Educational Technology

By JOE KARAGANIS and DAVID McCLURE, NY Times

Over the past two years, we and our partners at the Open Syllabus Project (based at the American Assembly at Columbia) have collected more than a million syllabuses from university websites. We have also begun to extract some of their key components — their metadata — starting with their dates, their schools, their fields of study and the texts that they assign. This past week, we made available online a beta version of our Syllabus Explorer,  http://explorer.opensyllabusproject.org/, which allows this database to be searched. Our hope and expectation is that this tool will enable people to learn new things about teaching, publishing and intellectual history.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/opinion/sunday/what-a-million-syllabuses-can-teach-us.html

By Michael Hart, Campus Technology

It took some time as well as a lot of planning and discussion, but Ribble and his colleagues got what they wanted when the new Center for Sciences and Innovation opened in early 2015. The $127-million, five-story, 280,000-square foot building is home to eight academic departments, the McNair Scholars Program, the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship — and “The Cube.” The official name of “The Cube” is the Innovation Center, an approximately 10,000-square-foot glass-enclosed space that ostensibly is the site of the university’s engineering science and computer teaching lab. However, it is best known as the hub of the entire building, a place that Chemistry professor Nancy Mills said offers students and faculty a rare opportunity.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/01/20/creating-a-collaboration-hub.aspx