ECOLAS, the consortium of European Colleges of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has awarded St Mary’s Senior Lecturer, Dr Matthew Martin, a ‘Julie Johnson Kidd Travel Research Fellowship’. His is one of ten such grants made to lecturers across Europe in 2015 in order to facilitate their research and practice in developing classroom teaching methods in the Liberal Arts. Dr Martin’s grant will be used to visit a number of Liberal Arts colleges in the United States in the coming year in order to exchange best practice in the areas of digital pedagogy, digital literacy and the digital humanities. He will be reporting to the American institutions on recent developments among European Liberal Arts colleges and reporting back to ECOLAS on what we can learn from the Americans in this area.

Key to developing plans for this work have been Dr Martin’s recent contacts with a new consortium of Liberal Arts colleges in the United States focused on improving online teaching methods. Colgate University, Davidson College, Hamilton College and Wellesley College have recently formed an organisation dedicated to improving the online learning experience of Liberal Arts students. Further details are available in the announcement in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Dr Martin said:

“Janet Simons, Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Initiative at Davidson College, has been very helpful to St Mary’s in getting this work off the ground by sharing her perspectives with us on where these fields are going to develop. We look forward to future exchanges on the matter.”