Global and Distance Learning News
Global Learning Initiative Expands To Include Distance Learning
The Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning has expanded its strategic initiative to promote global learning projects to encompass online and distance learning. The initiative is now called "Global and Distance Learning: Learning Beyond Boundaries," reflecting the growing interest in online and distance learning at Columbia and at other universities.
CCNMTL has relaunched the initiative’s website, which features its global and distance learning projects and information for faculty, schools, and departments interested in working with CCNMTL on similar efforts. The site also includes announcements, links to related news, and information on global and online learning efforts across the University.
This spring CCNMTL has held workshops on best practices for online and distance learning. Topics included using video and social media to create a sense of community among students in a global, online course; reviews of recent educational research; and ways faculty can effectively map existing curricula onto online courses.
Jami Carlacio, Ph.D., recently joined the Center's staff to lead the Global and Distance Learning Initiative. An experienced writer and editor with a Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Jami has taught online writing classes at multiple universities. Since joining the Center, Jami has initiated conversations with schools and departments at Columbia that will inform CCNMTL’s future projects in global and distance learning.
New Seminar Series: An "Idea Salon" for Faculty
The Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL) is pleased to announce a new seminar series to provide faculty with ideas and best practices for using new technology in their courses.
This spring, the series features five weekly seminars on Thursday afternoons, March 29th through April 26th. In each session, faculty and instructors can explore ways to engage students, facilitate collaboration, connect beyond the classroom, and enhance learning.
These “inside-out” seminars start not with the technology, but with a teaching challenge, such as how to encourage discussion outside the classroom. CCNMTL staff will present pedagogical research on the challenge, discuss tools and approaches to solving the problem, and provide examples for inspiration. A salon-style format encourages discussion and sharing of ideas. Attendees are welcome to bring a lunch, and beverages will be provided.
All seminars are free and will take place in CCNMTL’s Faculty Support Lab in Butler Library, Room 204. Follow the links below for more information and to register.
Using New CourseWorks to Engage Students Online and Offsite
Thursday, March 29, 2012, 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
Extending Discussions Beyond the Classroom
Thursday, April 05, 2012, 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
Lectures that Stick: Cognition Theories for Better Presentations
Thursday, April 12, 2012, 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
Research Remixed: Understanding and Using Media Annotations
Thursday, April 19, 2012, 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
Sifting through the Noise: Filtering, Tagging, and RSS
Thursday, April 26, 2012, 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
CCNMTL Spotlights HIV Projects for World AIDS Day
December 1 is World AIDS Day. CCNMTL is currently working on three projects focused on HIV prevention and treatment: Masivukeni, Multimedia WORTH, and Multimedia Connect.
Masivukeni is a counselor support tool for delivering an HIV-treatment adherence intervention in clinics in South Africa. It is a collaboration between Dr. Robert Remien, a research scientist at the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies, and CCNMTL. More about this project...
Multimedia WORTH is a computer-supported HIV prevention intervention for groups of drug-involved women who are on parole or in alternative to incarceration programs in New York. WORTH is a collaboration between the Columbia School of Social Work's Social Intervention Group (SIG) and CCNMTL. More about this project...
Multimedia Connect is a a computer-supported HIV prevention intervention for couples at risk for HIV developed by the Columbia School of Social Work's Social Intervention Group (SIG) and CCNMTL. The multimedia intervention provides supplemental facilitator training and support materials and participant activities. More about this project...
Global Honors College 2011 Concludes
The Global Honors College concluded its 2011 Global Seminar on August 20. This summer's seminar brought together 28 undergraduates from 8 universities in the United States and Asia. The Global Sustainability Seminar focused on a food and agriculture theme for 2011. The students began their study in June and July by participating a six-week online phase led by faculty from Columbia, the National University of Singapore, Waseda University and the University of Washington. During the online phase of the seminar, CCNMTL worked with the faculty to leverage interactive synchronous and asynchronous technologies and to plan course units and assignments that maximized interaction among this global group of students.
In August, the group convened in Singapore for the onsite phase of the seminar, including Ashlinn Quinn representing CCNMTL. This year's onsite phase was hosted by the National University of Singapore at its brand-new UTown campus. The onsite phase was a period of intensive work and study where multidisciplinary student teams conducted research into prevailing issues in the sustainability of global food and agriculture systems. Our NUS hosts arranged informative field trips so that students could get an in-depth view into the local issues affecting food, agriculture, and sustainability in Singapore. Students visited a marine aquaculture center, a governmental public health/food testing laboratory, a vegetable farm, and several natural reserves where Singapore's native forest and fauna were protected from development.
For their final projects, teams of students created research presentations that focused on specific topics in the sustainability of food systems. In their work, they incorporated their own definitions of sustainability into presentations that merged research summaries with policy recommendations. The presentations' topics included the salmon industry in British Columbia, the future of rice farming in sub-saharan Africa, the oil palm industry, and the sustainability of food waste management systems.
The website for the seminar – which paired traditional course management capability with interactive tools like microblogging and video commenting using GoingOn.com's LMS – contains narrated copies of these presentations as well as records of the ample work students completed in the online phase of the seminar.
Global Honors College 2011 Kicks Off
The online phase of the Global Honors College 2011 officially began on June 20. The course, Global Seminar on Sustainability (2011 Theme: Food and Agriculture), began with a live global kickoff session held in Adobe Connect that brought together the Seminar's four teaching faculty and students from nine participating institutions. The live event was a chance for the students and faculty to meet each other in real time, covering faculty introductions and an overview of the weeks ahead.
Course work for the seminar is now underway using the GoingOn course platform that emphasizes social media interactions among students and instructors. Additionally, faculty will enhance course presentations using VoiceThread. The online phase will continue for six weeks before all participants rendezvous in Singapore for the face-to-face component of the course in August.
The GHC is a joint effort of Columbia and Waseda Universities, with funding provided by the CU Provost's Office and Waseda University.
Public Health Publication Features Columbia Global Course
The Friday Letter, a weekly publication of the Association of Schools of Public Health, released an article entitled, Expanding the Knowledge Network through Columbia’s Global Classroom, highlighting how students from Indonesia and Sri Lanka are tuning in to classes at Mailman School of Public Health.
The April 15, 2011 article focused on the course, “Protection of Children in Disaster and War,” taught by Dr. Neil Boothby, the Allan Rosenfield Professor of Clinical Forced Migration and Health and director of the Program on Forced Migration and Health, and Dr. Lindsay Stark, assistant professor of clinical population and family health, that was shared via video conferencing and, online, using a Wikischolars site.
Michelle Hall, CCNMTL senior educational technologist, helped the group choose and set up the Wikischolars platform for collaborative editing that allowed for Columbia UNI and non-UNI access; advised how the assignments should be set up along with the RSS feeds to capture student responses. Michelle also trained the TAs and coordinators to use the wiki that was set up to function like a course management system, using a wiki page for each class session.
CCNMTL Attends the Global MDP Summit 2011
CCNMTL was invited to present at the Global Master's in Development Practice Summit held in late February 2011 in Turrialba, Costa Rica. The summit, hosted by CATIE University, gathered more than 20 participating universities that offer the Global Master's in Development Practice. The schools were represented by close to 70 faculty and administrators.
Ashlinn Quinn, senior program specialist for the Global Learning Initiative, and Rob Garfield, educational technologist for the Global MDP program, gave an overview of CCNMTL's efforts around the Global MDP program, including curricular design and support for the core MDP course Integrated Approaches to Sustainable Development Practice, which is offered in a live "global classroom" format. In addition, Ashlinn and Rob demonstrated related projects, including Journalism Case Studies, the Millennium Village Simulation, the Virtual Forest Initiative and Country X. These projects were used to spark conversations with the participants about potential collaborations with MDP faculty.
Ashlinn and Rob are pursuing many intriguing ideas that emerged from the summit, including possibly developing additional courses to be delivered in the "global classroom" format, online case studies, a custom software tool for students to plan and evaluate healthcare interventions, and more.
CCNMTL Attends New York State Global Health Forum
December 14, 2010. CCNMTL's Ashlinn Quinn represented the Center at the annual New York State Global Health Forum today. The all-day Forum held at the NYU College of Dentistry brought together educators from medical, dental, nursing, social work, and public health schools to discuss strategies for implementing their practices in global health. Quinn co-hosted a breakout session with Dr. David Stern, MD of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine that focused on using information technology in global health education. She demonstrated Global Learning Initiative projects such as the Global Master's in Development Practice and the Global Honors College, and helped forum participants consider how their institutions might implement existing digital tools to create globally collaborative courses in the fields of medicine, dentistry, and public health.
CCNMTL Travels to Waseda University for Global Honors College
August 23, 2010. CCNMTL staff members Michael Preston and Ashlinn Quinn visited Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan for the Global Honors College on August 1-4, 2010. The visit coincided with the start of the three-week onsite phase of the College's 2010 Global Seminar in Sustainability. This onsite phase is a two-credit course for undergraduates from nine universities in the U.S. and Asia (including Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Yale, Peking, Korea, Waseda, University of Washington, and the National University of Singapore) which followed immediately upon the online component of the seminar held in June and July. In both the online and onsite phases, faculty and students conduct research on topics pertaining to sustainable development, using digital collaboration and research tools to document and share their findings.
During their visit, Preston and Quinn led several workshops with students and faculty, introducing them to new tools that would be implemented throughout the seminar's onsite phase, including one of Columbia's online collaboration platforms, Wikischolars. They also provided troubleshooting support to seminar participants who were using technologies such as VoiceThread and Mendeley, and they attended administrative meetings to discuss planning strategies for future Global Seminars. Prior to their departure, Preston and Quinn designed and distributed a survey to the seminar students to evaluate the online phase of the program.
Learn more about the Global Honors College.
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.
See also:
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.
See also:
View the full article (PDF)
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:
| Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning 212.854.9058 ccnmtl@columbia.edu Site Map |  |