Now, Crowley is bringing her expertise to an online resource called LEADERS that aims to connect with students, families, and practitioners to ensure that children and adolescents who are bilingual, minority, or from lower income homes receive competent services. CCNMTL partnered with Crowley and her team of research assistants on the LEADERS project, which recently launched to the public. A team of the Center’s staff developed the LEADERS website, filmed and produced videos for the site, and helped develop educational activities.

Crowley wanted the site to be designed so that many different audiences could easily find the information they are looking for. A speech pathology student can find links to research on a topic he or she is studying, a parent can read and respond to blog posts, and practitioners can find video tutorials on evaluation methods.

For the CCNMTL team designing the site, the scope of the content presented a challenge. Through an involved discovery phase, the team determined that the information architecture of the site needed to provide simple access for lay audiences and also allow for specific, technical searches a researcher might want to perform. “We created a faceted search, which was unprecedented for us,” said Marc Raymond, the designer for the project. Faceted search is commonly seen on e-commerce sites like Amazon.com; users can select multiple categories and parameters by which they want to search, with or without a main search keyword.

“Faceted search helps people find what they are looking for better than a traditional model,” said Paul Stengel, an educational technologist who is the CCNMTL project manager for LEADERS. “It allows people to drill down and find relevant content they want without having to know specifically what they are looking for.”

Over the next few months Crowley and the project team will deploy learning activities using content from the LEADERS project site in Teachers College classrooms, observe how visitors use the site, make improvements, develop more content, and demonstrate the site to key constituent groups. A full, official site launch will take place in Fall 2013.

Selingo's talk, "Tomorrow's College: The Future of Higher Education," discussed how the perfect storm of financial, political, demographic, and technological forces are changing higher education forever. In this talk, Selingo described the college of the future: how students will want to learn, the role of technology, and the risks and opportunities for traditional campuses.

Thille discussed her work with the Open Learning Initiative, a grant-funded group that offers innovative online courses to anyone who wants to learn or teach. Founded in 2002, the group’s aim is to create high-quality courses and contribute original research to improve learning and transform higher education.

Stay tuned for announcements about future talks by following CCNMTL on Twitter and Facebook.

Candace Thille has been featured in numerous articles and was profiled in 2012 by The Chronicle of Higher Education as one of the “12 Tech Innovators Who Are Transforming Campuses.”

OLI is a grant-funded group at Carnegie Mellon University that offers innovative online courses to anyone who wants to learn or teach. Founded in 2002, the group’s aim is to create high-quality courses and contribute original research to improve learning and transform higher education. The Open Learning Initiative originated from the idea of leveraging Carnegie Mellon’s expertise in cognitive tutoring into whole online courses.

The Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning will record Thille’s presentation, and the video will be publicly available on YouTube after the event.

Candace Thille is the Director of the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon University, a position she has held since the program’s inception in 2002. She is the co-director of OLnet, an international open educational research network run jointly by Carnegie Mellon and the Open University in the UK. Thille’s focus of research and development is in applying results from the learning sciences to the design, implementation and evaluation of open web-based learning environments. She recently served on a working group at the U.S. Department of Education to write the National Education Technology Plan for the Obama Administration and is currently serving on a working group for U.S. Department of Education to evaluate of the effectiveness of online courses for secondary students.

The program is an extension of the Virtual Forest Initiative, a project that teaches environmental science with web-based, interactive tools that use real data from the Black Rock Forest north of New York City. In 2011, the Black Rock Forest Consortium was awarded a $500,000 grant from the Toyota USA Foundation to develop two educational modules - on chemistry and biology - for Harlem schools. The grant also supports class field trips to the Forest, where students can experience the forest first-hand and apply what they have learned from the online modules.

The first module, on water chemistry, was launched in late 2012. Over 300 students used the curriculum, and teachers praised the activities as fun and uniquely engaging.

CCNMTL and BRFC recently launched the second module, focusing on mammals and habitats, at several New York City schools serving disadvantaged youth. In this module, students become citizen researchers by taking part in a long-term study to identify Black Rock Forest mammals in various habitats.

Jeff Kidder, Director of Education at BRFC, led the creation of a mammals-centric curriculum, which covers various topics ranging from form and function of skulls and pelts to biological evolution of species. Kidder called on CCNMTL to create a randomized grid sampling tool of the forest for the mammals and habitats module. In the latter, students learn about mammals' eating habits as well as habitats in which they live.

The mammals and habitats module includes an overnight trip to the Black Rock Forest, during which students visit a particular area of the forest and identify the habitat and the mammal population in the area. Before the trip, students do in-class activities that show how an animal’s physiology - such as its teeth, skull, and pelt - relates to the habitat it lives in. They also learn and practice “orienteering” skills, such as using a compass to navigate from one point to another. Teachers and students have access to an online playground grid, which mimics the real research grid used in the field and prepares them for the vocabulary and tools used during the activity at the forest.

The data students collect during the field activities becomes an integral part of real scientific research. “The Virtual Forest [website] allows us to share data collected over years, and then we can ask meaningful questions about it," said Kidder.

Over time, by repeated use of the mammals and habitats module, the forest's habitats will emerge and be represented as colorful overlays on an interactive, online habitat map. The map, also developed by CCNMTL for this module, will show the first name of the students who located the mammals along with their school.

As the initiative continues, CCNMTL will investigate the interplay between the classroom, web-based, and field components of the project and study how the online preparatory exercises can improve the educational value of activities in the field. A variety of assessment data will be collected from both student and teacher participants over time. This data will help the project team improve each subsequent use of the educational modules, particularly the design and sequencing of the exercises.

About Black Rock Forest
Black Rock Forest, located 50 miles north of New York City in the Hudson Highlands, offers a natural laboratory that comprises 3,830 acres of forest for scientific researchers, educators, students, and the public to visit and study. In 2007, CCNMTL partnered with the Black Rock Forest Consortium to create the Virtual Forest Initiative—a project aimed at supporting and enhancing research, education, and community activities at the Black Rock Forest. In partnership with professors from Columbia University and Barnard College's Earth and Environmental Sciences Department, CCNMTL developed four interactive online educational modules that provide students with lessons on environmental science practices, such as conducting forest sampling, understanding and analyzing tree respiration, and identifying pollen grains and plant macrofossils. These are being used in several courses at the University and are also open to the public.

Learn more about the Virtual Forest Initiative at http://blackrock.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/portal.

Selingo's talk, "Tomorrow's College: The Future of Higher Education," will discuss how the perfect storm of financial, political, demographic, and technological forces are changing higher education forever. In this talk, Selingo will describe the college of the future: how students will want to learn, the role of technology, and the risks and opportunities for traditional campuses. He will also discuss how residential campuses can prove their value in a marketplace where students will have many more options. Copies of his new book, College (Un)Bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students, will be available for sale after the talk.

The Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning will record Selingo’s presentation, and the video will be publicly available on YouTube after the event.

Jeffrey Selingo is editor at large of The Chronicle of Higher Education and a senior fellow at Education Sector, an independent education think tank in Washington, DC. From 2007 until 2011, he was editor of The Chronicle, where he worked for 15 years in a variety of reporting and editing roles. His work has been honored with awards from the Education Writers Association, Society of Professional Journalists, and the Associated Press, and he was a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists. He has been a featured speaker before dozens of national higher-education groups and appears regularly on regional and national radio and television programs, including NPR, ABC, and CBS. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, and he is part of the inaugural class of thought leaders writing for LinkedIn Today. He received a bachelor's degree in journalism from Ithaca College and a master's degree in government from the Johns Hopkins University.

Image credit: The Chronicle of Higher Education

The fellowship program will be offered over two years and will target faculty of the schools of education and related disciplines at each institution. Approximately 20 faculty from the three institutions will be selected through an application process to comprise a cohort of fellows.The first fellowship will begin in April of this year.

Each cohort will attend five in-person and five online workshops to learn strategies, tools, and approaches for using educational technologies to improve student engagement and learning. CCNMTL staff will facilitate the in-person workshops, which will be based on seminars on teaching with technology the Center currently offers to Columbia faculty.

Each fellow will design and implement an educational technology project in his/her own teaching with the support of the home institution. Fellows will receive individual assistance with projects through weekly virtual office hours with CCNMTL staff. The fellowship will culminate in two showcase events at which fellows will demonstrate the projects they have developed.

A final component of the partnership is a monthly round-table gathering of the leadership of the three institutions with CCNMTL directors to discuss strategic and tactical directions around educational technologies.

The fellowship is sponsored by the Jim Joseph Foundation, a philanthropic organization dedicated to supporting the education of Jewish youth and young adults in the United States.

The fellowship builds on an existing CCNMTL partnership with JTS launched in 2011 to promote the the use of technology and new media in teaching and learning at JTS.

Register now!

Course Management: CourseWorks (Sakai) Getting Started
Wednesday, May 8, 12:00-1:15pm
Tuesday, May 14, 12:00-1:15pm

Course Management: CourseWorks (Sakai) End of Semester
Wednesday, May 8, 2:00-3:15pm
Tuesday, May 14, 2:00-3:15pm

See CCNMTL’s events page for all upcoming workshops, or request a custom workshop just for your department.

Next Tuesday, April 23rd at 2pm, iversity's Open Courses and MOOC Production Fellowship will be featured during a presentation led by Hannes Klöpper, iversity's chief marketing officer. Iversity is promoting their MOOC Production Fellowship program which is offering 10 grants of €25,000 to faculty and universities to produce courses. The talk is open to CUID holders and will be held in 523 Butler Library. (Use westside elevators.)

Hannes Klöpper is a Columbia grad and co-founder of the Berlin-based online-startup iversity. Iversity is the first European startup in the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) space. To develop their inaugural set of courses, iversity partnered with a top German think-tank the Stifterverband (www.stifterverband.info) for Europe's first-ever MOOC contest. Through April 30, universities and professors from around the globe can submit their concepts for open online courses in any subject matter.

Additional details on the fellowship and simple application are available here: http://moocfellowship.org.

Dozens of top universities now offer MOOCs that span a range of topics including computer science, business, medicine, science, humanities, social sciences, and more. Launched in April 2012, Coursera now has over 3 million students, ranging from 10 to 90 years old, of whom 40% are in the developing world. In the talk, Koller reported on this far-reaching experiment in education, including some examples and preliminary analytics. She also discussed how this model can support an improved learning experience for on-campus students, via blended learning, and provide unprecedented access to education to millions of students around the world.

As part of her visit to campus, Koller also met with the University Senate Online Task Force, the Provost's Faculty Advisory Committee on Online Learning, and the CUMC Education Resource Council.

Koller’s talk, “The Online Revolution: Education for Everyone,” will discuss how the advent of MOOCs is transforming higher education. Dozens of top universities now offer MOOCs that span a range of topics including computer science, business, medicine, science, humanities, social sciences, and more. Launched in April 2012, Coursera now has over 3 million students, ranging from 10 to 90 years old, of whom 40% are in the developing world. In this talk, Koller will report on this far-reaching experiment in education, including some examples and preliminary analytics. She will also discuss how this model can support an improved learning experience for on-campus students, via blended learning, and provide unprecedented access to education to millions of students around the world.

As part of her visit to campus, Koller will also meet with the University Senate Online Task Force, the Provost's Faculty Advisory Committee on Online Learning, and the CUMC Education Resource Council.

The Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning will record Koller’s presentation, and the video will be publicly available on YouTube after the event.

Daphne Koller is the Rajeev Motwani Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University and the co-founder of Coursera, a social entrepreneurship company that works with top universities to make the best education accessible to everyone around the world, for free. In her research life, Daphne works in the area of machine learning and probabilistic modeling, with applications to computer vision, systems biology, and personalized medicine. She is also an award winning teacher, who pioneered in her Stanford class many of the ideas that underlie the Coursera user experience. She received her BSc and MSc from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and her PhD from Stanford in 1994.