The benefits to teaching in Honors

Teaching in the Honors Program gives you the opportunity to experiment in your teaching and to enjoy the following Honors teaching conditions:

• small seminar-style classes between 15 and 20 students
• highly motivated students
• the possibility to experiment with new course subjects, pedagogies and practices
• participation in an interdisciplinary community of faculty interested in teaching excellence and active learning.

The benefits to your department of offering an Honors course

All student credit hours (SCH) for honors courses are credited to your home department. (We are currently exploring how to offer departments that offer Honors courses an additional premium in terms of SCH. This premium would be taken into account by Colleges and the Provost’s Office in terms of future resource allocations for the department.) Additionally, teaching in the University Honors Program offers your department: 

• an opportunity to showcase and recruit for your major among excellent students;
• an opportunity to bring new high-impact teaching practices back to your department;
• an occasion to try course designs that may later become a permanent offering in your department.

Guidelines for honors course proposals

If you would like to teach an Honors course in 2024-25 and if you have never taught before in the Honors Program, we recommend that you first contact Karl Aspelund (aspelund@uri.edu), Associate Director, to discuss your course idea. If you are already familiar with the Honors Program and have been actively developing your high-impact teaching practices, you may submit a course proposal directly to Anna Blake, Honors Program Coordinator (annablake@uri.edu). Please find instructions here.

Instructions for course proposal:

• the Course Proposal Cover Sheet
• a syllabus of the proposed course that includes the following information:
  an exciting and compelling course title and course description; the course level 100/200/300/400 most appropriate for the course, the course objectives, the grading method/criteria, and a sample course materials list. For general education courses, please indicate which requirement the course will meet and which skill areas will be covered in the course;
• an exciting and compelling thirty-word course description that can be included in our course schedule and flyer;
• a 2-page curriculum vitae and IDEA scores from the previous two semesters

For additional information please e-mail Anna Blake (annablake@uri.edu) or visit our website at uri.edu/honors.