Systemic Progress in Teaching and Learning 2004 Award Winner

Lehigh University

Lehigh Lab

Lehigh University's Lehigh Lab is a campus-wide initiative to foster best practices in teaching and learning. The Lab concept is founded on the idea that the University as a whole is a laboratory, in which faculty, staff, and students work and experiment together, across departments and disciplines, to advance learning. The initiative was made possible largely through extensive reorganizations during the late 1990s and early 2000s that united academic computing, media services, administrative computing, distance education, digital initiatives, library services, and faculty development into a single organization, with the goal of advancing a vision of systemic change in the classroom.

Lehigh Lab's primary objective is to facilitate innovative undergraduate and graduate teaching that utilizes information and technology to its fullest in a learner-centered environment, enables faculty to achieve their core teaching goals, and provides students with the capability to tap into the world-wide reservoir of social, economic, scientific, and political knowledge. It fosters collaboration by showcasing best practices across departments, disciplines, and colleges. Lehigh's libraries provide the essential content needed for curricular innovation and development. A novel, scalable approach to the strategic organization of human resources and technological infrastructure, it relies on a number of effective supporting elements:

• Technology Resource Learning Center, dedicated to exploration and application of technology for teaching and learning; composed of a high-tech classroom, public scanning and editing area, faculty development area, consulting space, and a faculty fellow office
• Classroom of the Future, a dedicated suite of classrooms with a wireless environment, located in Lehigh's College of Education
• Several multimedia Internet2 videoconferencing classrooms
• Clipper Project, a test of the efficacy of the new organization, which evaluated short- and long-term costs and benefits associated with offering Web-based courses to high-school seniors who had been "pre-admitted" to the University
• Cybertools, an annual faculty symposium promoting effective use of technology offered since 2001
• Strong and effective integration of assessment tools and practices, focused on learning outcomes

The Lehigh Lab is far more than the sum of its parts. The effective integration of proven techniques, the commitment to organize support structures around these techniques, the clear evidence of long-term institutional resource commitment, and the incorporation of assessment focused on learning outcomes, make the Lehigh Lab a model worthy of emulation and deserving of the EDUCAUSE Teaching and Learning Award.