New Board, New Events!

Welcome back, SIPA Education Collaborative!  We’re starting fresh, and have some exciting events and opportunities lined up for the next two semesters:

•       Brown bag lunches covering both domestic and international education issues. 

•       Case challenge competition in collaboration with MESS (the M&E Student Society)  

•       Career panels

•       Service opportunities throughout NYC 

Stay tuned for more details to come, and peruse our website as we highlight interesting events, feature guest bloggers, and update education related course offerings and opportunities at Columbia and in New York City.

First Spring Meeting

We want to hear your ideas!  Come out for our all group meeting on Tuesday, February 17^th from 1-2 PM in IAB 402.  Lunch will be served.  We hope to see you there! 

Opportunity: Declara, Education Start-up

Want to really make a difference?  Then come work for Declara, Silicon Valley's hottest new education start-up! We're committed to improving the way people learn worldwide!  For more information about Declara, visit our website (www.declara.com) or contact SIPA alum Elyse Klein at elyse.klein@declara.com.  You can also read the recent Bloomberg article on Declara here: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-26/declara-co-founder-ramona-piersons-comeback-odyssey#p1.

Why Declara?
Declara aims to define a new framework for learning and development, where social collaboration, predictive analytics, and semantic search technologies are combined to empower people to work smarter and be more impactful. For better teams, better companies and better results, we need to connect people with relevant content, experts, conversations and resources at the right time.

Today, companies and organizations invest millions of dollars developing and maintaining resources and tools needed to train their employees and help them innovate. Millions more are applied in attempts to measure or evaluate the effectiveness and outcomes of these resources and tools. Instead of tackling one part or another of the greater, systemic problem, it’s time to pursue a singular solution, that utilizes social collaboration and data intelligence, that can deliver measurable progress, whether among individuals, within companies or across new and uncharted frontiers.

The full requirements are below, but if you speak Spanish and have an interest in working at a start-up, feel free to contact Elyse for more information!

Client Delivery Manager

Declara is seeking out a Client Delivery Manager; an ideal candidate to oversee the projects, processes and teams associated with the ongoing delivery of Declara client engagements. This position provides organization and leadership to extended project teams including matrixed resources and/or direct reports of business analysts, project managers, product managers, and other program delivery resources.

In addition, this individual works closely with business stakeholders to ensure prioritization, scope and scheduling of projects align with overall organization objectives. The Client Delivery Manager recommends and leads efforts to streamline organizational processes and works the senior management to establish and propagate best practices. This position serves as a single point of contact to the larger organization regarding all project efforts within the scope of the manager's project portfolio. We're interested in someone who wants to:

• Learn. Learning isn’t just our product – it’s what we do every day.
• Work with a small, focused team. You’ll push and be pushed.
• Tackle technical challenges. We want to connect educators to the techniques, content and experts who can teach them best, and provide a fast, smooth, environment where communication can happen in real time. It won’t be easy, but it will be interesting.
• Do something meaningful. We’re changing how the world (seriously global in scope) nurtures and develops its talent.

Requirements
• Provides supervision, guidance and task assignments to program business analysts, project managers, and other program delivery staff tasked with executing portfolio projects
• Mentors and develops staff throughout ongoing project life cycles
• Responsible for managing and reporting on overall program budget
• Provides visibility via standardized communication methods that effectively and accurately provide “at a glance” status/health updates for management
• Directs change management processes for the budget, scope and schedule of the project portfolio
• Apprises senior IT and executive management of program status, issues and concerns
• Develops and maintains program management practices with the input of senior IT leadership and insures that processes are applied / modified appropriately
• Assesses the collective demand for resources to identify resource conflicts and track allocation
• Continually monitors individual project and program level resources’ progress to insure meeting of specific deadlines
• Actively pursues issue resolution and communicates status and issues to stakeholders
• Leverages a broad knowledge of technical and business resources to effectively coordinate team members and external resources
• Works with teams to determine feasibility, cost, time required and compatibility with current systems
• Supports project initiatives, including identifying and analyzing budget considerations, time and resource estimates, defining project scope and objectives and getting business user sign-off
• Arbitrates and resolves conflict between and among project teams
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills (including the ability to translate technical approach into strategic positioning)
• Commitment to on-time performance
• Management of internal and external resources
• Coordination of inputs, reviews, and strategy implementation
• Problem identification and resolution
• Ability to prioritize and juggle multiple projects with competing objectives and deadlines in a fast-paced, high-pressure environment.

Experience
• Experience within a Program Management Office (PMO) including creating, deploying, and monitoring compliance with Standards and Procedures
• Results oriented; ability to commit to and follow initiatives through to completion
• Strong interpersonal, collaborative and team building skills; Able to partner with and lead people with different personalities and responsibilities, demonstrating conflict management and negotiation skills; Adaptive; Confident; Persuasive; Proactive.
• Mastery of project management processes, including planning tasks and allocating resources, risk management, issue management, time management, financial management, working in teams, quality management, monitoring, reporting and documentation
• Strong business acumen—ability to quickly develop and display knowledge of the strategic and operational issues and goals of the business unit
• Bachelors degree in a related field

Bonus Points
• You love data — you want to measure everything, and have a nose for what questions we should be asking to get the data we need.
• You’re an entrepreneur at heart – you can be resourceful and creative to find the best solution that gets the job done.
• Jira experience
• Spanish language proficiency
• Educational assessment, psychometrics and/or Education-tech experience

To apply please submit a resume and cover letter summarizing your interests, relevant experience and what makes you different to careers@piersonlabs.com.

Conversations on Online Learning - Audrey Watters: "(Student) Data is the New Oil: MOOCs, Metaphor, and Money"

Talk description: Education technology entrepreneurs frequently boast about the great insights about learning they are able to glean, thanks to the "unprecedented amounts" of data they're collecting from their users. Every keystroke. Every click. Every pause and rewind in a video lecture. Every homework submission. Every forum post. The promise of all the data gathering and data mining: better teaching and learning through technology. And perhaps we will see education transformed. But the claims about "big data" and education echo those made by the tech industry in general, and there is incredible investor interest in this story -- in funding data science oriented startups. This presentation will examine "student data as the new oil" -- the metaphor and the money behind education data and learning analytics as seen in MOOCs and other education technologies.
Audrey Watters, a leading freelance writer in the education field and author of the blog Hack Education, will present a talk entitled “(Student) Data is the New Oil: MOOCs, Metaphor, and Money.” The event is free and open to members of the Columbia community with a valid University ID.

October 16, 2013
3 pm to 4 pm
Columbia University Morningside Campus 203 Butler Library

Fall 2013 Speaker Series

Join the Education Collaborative for the first installment of its Fall 2013 Speaker Series.  Professor Alessia Lefebure will join us for a conversation about the role of education technology, particularly Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), on higher education.  She will also field questions on the status of higher education in Asia.

Date: Tuesday, October 8
Time: 1-2pm

Room: IAB 402

Refreshments will be served!

Check out our calendar for future installments in the Fall 2013 Speaker Series

About Prof Lefébure:
Prof Alessia Lefébure is the Director of the Alliance Program since the spring 2011. Prior to this, she has served as the Director of the Centre for Asia and the Pacific at Sciences Po, from 2006 to 2011. In this position, she was responsible for the definition, implementation and development of the school’s institutional policies towards the countries of the Asia-Pacific region. She managed a seven-member staff in Paris and coordinated a network of representative offices in China and India. Her experience in a series of international positions within academic and research institutions has provided her with the background and knowledge necessary to pursue her PhD in Sociology at Sciences Po on higher education models in China. At present, she also teaches a class titled, "Higher education, policy and development in Asia," at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

Opportunity: NYC Department of Education

NYCDOE Office of Teacher Effectiveness is looking for members of its new strategy team - Director, Manager, and two Analysts.

The OTE Strategy Team will serve as the steward of all teacher effectiveness data and will lead the ongoing analysis of data for the purposes of driving teacher effectiveness work in schools and Networks across the city. This year is especially exciting for those on the OTE team, as 1800+ schools implement the new Advance system of teacher evaluation and development.

Please reach out to Kate Alcorn (kalcorn@schools.nyc.gov) if you are interested in any of these roles, and feel free to forward to your networks.

Descriptions of job positions:
Director
Manager
Analyst