I Want My Department/College/University to Adopt SOCL

From SOCLProject

PLEASE NOTE: The grant submission deadline has passed, so we are no longer accepting new participants at this stage. However, if the grant is funded, we will be accepting new participants at that time. If you'd like to be notified at this stage, please contact the PI Richard at rnlanders@odu.edu.

Thank you for wanting to join the SOCL Project! This document details general information you might need before making a decision. Once you have decided to join the project, please contact Richard at rnlanders@odu.edu as soon as possible.

Timeline

The overall timeline of this project is as follows:

• Phase 1: Development. For the first Academic Year (Fall - Spring), the programming team will work on creating the SOCL software. This is based upon the socialPsych platform that served as the pilot data for this project.
• Phase 2: Active Student Participation. For the life of the grant (first Summer onward), the grant will support almost all costs associated with SOCL including: hosting the software, providing a technical support chat line and e-mail address, and actively updating the software if bugs are encountered.
• Phase 3: Transition. After the life of the grant has ended, institutions are expected to migrate the SOCL platform to their own locally hosted servers. Because the software is free, this is primarily an IT infrastructure cost plus any technical support role required. Many institutions will be able to continue use of the software for near-zero cost.

For a more detailed timeline, see the Complete Timeline.

Levels of Involvement

Involvement is available at multiple levels:

1. Entire institutions. This is the most powerful deployment of SOCL. With an entire institution on board, your students are all connected with each other, maximizing the sense of community this software is designed to bring.
2. Department and colleges within large institutions. This is the likely the most common deployment of SOCL and is the minimum recommended deployment for SOCL. It reduces the administrative burden associated with larger deployments (a single person within the department could administer the system with only a few hours per week) while still creating the large-scale sense of community that many students desire.
3. Course clusters or individual courses. If it is not possible to get buy-in from your institution, you can still adopt SOCL for your own course or courses. If you have multiple courses, they can even be linked together to create at least some of the sense of community created with larger deployments.

Institutional Requirements

Please note that you should contact Richard at rnlanders@odu.edu before acquiring any of the following:

1. General letter of support at the appropriate level. For any institution (be it entire institution, department, or college) that wants to be involved, a letter will need to be drafted specifying:
   1. The NSF title of the project:
      DIP: Using Gaming Principles with Social Networking Technology to Establish Undergraduate Online Learning Communities
   2. That an effort will be made at the appropriate scope to implement SOCL at the level chosen (i.e. please describe the level at which you will be implementing it).
   3. That the institution will see the project through to Phase 3 if the project reaches desired outcomes.
   4. That a local administrator to take ownership of the project at the site has agreed to that role (and the name of that person - primary roles will be acquiring student enrollment data and working with local IRB).
   5. That course grades and student evaluation data will be made available to the project team in order to evaluate the success of the grant in achieving its goals.
   An appropriate author must draft this letter:
   • At the departmental level, this will typically be the department chair/head.
   • At the course level, this will be the instructor of the course(s).

   This letter can be addressed to either the PI (Dr. Richard Landers) or to the NSF review committee:

   • CyberLearning: Transforming Education (NSF Solicitation 10-620)
     National Science Foundation
     4201 Wilson Blvd.
     Arlington, VA 22230
2. Supplying of other information. Other information may be required for the grant proposal. The point of contact at the institution must be a part of the SOCL Listserv to receive information on project updates and specific requests (e.g. updated number of students that will gain access to SOCL, course structure, etc.).