The Office of the Dean of the College works in partnership with the McGraw Center for Teaching & Learning and the Office of Information Technology to identify opportunities for enhancing teaching and learning through the use of technology, both in the classroom and beyond. In addition, the McGraw Center offers a range of services to support the Faculty's use of information technology in teaching, scholarship and research.
Online Course Platforms
Princeton’s initiative in online education offers faculty members the opportunity to enhance the quality of education on campus while sharing free course content with students around the world. This includes the development and delivery of free, non-credit course materials that are available to hundreds of thousands of students via the Coursera, NovoEd, Kadenze and edX platforms. As this initiative has evolved, the emphasis of this work has moved from the production of new online courses to creating environments that connect with on-campus classes. Faculty members interested in experimenting with these innovative teaching environments should begin the process by contacting Mona Fixdal.
Classroom, Lab, and Media Support
Princeton's Broadcast Center, housed in the Lewis Library, is a professional, high-definition video and audio studio that can assist faculty and staff in building high-quality presentations, including recorded lectures. The studio provides a direct link to all the major television and radio networks, allowing faculty and staff to broadcast across the country and around the world. Recordings made for use outside of the University must be approved by the Office of the Dean of the College; please email requests to Mona Fixdal.
The Educational and Classroom Technologies (ECT) group in the McGraw Center exists to foster the purposeful application of new technologies to enhance teaching and learning. To help integrate digital assignments in Princeton courses, McGraw’s educational technologists work with faculty to effectively utilize existing digital tools and, when necessary, develop new tools to address pedagogical goals. The group provides consulting, design, and training for specialized educational technologies, as well as support for active learning spaces and technologies for teaching such as lecture capture, personal response units (“clickers”), course blogs, technology-based course assignments and online applications for teaching and learning. The ECT group also includes the McGraw Center's Digital Learning Lab (DLL), a technology-rich teaching space in the Lewis Science Library building. Part classroom, part workspace, McGraw DLL fosters – through its resources, staff, programming, peer instruction, partnerships, and participation in courses – conversations around effective teaching and learning with multimedia tools. The DLL combines high-end Apple computers optimized for creative projects with a knowledgeable staff of students and technologists who are passionate about teaching. To support the curriculum, the community of 20+ student staff and McGraw technologists teach workshops, contribute to instructional resources on the DLL website, and provide support via one-on-one consultations. Learn more about teaching in McGraw DLL, or contact ECT to arrange for a technology consultation.
For A/V equipment and support in the classroom, including projection, sound, recording and video conferencing, contact Media Services.
Learning Management System
Canvas, Princeton’s learning management system, is a robust online platform for teaching and learning. Faculty can use their Canvas course sites to communicate with students, to share syllabi and course materials, to create opportunities for collaboration and activities like peer review, social annotations and asynchronous discussions, and to assess student understanding through assignments and quizzes.
The McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning supports the use of Canvas and can be contacted at canvas@princeton.edu.
Blackboard will no longer be used for new courses. Information about accessing previous courses in Blackboard can be found on OIT’s website: Blackboard Archive Mode.
Web Sites
Faculty members looking for an easy-to-use templated system for building personal web sites should visit Web Development Services (WDS). WDS assists faculty, labs, departments, and programs with their website needs.
Digital Course Reserves and Services
The Library can help faculty members incorporate digitized film service and other information technology into their courses and research. The Library also manages the University's collection of DVDs and specialized language software.
Center for Digital Humanities
The Center for Digital Humanities (CDH) is an interdisciplinary research center and academic unit within the Princeton University Library. The CDH research team serves as a hub for expertise in digital methods, tools, and best practices that allow scholars to analyze traditional and unconventional source bases to discover and share new insights.
Research Computing
Princeton has a number of resources to assist faculty members with their research computing needs, including the High-Performance Computing Research Center, through a collaboration between the Office of Information Technology and the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering (PICSciE).