The Visible Knowledge Project is a five-year, four million dollar project aimed at improving the quality of college and university teaching through a focus on both student learning and faculty development in technology-enhanced environments. With more than 50 faculty on 25 campuses engaged in the scholarship of teaching, the VKP is among the largest research projects in the country on technology and learning, and one of the largest in the humanities, social sciences, and interdisciplinary culture fields. CNDLS’s Randy Bass is the Principal Investigator for the project.

VKP places questions about the integration of technology within a broad context of faculty inquiry into student learning and innovative practice. Unique in its approach, size, and scope, VKP promises to have a significant impact on current national conversations about learning, technology, and the scholarship of teaching. As information technologies spread throughout higher education, they bring with them the potential for transforming the nature of teaching, learning, and educational institutions, in general. Yet with these changes come a multitude of fundamental questions about how students learn and about how faculty change the ways they teach. The Visible Knowledge Project seeks to move beyond our present very general notions about the promise and impact of educational technologies by asking questions that fall into two categories: those focused on student learning, and those focused on faculty development and innovation. VKP asks such questions as:

• How can interactive learning environments enhance the way students acquire knowledge in culture and history courses?
• Which specific approaches maximize the impact of certain technologies; which technologies enhance particular approaches?
• What role and impact do new media technologies have in helping to make the tacit knowledge of expert learners visible to students?
• How do new online environments transform ways that students can perform their understanding, and the way we assess them?
• How do certain frameworks, tools, and models enable innovation? Can a richer context for innovation help faculty implement change at deeper levels of transformation than is generally possible at present?
• How can we better help faculty turn their own ways of knowing into more meaningful and deeper learning experiences for students using new technologies and learner-centered pedagogies?
• Can we begin to develop frameworks for faculty to think about learning that can be effectively combined with investigative tools and models of scholarship of teaching and learning?

Having a truly national scope, VKP represents a unique combination of theoretical and practical explorations, in both local and virtual contexts. We have captured the models, resources, and cases in Web-based, video, and print materials that we will disseminate through a variety of venues, beginning with the Crossroads of Teaching and Learning site, (part of the American Studies Crossroads site, already an internationally established site for teaching and learning materials in American Studies and related fields). VKP builds on already established faculty networks built through the New Media Classroom Program (sponsored by the American Social History Project) consisting of eight regional centers and more than 300 faculty, the Crossroads Project network of American Studies Programs and American Studies Association members, and through partnerships with other key related multi-institutional, national conversations, including the “campus conversations” on the scholarship of teaching and learning of the Carnegie Foundation.