The Collaboratory Program at Columbia

A summary of my @TheHDSR paper with @IsabelleZaugg, Trish Culligan and Richard Witten on the Collaboratory Program @Columbia, a collaboration of @ColumbiaEship and @DataSciColumbia.

https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/j8v2h5hc/release/2 

Columbia's Collaboratory program is to "Preparing Tomorrow’s Leaders for a Data-Rich World". It offers a meta-model for a data science education accelerator program that allows HE institutions to respond to their own disciplinary heterogeneity. (entrepreneurship.columbia.edu/collaboratory/)

One way to think about it is that the Collaboratory crowd-sources innovative new course designs by providing seed funding to support transdisciplinary collaboration between data scientists and domain experts, called “Collaboratory Fellows.”

The Collaboratory jumpstarts data-driven pedagogy that otherwise would take years to develop. Here is a video where a few Collaboratory program's leaders and fellows discuss the impacts of the program.

Collaboratory Program in numbers
Over the past 5 yrs,
67 Collaboratory Fellows
21 Collaboratory projects
Span 14 schools
14 institutes and centers,
26 departments
36 new courses
served the learning needs
of more than 4,000 students.

In this @TheHDSR article, we outlined different levels of data science competency and the Collaboratory's curriculum development life cycle. More importantly, we reflected on value creation through the Collaboratory and challenges that remain. The Collaboratory can be thought of as an aspen grove that stems from a unifying idea and funding source and shares the Collaboratory Fellows cohort structure of mutual support and collective resources. It consistently drives the creation of new courses that serve students throughout the many domains of the university, just like an aspen grove sending out new shoots that grow into trees, quickly covering large landmasses with a beautiful canopy.