New Initiatives

Gates MET Project

Near the end of the fiscal year, ICPSR received word from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that the University of Michigan would receive a two-year, $1.3 million grant to archive videos and related quantitative data from the foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) program.

This project provides important new data to analyze various teaching methods and also will allow ICPSR to develop the infrastructure and expertise necessary to archive video material from other sources.

"The videos from the MET project are extremely valuable to education researchers," said George Alter, ICPSR director and Principal Investigator. "And this project represents a great step forward for ICPSR as we develop new capabilities to archive and disseminate emerging types of research data."

The MET project gathered video from the classrooms of more than 3,000 teacher volunteers across the country in the 2009-10 and 2010-11 school years. The videos captured a 360-degree view of the classroom, so that student reactions to the teacher can been viewed. Two groups of researchers will have early access to the data. The initial analysis will be done by the MET research partners who collected the data. The second group is expected to be recipients of grants that will be competitively awarded to use the new MET Database beginning in summer 2012. Authorized data users will be able to securely access the videos through a Web-based streaming service, and quantitative data through a secure virtual data enclave.

Robbin Gonzalez will serve as ICPSR project manager, leading a University of Michigan consortium including the Brandon Center at the School of Education, the Survey Research Center at the Institute for Social Research, and the U-M Libraries.