Meet CETLOE’s 2025-2026 Catalyst Cohort!

Catalyst is a new, CETLOE-supported, cohort-based community of pedagogical innovators working together to develop, test, and scale ideas that promise to improve the quality, effectiveness, and impact of teaching methods and learning experiences at Georgia State University. Our inaugural cohort will include 25 participants across 7 colleges and schools working on 18 projects.

Check out short descriptions of our upcoming work below. 

This project will integrate real-world actuarial case studies into coursework through industry partnerships. Students will apply actuarial techniques to real datasets, bridging theory and practice. The work will enhance experiential learning, strengthen career readiness, equip students for success, and foster faculty-industry collaboration. 

Project participants will identify high-impact practices (HIPs) across the English curriculum, map career-relevant competencies to each HIP, develop processes to grant microcredentials that showcase students’ mastery of these competencies, and communicate microcredentialing opportunities to students. Project participants will also work to strengthen the English Department’s internship program by expanding and deepening community partnerships and cultivating new internship opportunities. 

Students on the Dunwoody campus taking Professor Mitchell’s perspectives class (Identity and Mass Atrocity Prevention) will engage with the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust to create a panel and exhibit for Genocide Awareness Week that can be shared across campuses to facilitate discussion and understanding of how conflicts escalate if left undeterred.   

This project will focus on the design and production of content that can be used university-wide in experiential courses, supporting efforts to increase the incorporation of high-impact practices across the curriculum. Drawing on ten years of experience in Robinson’s Panthers Accelerated Consulting Experience (PACE), content will focus on (1) real-world problem-solving, (2) effective team collaboration, and (3) developing student self-efficacy.  A user manual and other training materials will support the content.  

This project enhances experiential learning by creating structured digital resources for MBA/MHA students. Through informational videos, a preceptor guidebook, and improved communication strategies, the initiative aims to clarify course expectations, strengthen student-preceptor relationships, and increase successful project placements while fostering meaningful professional connections. 

Project participants will develop a living field guide to explore the biodiversity of the downtown Atlanta campus. The goal is to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration, experiential learning, and high-impact practices while promoting sustainability and environmental awareness. By emphasizing place-based learning, participants hope to foster community and strengthen connections between students, faculty, and nature. 

This project will expand the Foundations student public art mural project to additional impactful sites on and off campus, into downtown Atlanta. 

Co-curricular activities enrich student learning, yet connections to coursework and careers are often unclear. This work will integrate reflective prompts into event registration, participation, and post-event surveys to help students recognize and apply their learning to their majors and career goals. 

This project will create, test, implement, and evaluate the use of realistic scenario-based virtual productions within social work graduate and undergraduate courses using 3D gaming engines and animation software. These emotionally engaging virtual products promise to help students make connections between course content and real-world social work practice skills and decision-making. 

This work will compare how well text- and voice-based interactions with generative AI platforms simulate client interactions in social work education. The study will evaluate students’ engagement, critical thinking, and skill development, informing best practices for AI integration in educational settings. 

This interdisciplinary project will explore using GenAI to help students explain biological concepts. Drawing from the ICAP framework, we will compare control and interactive learning activities, examining relations between activity transcripts and learning outcomes, providing evidence for best practices in leveraging GenAI to enhance learning across courses. 

This project will investigate the implementation of an AI-based training tool designed to foster constructive dialogue skills through guided interactions with politically divergent AI personas. Hosted via API for scalability and data capture, the tool supports extended student engagement.  

This study will gauge the impact of Sway, a free AI-guided chat platform that moderates conversations and facilitates more productive dialogue between students with differing perspectives on controversial or polarizing topics. 

This study will examine how AI-generated Topical Vocabulary Tests (TVTs) can be used to assess students’ background knowledge, helping to address knowledge gaps and improve student learning outcomes. 

This project will focus on the transformation of a biology course that will encourage real-world relevance using active learning and story-based modules. 

This project will develop a comprehensive training course with six interactive modules designed to train educators in the best practice standards of Simulation-Based Education (SBE). Completion will be a requirement for educators using SBE in The Lewis Clinical Skills and Simulation Center. Microcredentials will be awarded to successful course completers. 

To further engage and support graduate students, this project will seek to develop a graduate student teaching and learning community. This project complements existing programs through a collaborative, scholarly approach to pedagogical development, furthering such work through the sharing and publication of ideas and scholarship. (This CETLOE Catalyst project is made possible through the generous support of the Graduate School.) 

Congratulations to all our Catalyst participants!