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2015 Annual: Seeding – and Speeding – Innovation | ˶ Columbia University

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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

Amy Stuart Wells
UNDERSTANDING: “˶ is an epicenter for pedagogy and curriculum on race, ethnicity and cultural understanding,” says Amy Stuart Wells. “We want to tell the world.”
Statue
A Rapid Prototyping grant supports a new social studies focus on the interconnected world of New York City.
Lalitha Vasudevan
INCLUSION: Lalitha Vasudevan(pictured), Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz and Laura Smith led a Provost-funded Civic Participation Project for safely discussing social inclusion and related issues raised by the “Black Lives Matter” agenda.

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