Campus Collaborative set the tone for outreach at Ohio State

As Ohio State prepares to extend its outreach and engagement initiative statewide, it is stepping onto firm footing established by the Campus Collaborative that has spearheaded the University District revitalization efforts over the past six years.

Campus Collaborative is a consortium of colleges and academic units led by the College of Education in partnership with Campus Partners. It has fostered University/community partnerships that have helped Ohio State become a model for other universities in their efforts to reach out to their communities, said Mike Casto, director of the Interprofessional Commission of Ohio and Campus Collaborative.

As a direct result of Campus Collaborative, more than 40 interdisciplinary outreach and engagement projects have been started through seed grants supported by the Office of Academic Affairs. And service learning has become a visible part of the academic agenda of the University, with 15 to 20 new service learning courses created, Casto said.

Additionally, the capacity of schools, community organizations and human service agencies to serve their students and clients has been substantially increased, and approximately 600 faculty, staff, students and community residents have been involved in five annual University/community forums.

A recent celebration breakfast at the Faculty Club marked the transition from the Campus Collaborative to programs and activities under the direction of the Office of Outreach and Engagement and the University P-12 Project to better reflect outreach as one of the main initiatives outlined in the University's Academic Plan.

"Campus Collaborative was never intended to be an organization that would continue indefinitely," Casto said. "It was intended to create the foundation for a more intensive and focused set of University initiatives. We were working to not only have an immediate impact, but also a long-term impact as far as projects and sustainable goals are concerned."

Bobby Moser, vice president for University outreach, said the Campus Collaborative set the tone for outreach at Ohio State. "The work the Campus Collaborative performed over the past five years resulted in creating and facilitating relationships between the University and the community. The partnerships that developed with schools in the University District have contributed to the development of some of the P-12 Project's initiatives in the neighborhood. As a partner with the University Outreach/Engagement initiative, Campus Collaborative has helped many members of the University community become involved with outreach and engagement in new ways."

Campus Collaborative was created in 1995, when the Interprofessional Commission was invited by Campus Partners to research and develop recommendations in several areas of human services that could be incorporated into the overall Campus Partners neighborhood improvement plan, Casto said. New partners in the community and the University were added to the participants in the Interprofessional Commission, and Campus Collaborative emerged. The focus areas have been faculty participation, public education, improved student quality of life, health and well-being, and economic development.

"The purpose of the program was to bring the teaching and learning of Ohio State faculty, staff and students into the community, and in the process, to respond to the needs of the community," Casto said.

Campus Collaborative has been successful in generating numerous sources of funding to fuel the University's outreach efforts. An investment of $400,000 by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) helped Campus Collaborative bring the academic mission of the University into the community; funds provided by Ameritech and Apple Computers helped establish a Community Computer Center; and additional grants helped Campus Collaborative develop a school-to-work system for the 13 schools serving the University District, Casto said. OSU Extension and the Columbus Employment Consortium helped support employment readiness and job placement support by staff, directly resulting in employment of more than 100 residents since 1996.

A Campus Collaborative grant helped launch Project Build, a program that provides training in the building trades for low-income persons with difficult employment histories, Casto said. It started as a partnership between Ohio State, Godman Guild, Weinland Park Community Collaborative, HUD, and a number of area employers and industries.

In addition, Campus Collaborative distributed seed grants totaling $276,877 that helped support initiatives focusing on faculty/student teaching and learning in the community, with 22 departments from 14 colleges represented. Among the programs highlighted by Casto that made exceptional use of seed grants were:

• The Service Learning Cooperative, led by principal investigators Susan Jones and Kathy Hill of the College of Education. In conjunction with an undergraduate course offered in the School of Educational Policy and Leadership, "Leadership in Community Service," the project developed a service-learning cooperative to engage students with community agencies to address community issues, enhance learning, and increase faculty and student participation in community life. Additional grants from the Campus Collaborative and external sources have provided a sustained emphasis at OSU on service learning, including the Service Learning Roundtable, a faculty development program facilitated by Jones and Golden Jackson, assistant professor of consumer and textile sciences.

• Housing Data for the University District, led by principal investigator Morton O'Kelly of the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis, resulted in a series of maps and overlays for the University District that illustrate housing data, population demographics, land use, population shifts, poverty levels, housing prices and many other types of data.

The reassigning of activities previously conducted by Campus Collaborative is just part of a restructuring of Outreach and Engagement as the University continues to move forward in fostering a culture at Ohio State as a more engaged institution. The office has moved to the fifth floor of Smith Lab and has put in place a team that will work to support and encourage University outreach and engagement. The team is led by Moser; Karen Bruns, leader of OSU Cares and outreach and engagement; and Janet Sanfilippo, director of University outreach.

Additionally, two new committees have been formed: the Dean's Advocacy Committee and the Vice President for University Outreach's Leadership Action Committee. Two new databases also have been created and will continue to be fine-tuned: a listing of outreach projects (www.osu.edu/outreachprojects) and a listing of resources available to support such initiatives (http://outreachresources.osu.edu).

For more information about Campus Collaborative, visit its Web site at www.osu.edu/campuscollab/. To learn more about the Interprofessional Commission, visit the Web at www.osu.edu/ico.

TELR institute advances Web instruction across the state

Technology Enhanced Learning and Research (TELR) at Ohio State has established a Learning Technologies Institute (LTI) to build and deliver research-based faculty development and training programs to advance Web-enhanced instruction.

"The TELR Learning Technologies Institute supports the Academic Plan's call for a renewed commitment to outreach and engagement," said Chief Information Officer Ilee Rhimes. Since its creation in January, LTI and its eight trainers have conducted training sessions for faculty from 22 Ohio colleges and universities spread throughout the state.

"We're proud to say that this academic year we have trained 261 faculty from Ohio colleges and institutions -- the majority within a partnership with the Ohio Learning Network's TeachU initiative," said Steve Acker, director of TELR.

In addition to faculty trained in a variety of campus labs around the state, 120 additional faculty attended faculty development workshops at the Kick IT Up A Notch conference hosted by Ohio State last August. Acker said TELR is striving to surpass these results at this year's Illuminating Learning with Technology conference, set for Nov. 1-3 at Ohio State's Pfahl Hall. (Details on the third annual conference can be found at telr.ohio-state.edu/conferences/2001.)

Acker said LTI is focusing training in three areas this year: WebCT course management system, Apple QuickTime and universal Web access (ADA compliance).

• The course management curriculum offers instruction in placing a course online using WebCT software. LTI training workshops for WebCT address training needs of beginners through advanced users, including sessions for those who wish to become certified trainers. Customized training sessions and faculty development seminars are also offered.

• QuickTime media with an emphasis on streaming video and audio help bring multimedia richness to online courses. The LTI has partnered with Apple Computer to develop the Apple QuickTime curriculum. Apple is helping train the LTI trainers, and in turn the new trainers will offer workshops to OSU faculty and staff as well as to external audiences. Workshops are focused on how to create, edit and deliver digital video using iMovie, FireWire and a digital video camera. They are being built around common problems faced by faculty, such as how to take a short segment of an evening newscast to share with tomorrow's class or how to capture and preserve a special guest lecturer's presentation.

• ADA compliance offers direction and advice in making an online course accessible to everyone. LTI is partnering with ADA Coordinator Scott Lissner; Margo Izzo, who co-directs the Technology Partnership Grant; the Office of Disability Services; and the Web Accessibility Center (which analyzes Web pages for their accessibility to people with disabilities) to develop the workshop curriculum to assure that Web-based courses are available for everyone.

All of the LTI trainers are Certified WebCT Trainers who have completed a "train-the-trainer" curriculum offered by WebCT's Vancouver office, Acker said. The certification process centers on techniques, strategies and methods for integrating teaching and learning principles, learning styles, and building online communities while conducting WebCT training. Current members of the LTI training cadre include Eva Bradshaw, director of technology enhanced learning with the College of Human Ecology; Cable Green, director of educational technology in the College of Pharmacy; Terri Mensing, associate professor at the Marion campus; Tom Stone, Office of Information Technology (OIT)Instructional Design Specialist; Joe Wheaton, associate professor in vocational rehabilitation in the College of Education and co-director of the WAC; Evan Straub, OIT Instructional Design Specialist; Chris Roberts, Wright State University; and Elaine Shillito, Clark State University.

Acker said that because LTI's off-campus activities are offered on a cost-recovery basis, participants pay to attend the workshops and conferences. This year, scholarships from the Ohio Learning Network helped many Ohio faculty attend the one- and two-day workshops.

Besides being "dead center with the Academic Plan" in supporting the outreach and engagement initiative, Acker said the benefits of LTI to the University are significant. Trainers return from teaching workshops on other campuses with new experiences and knowledge of how others teach technology, and conferences draw in visitors to the University who possess a wealth of experience with technology.

"So, we're building a community of learners and forging relationships around the state," Acker said.

Acker credits TELR Coordinator Catherine Gynn for putting LTI into production and making it work. "Her commitment to this start-up venture has been extraordinary," he added.

"I think we have been very successful for a brand new organization, and I think that we have a path charted to build on that success," Acker said.

Interested individuals can learn more about the LTI at http://telr.ohio-state.edu/lti.

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