Mellon Funds Multicampus Digital Initiative

UMW will be part of a three-year project to expand distance, team-taught, and multicampus digital research seminars in the liberal arts.

The Andrew Mellon Foundation awarded COPLAC – the 29 member-school Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges – a $540,000 grant for the three-year project. UMW is a COPLAC member.

The project, “Digital Liberal Arts at a Distance,” will be co-directed by UMW History Professor Jeffrey McClurken ’94 and University of North Carolina Asheville History Professor Ellen Holmes Pearson. McClurken, who also is UMW special assistant to the provost for teaching, technology, and innovation, and Pearson co-directed the successful COPLAC-sponsored pilot course “Century America Digital Liberal Arts” that inspired the new effort.

Using distance and online technologies, undergraduate researchers will collaborate across campuses to build major digital projects that will be available to the public on the web. They will develop research, production, and communications skills that are useful in a wide variety of professions.

Seventy-five participants will be selected for the project, including faculty members, special collections librarians, and instructional technologists. They will develop and launch as many as 16 digital liberal arts research seminars on topics in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. All will attend an opening three-day meeting in early June at COPLAC headquarters on the campus of UNC Asheville. Faculty will meet again beginning fall 2016 at the UMW Hurley Convergence Center, where they will receive the technical training required to teach digital liberal arts at a distance from students.

Speak Your Mind

*