In collaboration with Curricular Affairs and faculty, ASLI sponsors four strategic initiatives to address timely academic priorities and strengthen the DKU academic model during the 2025–26 academic year. These campus-based projects advance curriculum development, assessment innovation, and teaching excellence through targeted pilots and faculty partnerships that support continuous improvement across the institution.
This committee is conducting a comprehensive evaluation of the Signature Work Program. Drawing on 2024–25 assessment data and new input from students, mentors, and academic leaders, the review will examine goals, requirements, support structures, mentorship, and implementation. The group will assess student work, identify strengths and areas for improvement, and propose actionable recommendations to enhance program quality and alignment with DKU’s mission and MOE standards.
This task force will develop an institutional strategy for the responsible and innovative use of generative AI in teaching and learning. Five implementation teams will:
To uphold DKU’s distinctive model of global liberal arts education—which integrates interdisciplinary problem-solving and innovative pedagogy—this initiative focuses on two areas. First, Support and Recognition: expanded workshops, colloquia, teaching grants, pedagogy labs, and a system for recognizing teaching excellence and innovation. Second, Framework Development: a faculty-administrative committee will create a comprehensive framework for teaching and mentoring effectiveness, building on Duke’s Teaching and Mentoring Excellence approach. The proposed framework will reflect DKU’s context and provide clear, adaptable standards for evaluating teaching and mentoring across diverse environments.
This initiative has two main components. First, a new Assessment Process will evaluate curricular changes using metrics from the recent curriculum study, along with data on teaching workload and course enrollment. Second, a Humanities Core Pilot will allow faculty to test a new interdisciplinary core for the Humanities major based on last year’s design principles. Together, these efforts will inform a broader curriculum revision process involving Major Convenors, Divisional Chairs, faculty, and academic administrators, scheduled for completion by Spring 2027. Further details will be finalized after faculty consultations in early fall.
DKU–Duke collaborative projects bring together faculty and academic teams from Duke Kunshan University and Duke University to advance shared goals in global higher education and educational innovation. These initiatives support cross-institutional research, joint programming, and professional exchange, fostering international collaboration that enhances teaching, learning, and scholarly impact across both campuses.
This collaborative project offers an engaging and supportive opportunity to use the process of assessment as a catalyst for exploration, reflection, and innovation. It invites faculty and students to engage with and animate three educationally vital values – connection, curiosity, and humility – in ways that are intellectually rigorous, personally meaningful, and contextually grounded. Rather than positioning assessment as evaluative, the project frames it as a shared journey of inquiry—one that fosters educational experimentation, cultivates trust, and strengthens collaboration among faculty, students, and assessment professionals.
This project focuses on developing interdisciplinary labs for cross-campus teaching and learning.The interdisciplinary lab model has been an effective means of supporting ongoing, vertically integrated communities of practice interested in project-based learning. Building upon the work of emerging Duke-DKU inter-campus initiative, Presence Lab, we will develop and refine approaches to cross-campus lab development that are sensitive to the challenges of our geospatial separation, curricular differences, term lengths, and unique strengths of our student and faculty populations. We seek to leverage these differences to find new approaches in technology and methodology to drive innovative, experimental pedagogy and assessment strategies.
From the perspective of innovative teaching and learning, our goals are: