proposals

The Center for Instructional Technology has two Requests for Proposals (RFP's) briefly described below.

Invitation to Develop Shared Online Materials (SOMs)

Invitation to Develop Online Learning Communities (OLCs)

The full content with application instructions are linked as pdf documents at the bottom of each description. CIT is very excited about the opportunities presented by these two proposals and we look forward to working with those who are awarded funding.

Please carefully read the application requirements (in the linked pdf files) and remember that these are two separate RFP's not be be confused with one another. If you are applying to both we need two separate RFP's. Incomplete and incorrect applications cannot be accepted.

1. Invitation to Develop Shared Online Materials (SOMs)

Wouldn't it be wonderful to have access to:

• An interactive lesson on plagiarism
• An interactive map or exercise that explains an abstract concept
• Digitized instructions for how to use the Internet for research in the discipline
• Visually animated instructions for your 101 course

Or you might want to develop materials about reading or writing, using the content focus of Philosophy, Biology or History.  Or you might want to develop discipline-specific interactive materials that would be available to adjuncts and other faculty and that would support departmental course learning outcomes?  You might like to meet with an instructional designer to revise and revitalize materials you've already developed for your online or traditional course? You might like to share an entire online course which you revise with your colleagues.

Interested groups of faculty are invited to propose plans for the development of online materials to be shared by faculty in your department or the college as a whole.  Groups can be within a single discipline or interdisciplinary.  Groups must be two or more faculty.  We want to build a local repository of interactive online materials available to all BCC Faculty. 

We are looking for materials that range from something as small as a single reusable learning object to as large as an entire online course to be shared by members of a particular discipline. Typically, these materials take a significant amount of time, energy, and skill to prepare, and therefore we want to faculty develop them with the intention of sharing them with their colleagues.

Click HERE to Access the FULL Shared Online Materials RFP

2. Invitation to Develop Online Learning Communities (OLCs)

Interested groups of faculty are invited to propose plans for the development of online learning communities. In higher education, curricular learning communities are classes that are linked or clustered during an academic term, often around an interdisciplinary theme, and enroll a common cohort of students. 

Learning communities present many advantages for students and faculty. Learning communities have been shown to increase student retention and academic achievement, increase student involvement and motivation, improve students' time to degree completion, and enhance student intellectual development.  Furthermore, students involved in learning communities become more intellectually mature and responsible for their own learning and develop the capacity to care about the learning of their peers.   Faculty members involved in learning communities that facilitate cross-faculty collaboration are expanding their repertoire of teaching approaches, continually revising their course content, and acquiring new scholarly interests. Learning community faculty members are also building mentoring relationships with each other and are more frequently engaging with beginning students and general education offerings. (Learning Community Commons)

Currently with distance learning at Bergen Community College, we typically use one WebCT course shell for one class. The online environment is a ripe arena for building learning communities because classes can be combined easily and scheduling problems are minimal.