New web forum helps researchers search for collaborators

Is Moodle the new Match.com?

 

That’s the hope of faculty and research administrators who are crossing disciplinary boundaries to search for research partners in different fields, all by using a web forum on Moodle, an open-source platform available through the Common Collaboration and Learning Environment (CCLE) initiative.

 

Clinical psychologist Christopher Layne, for example, and his research partner, a statistician, are hoping to find someone in psychology, sociology, anthropology, geography or another discipline to work with them on developing “hands-on” interactive software for learning and applying statistics in health education and practice.

 

Judy Mitoma, director of the Center for Intercultural Performance and a professor emerita in world arts and cultures, is looking for a collaborator in another field to work on a project involving the inhabitants of three Pacific atolls that are being threatened by rising water due to climate change and global warming. The islanders are creating first-person accounts of this phenomenon through poetry, song and live performance.

 

What these faculty and others are using to seek out interested collaborators in other disciplines is a web forum created with Moodle, the online tool that has been used for years at UCLA to build course websites under CCLE, the campuswide initiative to offer an open-source platform that can be used by every academic unit to support instruction and research collaboration.

 

For this new match-up service, a collaborative site was configured to allow faculty to post what is essentially a campus “want ad” describing their research interests in a database. Using other features, faculty can join a publicly viewed discussion forum, and, if they wish, have a private discussion with potential partners.

 

They can even set up a wiki, an online tool that allows authorized participants to contribute, edit and revise the same text — a grant proposal, for example.

 

The impetus behind this effort to find research partners in other disciplines is the new Seed Grant Opportunity to Enhance Transdisciplinary Research/Scholarship announced Feb. 2. A total of $250,000 is being offered to fund seed grants of up to $25,000 per project by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and the Academic Senate Council on Research.

 

The lead principal investigator must be a UCLA faculty member from a discipline in the humanities, arts or social sciences. The co-investigator(s) may be faculty from any campus or non-campus unit. But, most importantly, the collaboration must involve at least two faculty members and represent the joining of two distinctly different disciplines or approaches. The area of inquiry outlined in the project or collaboration must be new to UCLA.

 

So far, interest in the fledgling website is still building. The database has had some 1,400 hits since going live. The discussion forum has mustered some 600 hits. And there have been many repeat visits by faculty members.

 

“I hope it becomes a destination for many repeat visits to see what’s been posted, like Facebook,” said Michelle Popowitz, assistant vice chancellor in the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, who worked with colleague Mike Franks to set up the site. If this proves successful as a communications tool, then it will be used again for other purposes, she said.

 

“This is the first time that I know of that this particular tool is being used this way,” said Franks, director of instructional technology at social sciences computing in the College of Letters and Science. “This is really an experiment in using campus collaborative tools to help faculty obtain collaborative research funding. And it required no programming time. We only used the tools that came with Moodle.”

 

CCLE was created to support both education and research for faculty and students. “In the past two years, we have seen amazing growth in the use of CCLE Moodle for instruction, but not much in research,” said Curtis Fornadley, CCLE coordinator. So the new use is a good fit. “Wikis, forums, database and document-sharing are among the tools that are available to researchers once they create a CCLE collaboration site.” All you need to do that is a UCLA Logon ID.

 

Erna Aridzanyan, research director of strategic research initiatives in the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, sees the potential. She posted a “want ad” for a computer scientist to work with the Los Angeles Unified School District on an afterschool program.

 

“It has great potential to allow everyone — faculty and administrators — to have the opportunity to share interdisciplinary research ideas,” said Aridzanyan. “The whole campus can see them, comment, offer help or even suggest someone who might be interested in collaborating. This is a way to get the conversation started.”

 

You can learn more about CCLE here. For more information, on the seed grants, go here.