Academic and Instructional Innovation
A&II Services
Academic and Instructional Innovation works with faculty, staff, and students to support teaching and learning, faculty development, and professional growth.
Academic and Instructional Innovation (A&II) is a team of instructional designers, educational technologists, and system administrators, who can help you apply teaching best practices to your curriculum, make your courses current, relevant, and efficient, and help students get the most from their learning experience. We want to help you create fun, rewarding, and transformative teaching experiences—and most importantly, to help you succeed.
The A&II team is dedicated to giving you support with pedagogical topics and educational technologies that today’s student learning experience demands. Whether you’re teaching for the first time or have years of experience, we can help you!
What we do
- Support faculty in designing, delivering, and assessing courses and programs
- Facilitate effective use and leveraging of academic technology
- Support faculty in enhancing teaching, learning, and assessment
- Provide professional development
A&II is SMU's instructional design and support team that helps faculty apply teaching best practices to the curriculum and make courses current, relevant, and efficient. We enable students to get the most from their learning experience by empowering faculty to create engaging, rewarding, and transformative teaching experiences.
We offer support for academic technologies including Canvas, Panopto, Poll Everywhere, Respondus LockDown Browser, Turnitin, VoiceThread, DesignPlus, and Zoom.
To access A&II resources and tutorials, visit the SMU Connect A&II intranet site. Find SMU Connect through MySMU.
For questions and consultations, contact aii@samuelmerritt.edu.
A&II can help you enhance, illustrate, and reinforce your teaching approach by tapping into different styles of learning to increase student engagement. Learn about making the most of media for teaching.
Learn more about in-person, online, hybrid, flipped courses, course development and revisions.
A&II supports students with academic technologies from Canvas, Respondus LockDown Browser, Turnitin, and Panopto; provides help guides and resources how to submit video assignments, and how to use the iPad, and more.
Connect 2 Success promotes digital equity among students by placing iPads in the hands of each student. Recognizing that students enter the University with variable digital literacy levels, we provide training and individualized support throughout each person’s educational journey. Read more...
The SMU Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Mini-Grant Research Program supports faculty with $500 to engage in a small research project with the focus on improving SMU student learning. A research project may be related to pedagogy, technology, or course improvement with the intention of improving student learning.
A&II works in conjunction with faculty and other staff to educate on the uses of AI in teaching and health sciences and scholarship on this emerging technology.