The Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness (RITE) team is dedicated to assessing the impact of instructional technologies on the learning climate of UCF. RITE provides a number of services to a broad range of constituents across the university with its primary objective being to facilitate effective research at all levels of inquiry.
Since 1996, broad research initiatives in online, blended, lecture capture, adaptive learning and other technologies have included evaluating the impact of technology through:
- Monitoring student success and withdrawal rates of students across all course modalities offered by the university
- Regularly surveying students for their satisfaction with their educational experiences
- Gauging faculty satisfaction with teaching with technology
- Refining and validating UCF’s Student Perception of Instruction protocol, in conjunction with the faculty senate
- Training graduate students in research design and statistics
- Interacting with funding agencies
- Disseminating results at scientific meeting
- Monitoring recent trends in research
- Collaborating with national and international partners on research projects related to technology-enhanced education research.
For more information on these initiatives, please visit the Distributed Learning Impact Evaluation.
While this high level evaluation is important for programmatic and institutional decision-making, individual faculty can have more personalized research needs. To address this, RITE supports UCF faculty in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) research. These services are provided free of charge to facilitate faculty SoTL classroom-based research:
- Providing research design consulting services
- Assisting with the development of questionnaire and assessment instruments
- Providing data analyses
- Conducting student and faculty focus groups
- Identifying publication and presentation outlets for faculty SoTL research