H-Innovate

H-Innovate is creating new honors opportunities for you: courses that have an honors experience built-in and ready to go. H-ready, in fact. Think of H-ready courses as offering a guaranteed honors contract option without either the contract or the paperwork. As with a dedicated honors section of a larger course, you will have an enriched experienced with value-added activities and additional learning experiences waiting for you. An H-ready course offers that opportunity in every section. Here is how to do it:

1. Enroll in an H-Ready course—the honors option is ready for you
2. Request “H Grade Mode” through the Registrar’s Office during the first week of class
3. Take the honors survey on your Brightspace course to open the honors pathway
4. Complete both the regular and the honors coursework
5. Earn honors credit in the course, which will appear on your transcript with an “H”

All JMHC students—and only JMHC students—may take an H-ready course for honors credit. H-ready courses follow the same timeline as standard H Contracts: for the deadline to add, see the Registrar’s Add/Drop calendar for the “last day to request H Grade Mode” (normally the end of the second week of classes): for the deadline to drop, see the Add/Drop calendar for the “last day to modify a course” (normally the end of the ninth week of classes). After the last day to modify a course, H Grade Mode cannot be changed, and your final course grade will reflect honors work.

Starting Fall 2025, all H-ready courses will be searchable with the course attribute HRDY.

H-Innovate is a program aimed at getting your honors students the H credits they need, where they need them. The program selects courses taken by large populations of honors students—most often courses that feature in multiple plans of study, are required, and/or fulfill university core requirements. The most important thing to know about H-Innovate is that the program adapts entire courses rather than individual sections. JMHC students can sign up for any section of the course and have a prepared honors module waiting for them because the course is "H-Ready".

H-Ready courses are different from either honors-only sections or individualized H-contracts. You might think of them as courses with a pre-made, pre-approved honors contract already embedded into the structure of the course.

The process of enrolling in an H-Ready course for honors credit is similar to the process for H-contracts: students enroll in the course and request H grade mode through the Registrar’s Office before the deadline, which is normally Friday of the 2nd week of classes. Unlike the H-contract process, students and faculty do not need to submit contract paperwork or a copy of the course syllabus and revised grading scheme.

H-ready options are open only to JMHC students—and all JMHC students. When approving H grade mode, the primary advisor need only check that the student’s record has the S-Honors or S-Honors2 cohort code. No other approval from the department or college is necessary.

Once H-grade mode is approved, a student will use Brightspace to enter themselves on the honors pathway through the course. If they decide to leave the honors pathway, students have until the last day to modify a course—usually the end of the 9th week of classes—to switch out of H grade mode with the Registrar’s Office. After the 9th week, all honors coursework will be part of the student’s final grade.

Beginning in Fall 2025, H-Ready courses will be searchable using this attribute: HRDY.

We welcome advisor feedback and suggestions for future H-Ready courses: blueskylab@purdue.edu 

H-Innovate provides funding and support for departments to adapt high-demand courses to allow for honors enrollment. Adapted courses include an embedded honors option that can scale up to meet student demand and transfer across all sections and instructors. Selected faculty members transform an existing course during a (re)design institute. Participants have full wrap-around support from a course design team to craft all materials needed to implement their honors adaptation.

Because the adaptation occurs at the level of the course rather than the individual section, H-Innovate requires a commitment from the sponsoring department as well as the participating faculty member.

About the Design Institute

In this 12-week institute, faculty learn the basics of adaptation and devise honors options for existing, high-traffic courses. The goal of this project is to add value for students—ideally, all students enrolled in the course. The institute focuses on creating honors options that produce benefit for all, connect to the existing course in generative ways, and utilize assessment practices that allow for rapid scale up.

H-Innovate supplies the instruction, materials, and support necessary to adapt courses and to prepare faculty to deliver the adapted course. Participants meet twice weekly: once in large group workshop and again with a small working team led by a course developer. By the end of the institute, faculty will have designed an honors adaptation and a revised course syllabus, built an honors pathway into their Brightspace course, and developed training materials for other course instructors. Faculty receive a stipend for their participation and redesign work

Participation in the 2025 pilot is by invitation only

Interested faculty and departments should contact the John Martinson Honors College’s Blue Sky Teaching & Learning Laboratory, blueskylab@purdue.edu