Eblen-Zayas awarded NSF grant to develop online teaching tools for liberal arts colleges

Melissa Eblen-Zayas, Carleton College professor of physics and director of the Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching, has been awarded a three-year, $290,940 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop online teaching tools for the 10 colleges of the Liberal Arts Consortium for Digital Innovation (LACOL). 

Eblen-Zayas will lead the project alongside Jonathan Leamon, director of instructional technology at Williams College; Laura J. Muller, PhD, director of quantitative skills programs and peer support at Williams; and Sundi Richard, lead instructional designer at Davidson College. Building on previous NSF projects, they will guide an effort to develop as many as eight online modules to teach key quantitative skills of wide value across the sciences and social sciences, to test and refine those modules at LACOL institutions, and to disseminate the modules widely within and possibly beyond LACOL.

A team of researchers at Carleton’s Science Education Resource Center (SERC), led by Director of Evaluation Ellen Iverson, will study faculty adaptation and adoption of these online modules across the consortium.

This NSF award is the first grant to LACOL, founded in 2014 as a partnership of leading liberal arts institutions interested in exploring online pedagogies and supporting effective teaching and learning in residential settings.