Carnegie Mellon Receives $1 Million Grant for Ed Tech Initiative
Carnegie Mellon University has received a
$1 million grant from the Carnegie
Corporation of New York to support the university's Simon Initiative, which aims to improve
student learning outcomes through the implementation of learning science
research and technology.
Part of the Simon Initiative is the Global Learning Council (GLC), a
consortium of academic, industry and nonprofit leaders focused on the use of
science and technology to enhance learning. The GLC held its inaugural meeting
in fall 2014. Since then, it has written a draft white paper, "Technology-Enhanced
Learning: Best Practices and Data Sharing in Higher Education," which
includes nine recommendations for improving student learning outcomes through
technology-enhanced learning (TEL).
Those nine recommendations fall under three main themes:
- Creating a campus culture with incentives and professional development
support;
- Building expertise and resources to foster a cycle of continuous
improvement; and
- Pursuing global community building and strategies for data and resource
sharing.
The grant will allow the university to begin implementing the GLC
recommendations and foster the use of technology-enhanced learning techniques
and resources at Carnegie Mellon and other higher education institutions. The
university will develop a series of statistics course modules for use in
research training courses in several of the its schools and colleges, and the
School of Computer Science will develop TEL modules to support introductory
computer science teaching.
According to Richard Scheines, faculty lead of the Simon Initiative and the
grant's principal investigator, "there are sizable barriers to wide
adoption of effective TEL, some rational and some not. This grant gives us the
opportunity to take this work to the next level, making these breakthrough
techniques available to more students here at CMU and to learners
everywhere.”
The project will "assess the type of university policies and practices
needed to overcome typical institutional barriers to adoption," according to
information from the university, and "the work will subsequently be extended to
other universities, domestically and internationally."
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].