A $665,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation puts CMC at the forefront of a collaborative academic computing program among The Claremont Colleges.

In collaboration with the Claremont University Consortium, the just-awarded Mellon grant will be used during the next three years to enhance pedagogical uses of information technology in seven areas: sponsorship of faculty workshops and professional development; housing a student production team and student training at CMC, the lead college for the grant; creation of multimedia library resources; enhanced use of video conferencing; coordinated and expanded user support; expanded courseware support; and focused content support.

The grant is the result of a project proposal called Sharing Our Strengths: A Consortial Approach to Supporting Pedagogical Innovation Through Faculty Fluency in Information Technology, or more briefly, SOS-Mellon.

“What it does is expand what CMC’s Teaching Resource Center has been doing all along, while drawing consortially on the resources of the other colleges,” said Jerry Garris, CMC’s assistant vice president for development.

Garris co-authored the proposal with Program director Cynthia Humes, CMC’s associate dean for academic computing, and interim director of the TRC.

Like many of The Colleges’ existing consortial programs, “SOS-Mellon pools together the strengths of neighboring campuses to meet the basic goal of improving the faculty use of technology in the classroom across all of the Claremont Colleges,” Garris says. But because CMC has the leadership role in the program, and because most of the services offered to the consortium through the program will be hosted by CMC, “It puts us in the forefront of instructional technology use in Claremont,” Garris said.

Benefits from the July 1 grant have already been reaped, Humes says. So far, 89 staff and faculty members have attended introductory and intermediate WebCT 3.8-version workshops, used in more than 350 courses last year to enhance class instruction through the Internet. Including faculty and staff trained in other Mellon-supported workshops, about 154 people have been trained, which already nears the three-year goal of instructing 200.

SOS-Mellon benefits will have a broader reach this semester, when Educational Technology Services hires student technician assistants from all campuses that can provide technical assistance in support of faculty pedagogical goals. Through their experiences, students will digitize images, video, and written materials, transfer files from one medium to another, assist with course Web pages, and perform video editing tasks on approved projects. A small group of trained students also will be working with faculty on discipline-specific IT applications.