Project Management and Strategic Planning

The College of Exploration supports project management and strategic planning at many levels, from internal management to external cross-institution project management to large-scale strategic planning and decision-making initiatives.

The College of Exploration has worked with a large number of projects around the country and around the world since 1991. At any given time, the team may be working with as many as a dozen different projects simultaneously. Through careful nurturing and adept management of these many relationships, TCOE has established a strong base of partnering organizations.

The College of Exploration has served as PIs for a number of NOAA and NSF grants and has contributed to successful execution of their projects. The College of Exploration played a lead role in organizing and facilitating two major USA literacy initiatives: the Earth Science Literacy Initiative and the Ocean Literacy Initiative. These initiatives benefited from TCOE’s design and management of collaborative environments in which scientists and educators dialogue for the purpose of identifying and articulating key principles in earth science and ocean science. TCOE facilitates such online large-scale decision-making processes that, in this case, allowed a geographically diverse group of participants to have a voice in articulating the main ideas that all citizens should know in the scientific domains of earth science and ocean science.

A major undertaking for strategic planning was the organization and management of a district-wide Department of Defense Dependents School strategic-planning effort related to technology integration in their schools. This web conference involved nearly 200 technology specialists, teachers and administrators on US military bases around the world to encourage brainstorming on actions to be taken for the revision of technology, curriculum, standards, and hardware and software selection. The College of Exploration first facilitated this strategic planning effort through a collaborative learning and working opportunity on the web, prior to the face-to-face meetings later in the school year.