Wallenberg Global Learning Network announces 2005-06 faculty grants program

The Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation and Stanford University recently announced a new program to support collaborations between Swedish and Stanford faculty committed to improving teaching and learning. The new project, named “WGLN II,” is funded by the Foundation with the primary goal of developing methods, technologies and practices to improve student learning from pre-college through university-level education.

The mission of WGLN II is to help students achieve better learning outcomes, to support faculty investigators in producing new knowledge for best learning practices, and to develop pedagogic and technical solutions suitable for innovative use in a variety of university and pre-college settings.

To achieve this mission, WGLN II has established a competitive faculty grants program, which anticipates funding approximately ten projects each year for 3 years. Successful projects will represent a genuine collaboration between Swedish and Stanford faculty and will show improved teaching and learning through the use of information and communication technologies (ICT). Ideally, each project will involve implementation and testing in ongoing courses at Stanford, in local pre-college schools, and in Sweden.

43 pre-proposals were submitted to the WGLN II committee in early March, representing 29 departments on campus: 15 in Engineering/Computer Science/Mathematics/Physics; 7 in Humanities and Education; 13 in Medicine and Biology; 5 in pre-college education; 3 in continuing education. Final selections will be determined by summer 2005.

The Wallenberg Foundation and Stanford University have appointed a board to govern WGLN II, with Stanford Professor of Biological Sciences, H. Craig Heller serving as Board Chair. Other members from Stanford include Provost John Etchemendy; Dean of Research, Arthur Bienenstock; and President and Professor, Emeritus, Donald Kennedy. An impartial faculty review panel will be appointed each year to select projects to be funded. The panel will draw its members from academic institutions in Sweden and across the U.S.

WGLN I was established in 1999 as part of a larger gift from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. The grant helped create Wallenberg Hall and its advanced resource classrooms and research space. Faculty projects funded by WGLN I between 1999 and 2004 developed collaborative efforts across a variety of disciplines to improve teaching and learning through the innovative use of information and communication technologies. WGLN I members included SCIL, the Swedish Learning Lab (Uppsala University, the Royal Institute of Technology, and Karolinska Institute) and the Learning Lab of Lower Saxony in Germany. WGLN I was completed during the fall of 2004. WGLN II is a new collaborative program between Stanford and Sweden, which is open for participation by all Swedish universities and will include an added focus on pre-college education.

Information on previous project results is available at http://www.wgln.org/about/annualReport.html .

For more information and contacts on WGLN II, visit http://www.wgln.org