Bay View Alliance

What’s New

Welcome to the Bay View Alliance

The Bay View Alliance: A Legacy of Collaboration and Change (2012–2025)

Since 2012, the Bay View Alliance (BVA) has brought together institutions and individuals committed to improving teaching and learning in higher education. Believing that campus efforts are strengthened by working with other institutions, we have catalyzed educational change initiatives, conducted research, developed resources, and built a community of practice. We fostered a trusted network of change leaders who worked together to advance evidence-based teaching practices at their institutions and built deep expertise in educational transformation.

Our Origins

The Bay View Alliance emerged from conversations among academic leaders seeking to strengthen the culture of teaching and learning at research-intensive universities. Early members recognized that while evidence-based teaching practices were well-documented, scaling their adoption required new approaches – ones that addressed departmental culture, leadership, and reward structures.

The BVA secured a seed grant to start the work, granted by the Sloan Foundation, Teagle Foundation, Spencer Foundation and the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario. The BVA succeeded in securing a multi-year grant to support the work of the BVA from the Sloan Foundation in 2012.

Supported by shared research and mutual learning, the BVA became a collective experiment in institutional change: a way to study how universities can learn together to improve the educational experience for all students.

Our Member Institutions

Over its history, the Bay View Alliance included universities in Canada and the United States united by a commitment to improving teaching and learning at scale. Member campuses included:

  • University of British Columbia (2012-2025)
  • University of California, Davis (2012-2019)
  • University of Colorado Boulder (2013-2021)
  • Indiana University Bloomington (2012-2024)
  • University of Kansas (2012-2025)
  • University of Massachusetts Amherst (2014-2024)
  • University of North Carolina (2019-2021)
  • Queen’s University (2012-2025)
  • University of Saskatchewan (2012-2025)
  • University of South Florida (2019-2024)
  • University of Texas at Austin (2012-2019)
  • University of Toronto (2021-2025)

Our Mission and Approach

The Bay View Alliance’s mission was to explore and support leadership that advances teaching and learning in higher education. Rather than focusing solely on individual faculty development, the BVA examined the systems, cultures, and structures that enable or inhibit meaningful, sustained change.

Members applied a research-action approach: working within their own institutions to test new strategies for supporting teaching improvement, while studying the results and sharing insights across the Alliance. This blending of inquiry and action became a defining feature of the BVA’s work.

Leadership

The Senior Scholars of the Bay View Alliance played a vital role in shaping the vision, scholarship, and direction of the organization. As respected leaders in teaching and learning research and academic change, they served as both guides and thought partners for the member campuses. The Senior Scholars included:

  • Mary Huber, Carnegie Foundation (2012-2021)
  • Pat Hutchings, Carnegie Foundation (2012-2021)
  • George Rehrey, Indiana University (2024-2025)
  • Linda Slakey, National Science Foundation (2012-2022)
  • Mary Deane Sorcinelli, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (2018-2023)

Hub members played a central role in planning Steering Committee meetings, contributing to publications and presentations, and sustaining the momentum of the Alliance over its 13-year span. Hub members included Senior Scholars plus:

  • Dan Bernstein, University of Kansas (2012-2017)
  • Dea Follmer, University of Kansas (Director 2021-2025, Associate Director 2017-2021)
  • Brita Harrison Brooke, Program Manager (2015-2025)
  • Emily Miller, Association of American Universities (2023-2025)
  • George Rehrey, Indiana University Bloomington (2020-2025)
  • Nancy Turner, University of Saskatchewan (2023-2025)
  • Lorne Whitehead, University of British Columbia (Director 2012-2021)

Research Action Clusters (RACs)

At the heart of the Bay View Alliance were its Research Action Clusters (RACs) — collaborative teams that focused on specific questions about institutional and cultural change. Each cluster brought together participants from multiple campuses to study and lead change efforts around a shared theme.

RACs explored areas such as:

Through the RACs, we implemented major initiatives including TRESTLE to support STEM course transformation at seven universities, the Collaborative Humanities Redesign Project to foster engaged learning in the humanities, the TEval initiative to transform teaching evaluation, and the Learning Analytics Research Collaborative (LARC) to empower faculty to use institutional data for inquiry into student success. 

Our projects and working groups also resulted in the design and implementation of a number of workshops that convened thought leaders working to improve undergraduate education and yielded tools and resources for online assessment, teaching evaluation, classroom observations, and departmental case study methodologies that continue to inform educational research and practice. In line with our overarching change model, we demonstrated that lasting change occurs when institutions collaborate, share knowledge, and tackle challenges together.

Several important initiatives are continuing beyond the BVA’s formal structure, including the FATE (Financial Alignment with Teaching Effectiveness) initiative, and a national alliance for teaching evaluation reform that has grown out of TEval. Additionally, while our recent proposal for the Equity-through-Inquiry project was returned by NSF without consideration despite positive peer reviews and a highly competitive rating, the collaborators are exploring alternative funding opportunities to advance this work.

Enduring Accomplishments and Impact

The BVA’s resources will remain available through an archive of reports, frameworks, and tools accessible to all former members and affiliates, and through a continuing public representation of the BVA’s history and work hosted on former member campus websites. There is also ongoing work to disseminate the results and insights from Research Action Cluster projects to benefit the broader higher education community. We will share details about these resources as they become available in the coming months.

Our efforts on educational transformation will continue; the current challenges facing higher education make this work more important than ever. The relationships we have built, the approaches we have developed, and the lessons learned will continue to have impact through different vehicles and partnerships.