Cortland Apple is a gratitude project started by Cortland’s Center for Teaching and Learning. We moved the announcement tool from the sidebar of our Brightspace to share important information with students and faculty about deadlines and training/support opportunities. Moving the announcement tool has had an enormous impact on student engagement with a variety of programs across campus. One such program is the Cortland Apple.

Using the Brightspace announcement tool and MS Forms, we created a space for students to write thank you notes to their instructors. We began in fall semester and received almost 600 thank you notes from students to faculty, 180 within the three hours. After we receive the letters, we use MS Word to create an email merge for professional letters from the CTL. Faculty can then print the letters and add them to their annual portfolios as evidence of effective teaching. We plan to offer this at the end of every semester from now on. In addition to sending faculty the letters, we also selected around 30 to share in a slide show during breakfast at our President’s semesterly state of the college address.

The CTL at Cortland is new, and our initial needs assessment found that faculty wanted more acknowledgement for their good work. Cortland Apple has been a free, high impact program that they love.

As a bonus, after I sent the messages to faculty, I was able to put all the letters into CoPilot and ask it to find trends in the letters. I posted those trends in an announcement to faculty to show them what students value in interactions. The four main areas were (unsurprisingly): empathy, transparency, authenticity of assignments, and faculty engagement. I use those to model my development and we discuss them in workshops.

Here’s a lovely study from 2017 examining the significance student feedback has on teaching. It finds that negative feedback can have a negative impact on teaching while positive feedback encourages faculty to engage more with their students and develop better teaching practices. Because Cortland Apples is a gratitude project, we get all the positive effects of feedback from students without the negative impact CTEs can sometimes bring. Flodén, Jonas.
“The impact of student feedback on teaching in higher education” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02602938.2016.1224997

The apples have been positively received by faculty and administration. It was a great way to introduce people to the new CTL and quickly address a need for free.

While I haven’t done any research into the impact on faculty, here is some of the feedback I’ve received:
“I love my job and my students. Thank you!”
“Thank you Jennifer!! These are better than CTE’s!!! Again, much appreciated”
“Thank you for sending these ‘apples’. Four is enough for a pie! You made my day (and semester).”
“Thank you for sharing this with me. I appreciate it! Thank you for all the work you do.”
“This is great to hear. It’s always nice to get positive feedback from students. Thanks for passing this along.”