Concordia’s Lab for Innovation in Teaching and Learning (LITL) opens a call for project proposals

Are you a faculty member or researcher looking to experiment with innovative approaches to teaching and learning?

Concordia’s Lab for Innovation in Teaching and Learning (LITL) is a space for developing and realizing experimental projects in pursuit of the highest quality of education at Concordia. The lab is currently seeking submissions for project proposals from faculty members across university departments. Applications will be accepted until November 30.

Faculty will benefit from working with a small, dedicated team in a lab where they can ideate, experiment with, and develop new and innovative teaching and learning methodologies. 

Working with the lab enables researchers to freely experiment with bold ideas and theories about teaching and learning and share their findings with their community. Ultimately, LITL aims to foster a next-generation university culture where innovation, collaboration and creativity meet change.

Exploration backed by trust

Remi Arora is the LITL Project Manager. He has been active in education, the events logistics and technology industries and various creative fields. He brings his diverse background and his passion for exploring innovation and the intersection of education and creativity to this role.

“I’m very excited about the diverse projects that LITL has realized in collaboration with Concordia faculty, researchers, research assistants, partner universities and various organizations who have worked hard in co-creating them,” Arora says.

"LITL is a place where you’re encouraged to be truly explorative and experimental; to try something and have it not always work out. This permission to try and fail, and to strive for innovation and success is really rewarding. We are very proud of our successful projects, have learned from those that weren’t, and appreciate having the continued trust of Concordia’s leadership in supporting these explorations."

The lab aims to explore ways to make new connections between teaching and learning. One example is a project that uses virtual reality (VR) as a training tool for student teachers, developed with the Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) program.

Phase 1 of the TESL-VR project examined a particularly stressful situation in teacher education programs: the student-teacher meeting with their supervisor during which the student’s performance is evaluated.

“The TESL-VR project, or ‘Let’s Try This Again,’ took inspiration from the simulator-based training that happens in other professions such as pilots or surgeons. It offers student-teachers the ability to practice this stressful interaction in a simulated VR classroom setting with a digital avatar supervisor,” Arora explains.

“With the pressure-relieving option to be able to try again, the hope is for students to build up their sense of self-efficacy and confidence. Having practiced with the digital avatar, we expect student-teachers to be able to appropriately deal with their eventual meeting with their real-life supervisor.”

AI tutors, Minecraft in the classroom and an accounting card game

John Paul Foxe is the senior director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) and responsible for the lab. He notes that the lab offers members of the university community and outside partners the chance to try out new ideas for teaching and learning through student partnerships, challenges, pilot tests and research.

“The lab is eager to work with Concordia community members who are motivated to radically change the way we find, experiment and build new ways to approach teaching and learning inside the classroom.”

Through its collaborations and partnerships, the lab has worked on projects that make use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a tutor and explore and implement the use of Minecraft to teach an undergraduate English course, entirely within the game.

The lab collaborated with the John Molson School of Business to develop, produce and successfully deploy a card game for an accounting course to help teach undergraduate students in the COMM 305 Managerial Accounting course the concepts and finer points of transfer pricing and negotiation.

Given the project’s success since it was first deployed in fall 2023, and again in the winter 2024 term, the card game has since become a core component of the accounting course materials going forward.

The Lab for Innovation in Teaching and Learning is accepting submissions for project proposals from faculty members from all departments until November 30.

Learn more about Concordia’s Lab for Innovation in Teaching and Learning and get more details about submitting a project proposal.