VITAL - Video Interactions for Teaching and Learning
Amplify Education, formerly known as Wireless Generation, provided me with a formative opportunity to build and lead a team.
When I was a graduate student, I took a class with Herb Ginsberg on the “Development of Mathematical Thinking”. This was in the late 1990s and Herb would bring a pile of VHS cassettes to the class, fast-forwarding to key moments of student sessions to show examples of student thinking.
I had the idea of digitizing the videos, which he was into, but unfamiliar with. I was working at the Columbia Center for New Media at the time and our mission was to enhance teaching through technology.
While digitizing the videos, I came up with the idea of allowing students to embed portions of the videos into classroom message boards - allowing them to comment and pontificate on relevant portions of the work.
The work took off. We won a 2.3 Million Dollar grant from NSF, calling it “VITAL” - Video Interactions for Teaching and Learning”, allowing us to build out a great version of the software, and do testing and evaluation of it.
We brought the work to the School of Social Work, and it had such a great impact on the teaching there, that they re-designed their classrooms to make it easier to work with video within their classrooms. I co-authored a number of research papers with social work faculty, and with Herb.
The work lives on at Columbia - it is now known as “Mediathread” and it continues to impact teaching and learning at the university level across Columbia and its consortium partners.
Impact
A spark of insight while sitting in a graduate school class, lead to a ten year run of grants and innovation that fueled dozens of research papers and impacted the education of students at Teachers College and the Columbia School of Social Work and beyond.