Notes from the Vice Provost: May 2014 VPAL Update

Colleagues,

In response to faculty requests, I will periodically provide short updates about opportunities to engage in innovative learning, conduct research on pedagogy, and receive grants and support.

Learning

  • HarvardX is launching a new faculty proposal process as of today. The aim is to enable faculty to engage with the HX team from the start to develop a course or module proposal and understand the work required before submitting a complete proposal to the HarvardX Faculty Committee. Proposals will be considered on a quarterly basis; the next deadline for submitting a letter of interest is June 30, 2014.  Letters of interest that are approved will be developed into full proposals with the HX team over the summer and reviewed by the HarvardX Faculty Committee in September 2014. 
  • The Advances in Learning Office will run partner with the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning and HarvardX to run a small pilot program this summer called the Faculty Academy.  The Faculty Academy is a monthly  intensive workshop to provide 6 faculty with a half day of hands-on experimentation and expert guidance in emerging pedagogies and tools for use on-campus and online.  The first session will take place on June 27.  Should you be interested in participating, please fill out this form.

Research

  • In collaboration with HILT, HarvardX Research Co-chairs Dan Levy and Andrew Ho are developing guidelines about more ways for faculty to engage with data and studies. Their priorities for 2014-2015 can be found here. 
  • Sam Moulton of HILT has prepared a summary of how psychological science can inform university-level learning and major open research questions. Download here.
  • Later this week the HarvardX research team, in coordination with MITx, will be announcing the release of a set of de-identified aggregated learning data relating to an initial study of online learning based upon each institution’s first year courses on the edX platform.  This dataset contains the original learning data from the 16 HarvardX and MITxcourses offered in 2012-2013 that formed the basis of the first Harvard-MIT Working Papers (released in January) and underpin a suite of powerful open source interactive visualization tools (released in February).  We will post the full press release with a link to the dataset on the HarvardX website when it is released.

Grants and Support

As always, please feel free to get in touch with me if you have any questions or suggestions.

Best regards,

Peter

Share on: