The Provost and deans of the Main Campus have articulated a set of Guiding Principles and Goals that should motivate ITEL projects:
October 2012
For several years, the Georgetown community has been building capabilities for innovative ways of teaching and learning. During the past 10-15 years in particular, we have experimented with new approaches to strengthen how we educate our students, and the toolset for helping students learn continues to grow.
The expanded toolset for higher education now includes:
Georgetown is beginning a University-wide initiative that will drive discussion and deliberation of the best way for us to use these new tools to enhance the lives of faculty and students, and to advance priority themes that emerged from a series of self-examinations, beginning in the 1990s that emphasize greater depth in the curriculum and co-curriculum.
Self-studies include the Intellectual life Reports (1997; 2007), A Call to Action (2009), Middle-States Self-Study (2012). Persistent themes and priorities include:
We are beginning the Initiative with a review of current work and new possibilities in meetings across the Main Campus, which will also provide input on what evaluations and pilot projects we should mount. This initiative will entail University investments in faculty time, campus infrastructure, and partnerships with consortia of universities sharing similar goals to gain access to tools that would otherwise be cost prohibitive.
This approach requires that we evaluate the learning effectiveness of each pedagogy we employ and that we actively exchange effective teaching practices and build on success.
October 2012
Dear Members of the Georgetown Community:
Earlier this fall, we announced Georgetown's Initiative on Technology Enhanced Learning (ITEL), which will provide new opportunities and enhance institutional support for faculty innovation.
Today we write to you to share the news that Georgetown will fund this initiative's commitment to innovation through three investments made over the next three years totaling $8 million across all of our campuses.
We are making these investments to create new opportunities to enhance the experience of teaching and learning at Georgetown through technology, and we will focus on three main areas:
Over the next three years, the Initiative will support a number of faculty interested in integrating technology into their courses both with financial resources as well as expert support to design and implement new approaches.
The grant support given through ITEL will be awarded to individual faculty members, teams of faculty, and faculty-student collaborators beginning next semester. The grants will support innovations ranging from introducing technology into single course elements to transformation grants, which could include the complete redesign of courses and programs.
We invite all interested faculty members to apply. You can read more about this exciting new initiative here.
A second component of these investments will include strengthening critical aspects of Georgetown's existing IT and faculty support infrastructure. In order to ensure that we can best realize the opportunities presented by new technologies, we will hire more expert staff to expand our current resources to help faculty integrate technology into teaching as well as deepen our work to enhance the availability and reliability of our wireless network.
Finally, as many of you know, we have been exploring opportunities to join a consortium of universities who are committed to enhancing educational opportunities both on their campuses and throughout the world through online technology and large software platforms with tools that support massive open online courses.
A partnership like this will present significant opportunities for Georgetown, particularly in the service of our mission by strengthening our work as a global research university. We expect to make an announcement on this partnership soon.
We would like to express our gratitude to the faculty, staff and students who have contributed to this work through our three-campus ITEL working group, Online@GU, and through the town hall forums with faculty from all of our campuses.
This is an exciting time for higher education and for Georgetown. We look forward to working together as we explore these new adventures and opportunities.
Dear Members of the Georgetown University Community,
I am pleased to write to you about a topic that is engaging the higher education community at a very rapid rate – innovative, technology-enhanced learning and online education. From campuses and classrooms to newsrooms and boardrooms, a conversation has emerged over how technology is best employed in the classroom and the impact of disruptors like flipped courses and online education on students and how they learn.
Georgetown is no exception to this conversation and debate. We have an exemplar in our distance-education version of the Master of Science in Nursing, and many of our faculty already are active users of blogs, clickers, and other approaches to fostering interactive learning.
Today we announce a new Initiative on Technology-Enhanced Learning (ITEL). This initiative will both strengthen teaching and learning in on-campus programs and enhance Georgetown's online activity globally. Through ITEL, we will explore experimenting with new approaches to interactive learning, which may include redesign of large introductory courses, deepening student research skills, and possible development of a few online courses.
ITEL begins on a strong foundation, building on a decade of projects large and small. It fits into the Georgetown Learning Initiatives component of the capital campaign, For Generations to Come.
ITEL's work is expressed in a working set of principles and goals that will carry the initiative forward. These working principles and goals are draft in nature and need the feedback of faculty governance groups, individual faculty members, and students. We look forward to providing opportunities for dialogue on this topic as we move forward.
To organize this work and begin a dialogue across campus, I am developing a new Working Group on Technology-Enhanced Learning. The Working Group will be comprised of faculty and individuals from across the University, including students. Their explorations and deliberations will inform our work in this arena and help shape key next steps.
The Working Group will be one aspect of our engagement on this topic. Recognizing that some of our most valuable assets are found in the intellectual resources of our own community, we hope this dialogue will engage our entire community, including senior administrators, faculty, existing faculty bodies, and students. Indeed our community is rich with resourceful change-agents who can help us develop innovative strategies to inform the way our students learn. We will also continue to promote conversation across the University community through such mechanisms as the Online@GU coordinating group, the Provost's blog, and a new website under development.
We will also apply new resources. For example, support for faculty to develop pilot projects or to experiment on a smaller scale will be one target for investment. We will also consider whether to invest in a partnership that connects us both to technology-based infrastructure and to other universities addressing the same kinds of problems and opportunities.
I look forward to keeping you posted on this exciting work and sharing more information in the coming weeks and months. This is a conversation that is just beginning and one that I am certain will inform our work to deliver the best possible education to our students.
Sincerely,
Robert Groves, Executive Vice President and Provost
CNDLS
The Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) supports faculty and graduate students in deepening student learning by joining educational traditions with the tools, resources, and opportunities of the 21st century. CNDLS facilitates a number of fellowship programs, hosts teaching and learning web tools for the university, provides workshops on pedagogy, and offers consultations on course design, assessment, and technology-enhanced learning.
Gelardin New Media Center
The Gelardin New Media Center supports the use of multimedia resources for research and scholarship. The Center provides workshops on software and recording equipment as well as consultations and production services.
Georgetown Commons
The Georgetown Commons is a web-based platform that enables members of the Georgetown University community to discover and connect with tools and practices for teaching and learning. Faculty, staff, and students can sign up for blogs, wikis, ePortfolios, and more on the Georgetown Commons.
Lauinger Library
Lauinger Library provides research consultations as well as class-specific instructional sessions.
Copyright at Georgetown
Lauinger Library's guide on copyright at Georgetown University offers guidelines for faculty on using copyrighted material for educational purposes, as well as managing the copyright of your own research products.
UIS Help Desk
The UIS Help Desk provides support for Blackboard and Google Apps (including GU Mail and GU Calendar) in addition to troubleshooting help for the university's technology infrastructure, including internet, telecommunications, and information security.
The following readings and videos highlight the current trends in technology-enhanced learning at Georgetown and beyond.
Barriers to Adoption of Online Learning Systems in U.S. Higher Education
A report from Ithaka S+R that offers an overview of recent developments in the realm of online learning and higher education
"College is Dead! Long Live College!"
A Time article on online learning and universities
ELI: "7 Things You Should Know About MOOCs"
A primer on massive open online courses from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative
"Online Learning at Georgetown: Faculty Perspectives"
Video of a recent event featuring a panel of Georgetown faculty discussing their experiences with online learning environments
"Reinventing the Classroom"
An article from Harvard Magazine on flipping the classroom
"The Open Learning Initiative: Measuring the Effectiveness of the OLI Statistics Course in Accelerating Student Learning"
A study by Marsha Lovett, Oded Meyer, and Candace Thille (CMU) examining the impact of OLI on student learning
Teaching and Learning in Open, Online Courses
A guide from Vanderbilt University's Center for Teaching Excellence
"What You Need to Know About MOOC's"
From the Chronicle of Higher Education, a chronological roundup of resources on massive open online courses
