Mendeley Blog Spotlights Global Honors College

August 10, 2010. Mendeley, the research management tool that allows users to index and organize PDF documents and research papers into your own personal digital bibliography, recently featured CCNMTL's Ashlinn Quinn in the Mendeley Blog. In the blog post, Ashlinn shares how Mendeley is used in the Global Honors College.. Read an excerpt below:

Throughout the Global Seminar, students are tasked with finding, reading, and annotating references in peer-reviewed literature that pertain to specific matters covered in the course. In the unit on Terrestrial Biodiversity, for instance, students searched the Web of Science for academic studies having to do with terrestrial species assessment, ecosystem services, and threats to biodiversity from climate change. Each student submitted references to the shared collection on Mendeley, using the “Notes” feature to annotate the references, and “Tags” to track who had submitted which references and to sort them by topic and by assignment.

After just six weeks of activity in the Seminar, the students have already collected almost 300 articles having to do with topics covered in the class, with new references being added to the collection every day. As the Seminar progresses, the students will refer to this library for group projects and research papers.

Visit the Mendeley Blog to read the full blog post.

2010 Global Honors College Launches with CCNMTL Support

June 7, 2010. The Global Honors College (GHC) launched last week after a year of collaborating with CCNMTL on the design, development, and implementation of an innovative online course. The GHC is an inter-institutional program that brings together faculty and students from leading universities worldwide in an undergraduate level course dedicated to conducting joint, structured, and sustained investigations of enduring and emerging global issues. It was started in 2008 by Waseda University (Tokyo) and funded by the Japanese Ministry of Education and Columbia University, and has grown to include faculty experts and select students from universities including Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Yale, the University of Washington, Waseda University, Korea University, Peking University, and National University of Singapore.

The central focus of the GHC is its Global Seminar—an annual summer-long intensive course in which highly motivated students are brought together online and in person to research, debate, and document an issue of global concern; this year's issue is sustainability. The seminar begins with a two-month online phase followed by an "onsite" phase in which students and professors meet for a rigorous three-week period in Tokyo.

For the past year, CCNMTL has played an integral role in providing curricular and pedagogical support to the GHC. Working closely with GHC organizers and faculty, the Center helped design learning modules that engage students at a distance and provide students with lectures and discussions from professors around the world. Columbia Professor and Global Seminar Instructor Kevin Griffin, for instance, is teaching the first month of the seminar from his research post in the middle of the Alaskan Tundra.

The GHC learning modules also help prepare and acquaint students for when they meet in Tokyo to complete the seminar's final phase. By giving these international students from the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and engineering the opportunity to discuss and debate issues of global concern both electronically and in person, the GHC aims to facilitate the creation of a network of future global leaders.

Additionally, CCNMTL advised and helped design the web-based platform that supports the online portion of the seminar. The selected platform built by GoingOn Networks integrates social media tools into any community of practice, in this case the seminar itself. A number of student activities—including blogging, content sharing, and interactivity around multimedia—will be based around the available social media tools in the platform. CCNMTL has also implemented pedagogical tools such as VoiceThread, an annotation system that will be used to create student introductions and serve as the means for delivering slide-based lectures, and Moodle, a learning management system that will be used to organize course materials and assignments.

The new online platform coincided with the launch of the seminar on June 1, 2010. CCNMTL is supporting faculty and student use of the program's online components, and working with GHC faculty to adapt curricula to an online format for future courses. Learn more about the Global Honors College, which is a project within the Global Learning Initiative.

New Master's Program Offers Global Classroom

September 25, 2009. The Global Master's in Development Practice (MDP) graduate program launched at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) this semester, following more than a year of planning and preparation between the Earth Institute, CCNMTL, and partner universities throughout the world.

This new program, conceived by the International Commission on Education for Sustainable Development Practice and sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, is the first of its kind at the University. The program, which aims to teach students the skills and knowledge necessary to address complex global challenges of sustainable development, is designed to incorporate multi-disciplinary classes and cross-border collaboration of sustainable development students throughout the world. A key component of the program is the Global Classroom: Integrated Approaches to Sustainable Development, a master's-level sustainable development course simultaneously taught at a dozen universities around the world. The Global Classroom enables hundreds of students to conduct synchronous discussion, collaboration, and learning.

CCNMTL has played a seminal role in the pedagogical and technological development of the Global Classroom and the MDP program, which are both projects in the Center's Global Learning Initiative. To foster a collaborative and engaging community for MDP students, the Center has created an online social network in which students can discuss and share their work. A core requirement for this enterprise was an open-ended learning management system (LMS) capable of supporting local and external students that offered a variety of collaborative and synchronous tools. CCNMTL partnered with Remote-Leaner.net to deliver a Moodle -based course site for students to access reading materials and videos of lectures, to participate in discussion forums about course topics, and to collaborate on assignments.

Currently, just four weeks into the MDP program, students around the globe have participated in live discussions with economist Jeffrey Sachs, food security expert Lawrence Haddad, nutrition specialist Jessica Fanzo, and agronomist Glenn Denning; and have begun to work towards devising sustainable solutions to localized development problems around the world. The participants, hailing from 17 universities across the globe, have also begun to use the customized social network to get to know each other outside of the classroom – for example by sharing relevant web sites, forming interest groups, and holding online discussions with other members of the MDP community.

Next year, 9 more universities worldwide will launch partner MDP programs, creating a global consortium of sustainable development students, practitioners, and subject experts. CCNMTL is continuing to build digital networking and learning tools to accompany cross-institutional student collaboration and is also facilitating the development of an online repository containing sustainable development resources and learning materials for student use.

BizEd Magazine Highlights CCNMTL Educational Technologist and the Global Classroom Project

July 29, 2009. CCNMTL educational technologist Tucker Harding represented the Center in a recent article on emerging online collaboration tools used in education. In "Virtual Solutions," published in the May/June issue of BizEd, author Tricia Bisoux features Harding and Tracey Wilen-Daugenti, director of the Higher Education Practice in the International Business Services Group at Cisco Systems, and shares their perspectives on how collaboration tools are transforming education.

Both Harding and Wilen-Daugenti note in the article that technologies, like web-conferencing and wikis, allow for richer learning experiences and enable students to connect across classroom boundaries. The author points to CCNMTL's Global Classroom as one example. This project, created with faculty partner and Earth Institute Director Jeffrey Sachs, organizes and delivers online lectures and readings for a master's level, sustainable development course simultaneously taught at a dozen universities around the world. Harding describes that the project allows students from diverse backgrounds to work together on common problems: "Using these tools is about more than just convenience. We want students to feel as if they are part of a single classroom. With something like the Global Classroom, someone working in Latin America is in the same course as someone working in Africa's Millennium Village. They don't just talk to each other about obstacles they faced in the past; they can talk about the obstacles they faced that very day." Read more about Harding's take on collaboration tools by downloading Virtual Solutions (PDF).

CCNMTL Partner John McArthur Discusses Master's in Development Practice in The Huffington Post

July 14, 2009. For the past year, CCNMTL has worked with the Earth Institute at Columbia University to co-develop and support the pedagogical and technological framework for a new Master's in Development Practice (MDP) graduate program that teaches students the skills and knowledge necessary to address complex global challenges of sustainable development, including poverty, population, health, conservation, climate change, and agricultural productivity.

The MDP program, conceived by the International Commission on Education for Sustainable Development Practice and sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, launches at the Earth Institute this fall. The graduate program, which comprises cross-disciplinary classes and field training, will expand upon the successes of the distributed learning course, Global Classroom: Integrated Approaches to Sustainable Development, taught for the first time in Spring 2008. Global Classroom, created by CCNMTL and the Earth Institute, organizes and delivers lectures and readings for a master's-level sustainable development course simultaneously taught at a dozen universities around the world. The course offers participating university students the opportunity to conduct synchronous discussion, collaboration, and learning about sustainable development issues. CCNMTL has played an instrumental role in envisioning a curriculum and accompanying educational tools for the Global Classroom that transcend geographical boundaries.

John McArthur, CCNMTL partner and research associate at the Earth Institute, highlights the MDP program and its mission to foster an interdisciplinary approach to sustainable development in A New Approach to Global Problem-Solving, published on The Huffington Post yesterday. In the article, McArthur notes the mounting global challenges—macroeconomic coordination, food production, energy, climate change, and disease control—and the corresponding need for multi-sector practitioners skilled in the "four pillars" of sustainable development: natural sciences, health sciences, social sciences, and management. The MDP program, McArthur explains, will train professionals across the four disciplines and will also encourage students to "practice working in networks across borders and time zones as a normal habit, empowered by simple webcams and cheap software."

To meet the cross-border educational aims of the program, CCNMTL has received funding from the MacArthur Foundation to support MDP in fostering an international network of multidisciplinary practitioners. The Center is currently developing digital networking and learning tools that will be accessible to MDP partner institutions and used in the first year of the MDP program, which begins at Columbia University in September 2009 and will expand to nine additional universities in 2010.

Stay tuned for more information about the launch of the MDP program, or learn more about the Global Classroom, a project within CCNMTL's Global Learning Initiative.

Press Release: CCNMTL Partners with Earth Institute on New Master's Degree

October 23, 2008. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has awarded the Earth Institute at Columbia University a $3.275 million grant to create a master’s program that will educate future generations of international development practitioners responsible for addressing the complex problems of extreme poverty and sustainable development. The Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL) will receive a share of the funding to co-develop and support the program’s pedagogical and technological framework.

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View full press release

Global Classroom Project Highlighted by Columbia Record

March 7, 2008. The Columbia University Record recently published an article about the Global Classroom, a partnership project between CCNMTL and the Earth Institute that connects leading problem solvers in sustainable development with hundreds of graduate students through new web technology. The article, "Global Classroom Links Experts and Students" describes the semester-long course in which students and professors share a common syllabus and pre-taped lectures, while holding a real-time worldwide discussion on sustainable development issues.

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View the full article (PDF)

Read more about the Global Classroom

Press Release: New Global Classroom On Sustainable Development

January 29, 2008. The Earth Institute's Commission on Education for International Development Professionals and the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL) launch the Global Classroom: Integrated Approaches to Sustainable Development Practice. An experiment in distributed learning, the project organizes and delivers lectures and assignments for a master's-level course that engages hundreds of students at a dozen universities around the world.

See also:

Read the full press release