January 10, 2005. On Friday, January 7, CCNMTL hosted a meeting to kick off an NSF-sponsored project, whose result will help colleges and universities across the country to prepare teachers of early childhood mathematics. CCNMTL and Teachers College will work with teacher education partners to develop model courses supported by a VITAL (Video Interactions for Teaching and Learning), a web-based study environment, which will be deployed at six other universities.

VITAL was first used in Prof. Herbert Ginsburg's course The Development of Mathematical Thinking at Teachers College during the spring 2003 semester. Based on this experience, CCNMTL continues to refine the VITAL environment and has received funding to collaborate with content experts and field testers to develop a large-scale, enterprise solution that will accommodate thousands of students nationwide.

VITAL project partners include William Paterson University, Rutgers University, Boston University, Boston College, Howard University, Hunter College, the State University of New York at Buffalo, Georgia State University, the University of Houston, Indiana University at Bloomington, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of San Diego, the University of Hawaii, and the Education Development Center.