Preparation

Instructors will need to plan ahead to include a project in their course syllabus without knowing the specific project until a few weeks before the semester starts. This requires the instructor to be flexible.

Implementation

The State Department identifies foreign policy projects in which faculty and their classes can be involved, then sends a project menu to a designated Diplomacy Lab Coordinator.

Faculty from around the nation bid on the projects by submitting to their institution’s Diplomacy Lab Coordinator. The Diplomacy Lab Coordinator forwards all of the campus’s bids to the State Department. Only the designated coordinator can submit faculty bids to the State Department. The Office of International Affairs’ director of curriculum internationalization serves as the coordinator for IU Indianapolis.

If the bid is accepted, over the course of a semester, professors guide their students in developing a final work product (deliverable) that accomplishes goals outlined by the State Department.

A bid is a 200-word proposal describing why the instructor, a specific course, and the students are suitable to address the challenge outlined in the project and how the you and your students will approach the project.

The Diplomacy Lab sends out the project menu to the Diplomacy Lab Coordinator the semester before the semester of implementation. For example, for fall projects, the menu normally comes out around the middle of February and bids are due by the beginning of March. The Spring menu is typically available at the end of September, with Bids due by mid-October.

Once an instructor has been awarded a bid, State Department officials associated with the project will contact the instructor to set up a meeting, during which the instructor will learn more about the specific Diplomacy Lab project, have an opportunity to ask questions and clarify the State Department’s need, and decide on the specific deliverable (the student project to be implemented).

Once this meeting has taken place, instructors can then add the Diplomacy Lab project to their syllabus and draft any instructional materials to guide the students through their work.

Assessment

A rubric can be used to assess student learning for this project. Instructors can learn about rubrics here and Canvas rubrics here.

Additional Considerations

The Diplomacy Lab project can often replace an existing project in a syllabus. It is not guaranteed that there will be a Diplomacy Lab project that is aligned with a class or that an instructor will be awarded a sought-after project. It’s a good idea to have an alternative project in mind. Faculty who bid on and implement Diplomacy Lab projects benefit from being flexible and able to deal with the unknown, especially the first time they bid.