Initiative Aims To Improve Websites

Funds and student fellows are now available to professors who want to improve and expand the technology they use in courses and on course websites, University administrators said yesterday.

The Presidential Technology Initiative will provide grants of between $2,000 and $10,000 to professors as well as stipends for undergraduate and graduate fellows in an effort to help faculty develop and implement technological tools, University President Lawrence H. Summers and Provost Steven E. Hyman announced yesterday.

Assistant Provost and Chief Information Officer Daniel D. Moriarty said that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) will implement the program first, employing about 10 student fellows over the summer and close to 25 throughout the next academic year.

The initiative will focus on expanding digital content and interactivity on course websites, and will be funded from Summers’ budget, said Moriarty, who declined to comment on the size of the total budget for the initiative.

“President Summers was personally supportive in initiating this,” Moriarty said.

Summers said in a press release that the main goal of the program is concurrently to “enhance the student experience” and support faculty who want to supplement their classes with technological tools.

Summers’ spokesperson said yesterday that the president declined to comment further.

The new program will receive financial and logistical support for at least several years, Moriarty said.

“If something is extremely successful, we look to expand it, if not, we look to reposition it,” he said. “Our expectation at this point is that this is definitely a multi-year commitment.”

Students selected to serve as presidential instructional teaching fellows— one branch of the initiative—will help to “configure and deploy” existing website teaching aids—some of them already pioneered by professors on campus, Moriarty said.

“We want to take the best practice that has been learned in some courses today, and to support spreading that best practice,” Moriarty said. “There are a lot of clever examples across the University.”

FAS will be the first to implement the new initiative, which will be rolled out separately at each school, and FAS fellows will be selected “in the next couple of weeks,” said Paul Bergen, senior manager of FAS’ Instructional Computing Group (ICG).

Bergen, who is the FAS contact in charge of implementing the initiative, said that when ICG ran a similar, but smaller, summer fellows program two years ago, it was “overwhelmed” with applications.

FAS had planned to replicate the program again this summer, said FAS Dean for Research and Information Technology Paul C. Martin, who will oversee the FAS arm of the presidential initiative.

“What we had been planning before was really quite modest compared to what we’re going to be able to do now,” Martin said. “We’re excited about the opportunity to have a lot of people doing things that we couldn’t do before.”

The grants will pay for a broad range of improvements to course websites, including the creation of digital content, high resolution imaging, high-level video production and the licensing of protected materials.

“Digitized content is going to be whatever it means to various disciplines,” Moriarty said. “Imagine you’re a biology student and you’re taking a cool course on membranes or proteins. In this case, you could have flash animations of protein synthesis, or a three-dimensional digital model and how molecules pass through it, or tools to look at and rotate molecules in three dimensions.”

Money for professors to develop new technologies was previously available, but this initiative will provide funding for both the creation of new online tools and the use of existing methods.

“The focus was pedagogical innovation,” Moriarty said, referring to grants for technological innovation provided to professors in the past. “The [new] content funds are not in competition with innovation, but they’re a little more practical.”

—Staff writer Katharine A. Kaplan can be reached at kkaplan@fas.harvard.edu.