Teaching support
The Center for Applied Teaching is the hub: individual consultations on course design and assessment, a required-but-useful new-faculty teaching seminar, mid-semester student feedback facilitated by a neutral consultant, classroom observation and coaching on request, and a small-grant program for redesigning a course around projects or open educational resources. It also runs the instructional-technology help for Canvas, lecture capture, polling, and the plagiarism-detection and online-proctoring tools, and it will review a course for accessibility (caption workflows, accessible documents, universal-design assessment) before the term starts rather than after a complaint.
Departmental teaching mentors and cross-disciplinary communities of practice (writing-intensive courses, first-year courses, lab safety, AI in the classroom) meet through the year.
The systems, and the weekly rhythm
MyPorter holds your rosters, grade submission, advising files, early-alert referrals, and the textbook-adoption tool (adoptions are due before registration so students can compare prices and the library can place reserves). Canvas is the course platform; a course shell is created automatically from the schedule and cross-listed sections can be combined on request. The employee portal handles travel authorization and reimbursement, purchasing, leave, effort reporting, and time for hourly staff. Accounts, the VPN, listservs, and shared drives come from IT; classroom technology problems have a dedicated same-hour support line during class time.
Key recurring deadlines: syllabus posted to Canvas by the first day, textbook adoptions by the registration date, early-alert referrals by the published mid-term window, grades within 72 hours of the final exam.
Research and scholarship administration
The Office of Research and Sponsored Programs helps find funding, builds and submits proposal budgets, negotiates awards, and manages compliance — the IRB for human-subjects work, IACUC for animal work, export control, conflict of interest, and responsible-conduct training. Internal seed grants, sabbatical and reassigned-time processes, the institutional repository for your publications and datasets, and support for undergraduate-research supervision (including stipend programs that pay students) all run through here or the graduate school.
Bring a proposal at least three weeks before the sponsor deadline; budgets and institutional signatures cannot be rushed on the last day.
When a student is struggling
Use the early-alert referral in MyPorter for attendance or performance concerns — it reaches an advising-center staff member who contacts the student, and it works far better in week 4 than week 14. For a student in apparent distress, a safety concern, or a report of misconduct, contact the Dean of Students; for suspected academic-integrity violations, follow the published process rather than handling it privately (documentation protects both of you). Accommodation letters come from the accessibility office and are implemented as written — questions about how an accommodation applies to your course design go back to that office, not to negotiation with the student.
You are a mandatory reporter for sex- and gender-based misconduct; know what that means before a student discloses.
Questions?
See the full staff & office directory for any phone number or email. Because this is a fictional parody site, addresses and phone numbers are illustrative and do not reach a real university.