Eu centers proposal submission guidelines

Course Development Plans
CES is proposing three “course development” projects, and including information here about an important ongoing outreach project with a local institution of higher learning. We will be encouraging the faculty applying for the Curriculum Development grants to incorporate our Conferences, Workshops, and Colloquium Series in their syllabus (again pending that the research topics match).
What follows are details regarding the three course development projects and information about the fourth, which focuses on the EU and Europe:
Course Development I: We are committed to increasing the number of EU courses that bridge the business and humanities curriculum, as well as to making those courses available to both Liberal Arts majors and Business majors. To that end, we will be providing funds for competitive proposals for the development and instruction of writing-intensive courses related to commerce and business in the EU in the following five areas, with the aim of funding at least three of the best course proposals submitted: (1) The Commercial Environment in the EU; (2) Culture and the Fashion Industry in the EU; (3) The EU as a Single Market: Potential and Prospects; (4) Corporate Governance and Competitive Policy in the EU; and (5) The Euro and European Financial Markets. We will look to video-conference these courses with one of our partner institutions in Europe. Our Target Audience for each class is 30-35 students.
Course Development II: The second objective is to allow one faculty member to create a new “Signature Course” on the topic of “leadership” in the EU widely construed. The signature course program, recently implemented by the College of Undergraduate Studies, provides all first-year students at UT with a course that helps them make the transition from promising high school students to worldly, knowledge-driven college students. As such it constitutes an important gateway course that can shape what students will study during their time at UT. By offering such a course, we aim to capture the attention of students early on, in their first year of study, and thereby foster interests for many UT undergraduates in Europe and the EU throughout their entire college career.
Target Audience: Our target audience for each class is 15-18 if it is approved as a seminar, 50-100 students if it is approved as a lecture. (Please note: If a lecture course, the professor will receive one graduate Teaching Assistant (TA) for every 50 students to conduct Friday discussion sections on the material covered in the weekly lectures.)
Course Development III: CES has recently received an award valued at BLAH through LAITS (Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services) to radically develop, enrich, and revise during the grant period its core required introductory course for all European Studies majors (of which there are roughly 60 to 70 in any given year). The proposed revision of the Introduction to European Studies (EUS 305), which focuses primarily on the EU, offers an innovative approach to constructing an expanded, interdisciplinary gateway course at UT.
The broad aim of this grant, which will involve a team of faculty experts led by Dr. Katherine Arens in Germanic Studies, will help create a standard framework of teaching and learning for faculty coming to teach this course, with new appropriate introductory teaching materials made available to all instructors. Moreover, it will allow CES to meet the needs of a large group of students (we are planning to expand the course through these revisions to 100 students) while still remaining true to EUS 305’s essential function as a key gateway course for its majors with task-oriented, learning-based, classroom activities.
On the national scale, such course models do not exist for large class environments, for content-based and criterion-referenced learning scenarios, and for teaching assistant (TA) training. The data that can be produced in assessing this innovation will be without parallel and critically important for teaching models for the next generation of interdisciplinary work dedicated to European Studies and the EU. Our plan is to make these teaching and class materials available through the web as part of an Open Access Initiative. The instructional project will be evaluated through continuous feedback and adaptation and monitored by LAITS and our external evaluator, CTL.
Finally, by significantly enlarging the class, we aim to bring EU studies to a broader population of students at UT—not only to the 60 to 70 majors in European Studies, that is, but also to the roughly 1,650 majors in the Government Department and the roughly 500 majors in the newly implemented IRG (International Relations and Global Studies) major, which counts Europe as one of its fields for the major. Moreover, as the course is assessed and developed, we aim to connect with an even broader undergraduate audience in partner Texas universities. As designed, the course in fact has potential to be streamed remotely, with students from various institutions, both in the US and in Europe, collaborating on projects on a wiki platform, receiving RIS streams and receiving oral versions of the students’ briefing book projects as short “webinars” (real-time seminar meetings via the WEB) or podcasts.
Target Audience: 100 students per class.
Course Development IV: As part of its overall outreach efforts as a National Resource Center, and in particular with an aim to forging connections with minority institutions in the community, CES will continue to develop a series of classes on European and EU-related topics at Huston-Tillotson University, a historically black college in the heart of Austin, Texas. Indeed, we feel it is central to our mission as not only a National Resource Center of European Studies but also as the flagship university of the state of Texas to actively bring our formidable resources—both monetary and pedagogical—to the less privileged and less well-endowed institutions of higher learning in our state. To this end, we anticipate funding as an NRC and teaching the following courses over the grant cycle at Huston-Tillotson:

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  Fall 2012 - International Politics with a focus on Europe and the EU
  
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  Spring 2012 - The European Union
  
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  Fall 2012 - Comparative Government with a focus on Europe and the EU
  
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  Spring 2013 - Modern European History and the EU
  
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  Fall 2013 - European Politics and the EU
  
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  Spring 2014 - War and Peace in Europe and the EU
  

Target Audience: We anticipate 10-15 students per class at Huston-Tillotson.
Fulfillment of Objectives for Course Developments Projects:
Objective 1: Course development will fulfill the objective of developing centers of academic excellence in EU studies. It will also create new EU teaching materials, many of them adaptable for hybrid educational purposes, which will benefit programs invested in EU studies not only at UT but also nationwide. Furthermore, by increasing the size of the classes, the project will have a multiplying effect: it will increase opportunities for students from all over campus to take our core class and thus “allow access to EU courses not only to a small group of students focusing on EU studies, but also to a wider number of students who follow another main curriculum and have a more targeted interest in specific aspects of the EU.”
Objective 2: The course development with Huston-Tillotson will allow UT to bring knowledge about the EU to “regional universities and colleges (four year and two year).” It will also draw that local university into EU Center activities at UT.
Objective 3: The course development projects will markedly strengthen “people-to-people links” between university faculty, students and their host institutions in the EU and US. We will also increase “curricular development programs developed, for example, by effective use of video-conferencing and other technologies.” Finally, in keeping with Objective 3, our aim will be to use video and web technology to link classes—both with partner institutions in the US and in Europe—in Course Development projects I and IV over the next three years.