Program overview
The Columbia University Center for Veteran Transition and Integration (CVTI) supports excellence and innovation in transition programming for current and former members of the armed forces.
As a service member in transition, you may face barriers reaching your potential in accessing higher education and beginning meaningful careers, despite the many effective programs offered to this population by the Department of Labor, Department of Defense’s Transition Assistance Program, and other programs offered by the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. With this in mind, the CVTI is dedicated to creating free courses that will help to break down those barriers to your successful transition. Currently we are offering three courses to meet these demands, with more courses on the way. While these courses are created for veterans and active duty service members, they are free and available for all.
Attaining Higher Education is a course designed to facilitate the successful transition of active duty service members and veterans to postsecondary education, whether at a two- or four-year college for an associate’s or bachelor’s degree, or even graduate school.
University Studies for Student Veterans helps orient veterans to the norms and expectations of the college classroom, along with offering strategies to ease the transition, to help achieve academic goals, and to allow students to optimize their college education.
Find Your Calling: Transition Principles for Returning Veterans will focus on the development of interpersonal, intrapersonal, and intellectual character strengths as they relate to making a successful career transition from military service to the civilian workforce. The course content is meant to provide you with a framework for an iterative process of self-reflection and the development of practical skills that enables you to make career choices that better align with your values, ambitions, and continued service. Ultimately, this course helps you answer the question: What should I do next?
What will you learn
- General and detailed information about colleges and universities.
- Foundational academic and study skills for achieving academic success in college.
- Strategies for more effective reading, writing, test preparation, and time management.
- Practical tips and strategies for making a successful military-to-civilian career transition.
- A framework for how to begin thinking about and exploring new career opportunities.
Program Class List
1Attaining Higher Education
Course Details
2University Studies for Student Veterans
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3Find Your Calling: Career Transition Principles for Returning Veterans
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Meet Your Instructors

Beth E. Morgan

R.J. Jenkins

Skip Bailey

Tanya Ang

Sara Remedios

Josh Edwin

Michael Abrams

William Deresiewicz

Sheena Iyengar

Sebastian Junger
Program overview
Education systems around the world face the central challenge of finding innovative solutions and techniques for improving student performance. This challenge is shared by teachers, teacher-leaders, and principals who are responsible for improving opportunities to learn, with two goals: raising average levels of student performance and reducing achievement gaps between students.
Beyond schools, leaders in district offices, government agencies, professional associations, and other non-governmental enterprises also share the challenge of improving student performance at scale across entire schools, districts, and systems.
What will you learn
- To envision new possibilities for the work of students and teachers in classrooms.
- To understand alternative logics and strategies for organizing the practice of educational innovation.
- To examine the application of the emerging field of improvement science to the practice of educational innovation.
- To explore innovation and improvement in large-scale educational reform initiatives in the US and around the world.
- To improve your own practice as an educator, innovator, and/or reformer.
- To develop and manage teams that use disciplined, evidence-based methods of educational innovation and improvement.
- To employ disciplined, evidence-based methods of educational innovation and improvement to manage collaborations among schools, districts, and systems.
Program Class List
1Leading Ambitious Teaching and Learning
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2Designing and Leading Learning Systems
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3Improvement Science in Education
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4Case Studies in Continuous Educational Improvement
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5Leading Educational Innovation and Improvement Capstone
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Meet Your Instructors

Deborah Loewenberg Ball

Nell Duke

Liz Kolb

Elizabeth Birr Moje

Donald J. Peurach

Gretchen Spreitzer

Anthony S. Bryk

Paul LeMahieu

Alicia Grunow

Amanda Meyer
Program overview
Engage and inspire students through technology.
Learn how to create enhanced learning opportunities using the latest tools and techniques to connect with today’s digital-first students.
Our unique approach to instructional design focuses on understanding learning theory, blending traditional instructional design models with rapid prototyping and data analytics to create online courses. You will gain hands-on experience developing and publishing online courses using the edX platform.
This Instructional Design and Technology MicroMasters program will provide the knowledge and skills needed to capitalize on one of the fastest growing areas of education – online teaching and learning. This program will prepare you to create engaging and active learning, using digital pedagogy, emerging technologies and data analytics.
Through this program you will learn how to design captivating learning experiences for students who want mobile learning opportunities that are collaborative and accessible, while advancing your knowledge of educational theory.
What you will learn
- Understand contemporary learning theories to develop online learning experiences
- Apply instructional design models to the development of online learning experiences
- Select, evaluate or design digital media to support learning
- Identify, evaluate, and integrate emerging technologies to support online learning
- Design an implementation process for online learning experiences
- Apply data mining techniques to the design and evaluation of learning experiences
Program Class List
1Instructional Design and Technology: Learning Theories
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2Instructional Design Models
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3Instructional Design: Digital Media, New Tools and Technology
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4Instructional Design Course Evaluation & Capstone Project
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Meet Your Instructors

LeAnn Derby

Doug Brtek
