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M-Write Joins the Digital Innovation Greenhouse  Portfolio

M-Write has officially become the fifth project housed within the Digital Innovation Greenhouse (DIG) portfolio. As the most recent addition to the DIG portfolio within the Office of Digital Education & Innovation (DEI), M-Write is a project that will leverage the resources, guidance and tools available through DIG in order to facilitate and scale up the implementation of writing-to-learn pedagogies, enhancing student learning and individualized feedback for students in large gateway courses on the U-M campus.

M-Write will leverage ECoach, another initiative housed in the DIG Portfolio, in new ways in order to work with user communities across the U-M campus. ECoach will be used by M-Write to provide personalized feedback to students based on automated and peer assessments of their writing, enabling students from diverse disciplines to participate in content-focused writing activities. Additionally, M-Write will incorporate conceptual writing prompts, automated peer review with rubrics and natural language processing.

M-Write joins GradeCraft, ECoach, Student Explorer and Academic Reporting Toolkit 2.0 (ART 2.0) initiatives; structured digital engagement tools that assist in implementing personalized learning at scale in a residential learning environment. ART 2.0 is a data visualization tool that focuses on supporting curricular decisions with evidence to foster more informed decision making. Student Explorer leverages course performance data to render real time updates on course progress in order to facilitate future student success, while ECoach provides personalized feedback and advice to students in large, introductory courses as well as the Honors Program cohort. GradeCraft, also recently added to the DIG portfolio, is a learning management system that supports gameful learning in the classroom. These initiatives highlight a few of the many ways DIG is partnering with faculty innovators to investigate, design and use learning technologies at U-M, as well as how DEI continues its commitment to accelerate digital education and innovation in learning in order to transform 200 courses by 2017.

Anne Gere, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Gertrude Buck Collegiate Professor of Education and English Language and Literature,  Director of the Sweetland Writing Center and Second Vice President of the Modern Language Association partnered with Ginger Shultz, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, to develop and test M-Write in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts and the College of Engineering. M-Write is the recipient of a $1.8M grant from the Third Century Initiative Transforming Learning for a Third Century (TLTC) program. M-Write will initially serve 5,000 students through the introduction of writing-to-learn pedagogies in large introductory courses on campus with the intent of reaching over 10,000 students over the lifetime of the project.

The Digital Innovation Greenhouse (DIG) consists of software developers, user experience designers, behavioral scientists and multi-disciplinary student fellows who work with user communities to provide resources for homegrown educational software innovations on campus and scale up these digital enterprises to maturity through collaboration across U-M’s digital ecosystem.