The Transparency in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education project (TILT Higher Ed) is an award-winning international educational development and research project that helps educators implement a transparent learning and teaching framework to improve college students' success. Transparency in learning and teaching (TILT) involves direct communication among educators and students about the methods of teaching and learning. It has demonstrably increased student success and instructor satisfaction at hundreds of institutions of higher education in the U.S. and abroad.
In curricular and cocurricular contexts, administrators, student-facing staff, educational developers, and instructors implement TILT in their strategic planning and communications to enhance students' sense of belonging, confidence, retention, metacognitive awareness of skill development and workplace readiness (Winkelmes et al. 2019). Data from several foundational studies identifies transparent instruction as a small, time-efficient, and equitable teaching intervention that significantly enhances students' success, with greater gains for underachieving and historically underserved students, including low-income, first-generation in their family to attend college, and ethnically underrepresented students (Winkelmes, 2013; Winkelmes et al., 2016; Gianoutsos and Winkelmes, 2016; Calkins and Winkelmes, 2018; Winkelmes et al. 2019).
Hundreds of publications by educators and advisors on six continents have emerged in the last decade to explain how TILT practices can enhance institutional and instructional efficacy and student achievement. These include books, special journal issues, curated collections, peer-reviewed articles, interviews, videos, blogs, podcasts, and educational materials like assignments and syllabi (listed on the TILT Examples & Resources webpage). In 1999, transparency in learning and teaching was an idea shared and developed by Mary-Ann Winkelmes with colleagues in a seminar at Harvard University's Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. By 2008-2009, the first TILT student surveys were developed and tested by colleagues at the University of Chicago and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Transparency Project began partnering with the American Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) in 2014-2015 to focus on advancing underserved students' success. At critical times in TILT's development, collaboration with colleagues from the AAC&U and organizations including the Gardner Institute, Complete College America, Achieving the Dream, the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE), the Professional Organizational Development (POD) Network, the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL), Improving University Teaching (IUT), Higher Education Teaching and Learning (HETL), and support from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas have allowed TILT to thrive and share a robust collection of open access resources (on the TILT Examples & Resources webpage).