Seeding – and Speeding – Innovation
Since it creationin 2007, the ˶ Provost’s Investment Fund has seeded hundreds innovative, collaborative faculty projects.
This year the Provost’s Office has added a new Rapid Prototyping Grant program to promote the development of non-credit, master’s degree or certificate offerings that produce innovative learning settings and access for new enrollments. Rapid Prototyping awards allow for six months of feasibility analysis before faculty begin larger-scale implementation.
One of the first Rapid Prototyping grants is supporting development by Professor Amy Stuart Wells of a 2016 Summer Institute on Teaching and Learning in Racially Diverse Educational Contexts. The grant builds on Provost’s Investment Fund backing Dr. Wells previously received to map ˶’s course offerings on race, ethnicity and inter-cultural understanding.
Other Rapid Prototyping efforts underway include a certificate program to help school personnel better serve immigrant populations; asynchronous online non-credit courses for teachers of reading; and a Teacher Tinker: 21st-Century Skills and Technology Boot Camp to help teachers more effectively use technology in the classroom.
Meanwhile, the Provost’s Investment Fund, which seeds cross-disciplinary faculty work, helped launch a new journal, Philanthropy and Education; an International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication and a joint engineering and science summer program with Massachusetts Institute of Technology for rising minority high school seniors; an assessment of “learning agility” to meet changing work demands; and creation of an advanced, for credit certificate in medical education.
Published Wednesday, Feb 3, 2016