Incremental ApproachIntensive M.A. Program, July 2008
Background
For more information on the Intensive M.A. program, please also visit: http://online.tc.columbia.edu/oice.
The Program in Computing and Education has been offering an M.A. degree since 1974. In 1983 we began offering an Intensive version of this degree program in which students come to Teachers College only in the summer (in July) and complete the degree requirements through independent study and online courses from where they live. Each summer we have accepted approximately 20 new students for whom it is impossible or inconvenient to come here easily during the Fall and Spring terms. To date, over 500 students have completed the Intensive Program.
This is a program for teachers or others who work with schools, such as technology coordinators, and curriculum specialists.
If you live in the New York City area, you are also welcome to come to courses in the M.A. program year-round. The "Intensive" program is the same program and the same degree as the "regular," year-round version, except for how the courses are offered. If you are interested in seeing more about the year-round program, please visit the Communication, Computing, and Technology in Education web site.
The Intensive program contains two concentrations of study: Teaching and Learning with Technology and Technology Leadership. These are informal concentrations, designed to help organize your study here. Each has several core courses, but they are also highly overlapping. For more information click on the links below:
Program Sponsor
Intensive M.A. Program Concentrations
Degree Projects
Time Frame and Scheduling
Independent Study
Housing
Costs
New York City as a Resource
Application Procedure
Program Sponsor
The Intensive Program is designed by the Center for Technology and School Change at Teachers College. The purpose of the Center is to help schools integrate technology successfully into their curricula, to study issues in student and school use of technology, and to develop technology tools and products for education.
Intensive M.A. Program Concentrations
Incoming students will choose between one of two Intensive concentrations. These are "informal" concentrations, in the sense that their names will not appear on the degree. We arrange them solely to help guide participants in their progress through the program. Both concentrations are in the Teachers College program called Computing in Education.
Teaching and Learning with Technology
The Teaching and Learning with Technology option is for anyone interested in using technology with students, in learning more about how technology impacts teaching and learning, in developing curriculum that uses technology, or in leading educational programs. We believe that technology has played a key role over the past century in structuring formal education in this country, and that it will continue to play a major part in restructuring it. Teachers, administrators, curriculum developers -- indeed, all concerned with the fate of education -- should be aware of this history, and of the issues it raises for the present and future.
This concentration combines work in understanding issues in technology and school structure and change with study of the new technologies themselves -- how to operate them, and how to use them in curriculum. We focus on using technology throughout the grades for problem solving, communication, collaborative learning, skill building and standard reaching. Course work includes basic computer programming. Independent work during the school year may involve learning more about educational technology, planning for their use in educational situations, and researching issues related to this use. Prospective students need not have any background in technology. This concentration offers an M.A. degree in Computing in Education.
Technology Leadership
This concentration is for those who are already in leadership positions involving school technology (such as school or district level computer coordinator) or expect to be in this position in the near future. Technology leaders assume a variety of roles in schools - from technical expert to curriculum developer to staff developer, and more. Being prepared for these roles requires ongoing learning and reflection about how best to prepare students and teachers for the technological future. This concentration aims to prepare technology leaders and prospective leaders to play their roles with both expert theoretical and practical background. The concentration's courses and seminars focus on several key areas:
- Research: What does research in educational technology tell us about how technology benefits learning, and how can we use the results?
- Cognition: What does cognitive science tell us about human learning and technology and how can we best apply it to curriculum-building?
- Constructivism: How can the use of technology best support a constructivist curriculum in which students are active and collaborative problem-solvers?
- Networking: What new developments in networking, distance learning, and use of the Internet and WWW are likely to impact education, and how should we think about applying them?
- Staff Development: What does our experience with educating teachers about technology tell us, and what does this imply about future efforts?
Altogether, the concentration's goal is to provide its participants with a holistic picture of the current state of school technology, along with its accomplishments and needs, and ideas for future work. We will draw upon participants' (and others') experiences to inform our planning. Participants will work during the year on a wide variety of independent projects designed to further their own learning and work in their schools. This concentration offers an M.A. degree in Computing in Education.
The program this coming July will consist of about 15 courses and workshops. Courses meet twice a week for about three hours a session (say, Mondays and Wednesdays from 3 pm to 6pm). Sesssions are scheduled in the morning, afternoons, and evenings (6pm to 9pm). The program will include courses in programming (in Java), hypermedia creation, Web page creation and design, technology and school change, instructional design, telecommunications and networking, and more. All students in the program must take some programming, if they do not already have a programming background. The full July schedule will be available around March.
Degree Projects
As a culmination of the degree work, students complete a project based on their area of interest and area of concentration. Projects may be in the form of research papers, curriculum or product development. Projects should be useful to students, in pulling together and extending work they have already done toward the degree, and in furthering their own professional interests and understanding.
Time Frame and Scheduling
The Intensive Program combines course work at Teachers College with independent work (independent study or fieldwork on online courses) during the school year. The M.A. degree requires a total of 32 credits taken through Teachers College, and can be completed in either two or three summers. Although two years is obviously faster, it also requires more intensive work, both at Teachers College and during the school year. The three summer option offers a somewhat more relaxed pace in terms of study and financial commitment.
The two summer option typically involves: 2 credits of independent study before coming to New York, to prepare for the summer; 8 credits of course work at Teachers College each July session; and the remainder of the credits done independently between one July and the next, to total 32 credits.
In three summers, students might take six credits in each July session, and spread out the remaining 14 credits of independent work through the intervening two school years.
Students attend Intensive summer sessions here at Teachers College. In Summer 2008, the Intensive session will run from Monday, July 7 through Thursday, July 31.
Up to 8 credits (four 2-credit courses) may be taken in the four week July period. Each course meets for six hours per week (two 3-hour sessions). Intensive program courses are scheduled in the morning, afternoon, and evenings.
Students are welcome to arrive in New York the week before the session starts. We will conduct group tours of the city and other activities (depending on how many people are here) during the weekend before the program begins.
Also, new this year, we will offer a 1-credit workshop on Wednesday and Thursday, July 2nd and 3rd, on digital technologies to study New York City.
Independent Study
To provide continuity between summer sessions and to deepen learning, students pursue independent study, fieldwork, and online course work in the Fall and Spring terms. Some of this work may be assigned by program instructors, and some designed by students in consultation with instructors and the head of the program. A number of our courses may also be taken online. A major thrust of this work is to further students' work in their concentration and to pursue independent work that leads to their Master's project.
In order to complete this program students must have access to a computer on a daily basis. We use both Windows and Macintosh computers in the program.
Housing
Teachers College offers housing for summer students. Because the program is intensive, often involving students in collaborative projects, we strongly encourage students to stay in this arranged housing. Most of our students have agreed that this is preferable, and many who opted to live elsewhere later wished they had stayed on campus. Information about summer housing will be available at:
http://www.tc.columbia.edu/housing/detail.asp?id=Summer+Conference+Housing
Costs
Tuition is currently set at $1,030 per credit. Tuition for the coming academic year (beginning in Fall 2008) has not yet been set, but it may rise. Students may take anywhere from 2 to 10 credits in a summer (up to 8 in the July session). Very limited scholarship assistance, in the form of free tuition credits for the coming academic year, is sometimes available for those who file early enough. Many students receive low-interest government loans for their study.
New York City as a Resource
Teachers College and the rest of Columbia University offer rich educational resources. More than this, the Intensive Program takes unique advantage of the richness of New York City. Students use the incomparable resources of the Metropolitan, Modern Art, and other world-renowned art museums, for example, to gain a sense of the development of written language and of 8,000 years of visual imagery, as the context in which computing, video, and other recent forms of communication mediators must be understood. In this experience, they also attend to the technology humans have developed and used in such visual communication. They sample the unparalleled range of musical performance available in New York also, to gain a still wider contextual background understanding of technology-mediated communication through one of the oldest human vehicles, music.
In addition to these and other New York City riches incorporated in the Intensive Program, students live in a human microcosm of today's world, surrounded by people from every corner and culture of the world, enriched and informed by a diversity of perspectives unparalleled elsewhere in the world.
Application Procedure
To apply to the Intensive Program, download the Word document below.
Application Request for Intensive M.A. 2008
A request for for an application package can also be made to Seynabou Diop at the Center for Technology and School Change. She can be reached by telephone, 212-678-4189, or by email at Diop@tc.edu.
As part of the application procedure, you will need to furnish transcripts, two letters of recommendation, and write an essay describing your background in education and in technology (if any) and explaining what you hope to do with a degree from the program. Test scores are not necessary, except for foreign students, who need to submit a TOEFL score.
Applications are judged as they are received until the program is full.
