A new microgrant program will support the development of courses and co- curricular projects that cultivate students’ critical engagement with and through digital technology.
Ohio Five's CODEX (Collaborative for Digital Engagement and Experience) has issued an initial October 25 call for proposals to the seven teams who attended the 2020 CODEX Summer Institute in July 2020. Pending available funds, the call will be expanded to other Ohio Five faculty and staff with application deadlines in mid-January and mid-March 2021.Grant funds can be used to continue or launch work on the new courses for expenses such as student research assistants, equipment or software, professional development, and conference presentations.
Critical engagement with technology can take many forms, of course. Courses emerging from this year’s summer institute included:
- digital mapping projects in which students are encouraged to think spatially about subjects in the humanities and social sciences
- digital curation or digital exhibition of primary sources relevant to themes studied in class, encouraging students to think about how they communicate those subjects to a public audience
- digital oral history and the impacts of sharing those histories online
- teaching modules designed to introduce topics such as data visualization and analysis to students in the humanities.
The microgrants are supported with funds from a William and Flora Hewlett Foundation grant to assess the impacts of open digital pedagogy on student learning outcomes. Details about CODEX and the CODEX Microgrants are available at https://codex.ohio5.org.