Pedagogical Impulse Fund (FIP)

UNIL's Pedagogical Impulse Fund follows on from the Pedagogical Innovation Fund, which supported more than 170 projects between 2008 and 2020. After being put on hold during the Covid period, the updated Fund was relaunched in 2023 in a broader format to better meet the community's current needs. Its objectives are to provide a pedagogical boost to existing courses taught by individual teachers and/or to support teaching projects involving several teachers at faculty, inter-faculty or inter-institutional level.

The new scheme in 4 points:

• Open theme, application submission on an ongoing basis
• 1 evaluation session per month
• Up to 20,000 allocated per project
• Up to 60,000 for larger projects of up to 3 years' duration

The Pedagogical Impulse Fund (FIP), which has been in existence since 2008, supported more than 70 projects in 2012. These projects are all initiatives by teachers or people close to university teaching, who all aspire to improve the quality of teaching and learning conditions for students at UNIL.

To find out more about the current status of the projects and their impact, the Executive Board commissioned a review of the FIP. This report was initially descriptive, but was then supplemented by an analysis, using a questionnaire sent to all project leaders between 2008 and 2012 (i.e. 5 funding periods or 56 projects). The main points of this report are summarised below.

The FIP supports projects from all faculties, with strong participation from the Faculty of Arts (18 projects). Overall, the FIP has brought great satisfaction to all project sponsors.

If we look at the teaching methods developed, while they are most often multiple within a single project (simultaneously or successively), a large proportion make use of interactive and collaborative group work (31 projects).

As for the use of technology, a third of the projects make fairly extensive use of it (databases, development of tools derived from existing software), compared with around a third of the projects that do not.

Although the FIP provides only one year's funding, overall, the projects are sustainable or in the process of becoming sustainable (52 projects), enabling medium-term educational use. It should be noted that a third of the projects have inspired others.

The questionnaire highlighted a number of interesting contributions made by the projects developed in terms of teaching and learning, in particular the aspects of collaboration and interaction between teacher and student and student and student and student, the transfer of skills with a view to professional development, and also, finally, the way in which teaching is approached.

(source: G. Curchod (2013), Rapport d'évaluation des projets FIP, UNIL, 9 p.)