Announcements
International SOS Program
March 26, 2007
Dear Members of the Columbia Community:
We are pleased to announce that, effective immediately, all Columbians
who
travel abroad for study, research, work projects or other university business,
will be entitled to special emergency coverage. We have contracted with
International SOS (ISOS), by every estimate the industry leader, to provide us
with world-wide assistance in the event of an emergency that requires special
evacuation and repatriation services or immediate medical intervention. This is
the kind of insurance one hopes never to use or to need, but we should have it
for the sake of all Columbians doing work around the world.
Membership in the program will be provided at no charge to you. The protection,
within the limits stated in the plan, extends to your immediate family members (spouse,
-dependent children, life partner), and covers a range of services that circumstances
may suddenly require. Such services include:
- pre-trip information on travel health issues
- emergency message transmission
- emergency evacuation
- medically supervised repatriation
- companion ticket for medical repatriation
- medical monitoring
- online travel security information
ISOS is the world’s largest medical and security assistance company, maintaining
health clinics and remote-site medical facilities across five continents. It is
important to understand that, although ISOS will offer you travel, medical
and security advice and services, as well as on-line access to information
which many insurance companies do not offer, ISOS is NOT health insurance.
Please maintain your own health insurance plan. Requests for reimbursement
for medical carereceived while abroad should be submitted to your health
insurance provider.
Here are two documents you should feel free to download. The first,
Using the ISOS Program,
outlines in greater detail the benefits of this
program, and responds to a
range of questions regarding eligibility, services,
or ISOS responses to one
or another emergency situation. The second is
a Membership Card (in pdf format);
please download this card and retain
it for your records.
For even more information about ISOS, and to avail yourself of the on-line,
real-time servicesthat the company provides, please consult their
website-- http://www.internationalsos.com --and access the plan specific
to Columbia by using the member number 11BSGC000064. Additional
information will be available through your respective schools or institutes.
It was through the joint efforts of many people in the Provost’ Office, the
Office of Global Programs, the Treasurer’s Office, the General Counsel’s Office,
Student Health Services, the International Student and Scholar’s Office and several
key schools and programs that the planning for this program was undertaken.
We thank all the participants for their input and consideration,and commit to
continue to work with them to review the University’s evolving needs and our
satisfaction with the program.
We hope all of our students, faculty, administrators, and affiliated personnel
eligible for this coverage will find that it provides, in the first instance, some greater
peace of mind. The University encourages study, research, and program activity in
every part of the world, and this program will provide appropriate safeguards for
the lives and well-being of those of us
so engaged.
Sincerely,
The Vice Provost for International Relations
Kathleen McDermott, Director
Office of Global Programs
Walter Pizzano
Associate Treasurer for Risk Management
_______________________
Addendum to the above message
- For your convenience, here are the ISOS Alarm Center phone numbers:
If calling from the US, Mexico, Central or South America:
PHILADELPHIA, PA
24 hours: 1-215-942-8226 (call collect where available)
Within U.S.A. call: 1-800-523-6586
If calling from Europe, CIS, Africa or the Middle East:
LONDON, ENGLAND
24 hours: 44-20-8762-8008 (call collect where available)
If calling from Asia, Australia or the Pacific Rim:
SINGAPORE
24 hours: 65-6338-7800 (call collect where available)
Additional Alarm Center and Clinic contact information can be found at the ISOS website at www.internationalsos.com/world-network
- Eligibility questions should be directed to riskmanagement@columbia.edu
Wimba Voice Boards Added to Course Works
12 Mar 07
Students and instructors in Columbia language classes are taking their conversations
online this semester, courtesy of a new voice discussion board feature in CourseWorks,
the University's course management system.
CUIT implemented the new voice tool for all Language Resource Center courses; this
project was sponsored by the LRC and Paul Anderer, vice provost for international
relations. The voice board software is a web-based tool developed by Horizon Wimba,
a commercial vendor.
The voice boards allow students and instructors to communicate with each other at
any time, using a threaded discussion board where they can read text messages,
listen to voice messages, and record and post their own messages. The boards enhance
and reinforce face-to-face classroom instruction by giving students more opportunities to
listen and respond to spoken idiomatic language, improve their listening skills, and
concentrate on rhythm and pronunciation.
More than 625 faculty and students in 108 different foreign language courses are using the
voice boards this semester.
"Wimba is easy to use and non-intimidating even for those who are less familiar with such
tools," said Dr. Mona Momescu, lecturer in Romanian language and culture. "Beginning
students find it enjoyable and extremely useful in their pronunciation exercises, and
intermediate students find it a very helpful interactive tool that allows them to add on
to the texts, review their previous achievements, and be creative in the language
they're learning."
"Integrating the voice boards with CourseWorks is a great example of how technology supports
teaching," said Carol Albertus, CUIT associate vice president for university systems. "CUIT's
partnership with the LRC and the vice provost's office has brought a great new teaching tool
to Columbia's foreign language community."
For more information about the voice boards tool and how you can use it in your language
course, send an e-mail message to voiceboard@columbia.edu.
Maneesha Aggarwal
Senior Developer, Teaching and Learning Technologies
OVPIR Launches Website
September 7, 2006
As we all know, Columbia is already international in its scope and proper ambition. No major research institution in our time could afford to claim less. But every university bears a responsibility to come to terms with the multiple ways it chooses to connect to the world, as well as to explore ways to make more and even better connections.
Our location, in this great global city of New York, surely gives Columbia a unique advantage as we work together to discover and responsibly transmit knowledge about our natural world and our social universe, including the many languages we use to express our deepest or most complex thoughts and feelings; and about the history of these transactions and the urgency for comparative reflection across national boundaries or the framework of disciplines.
Please consider this Web site, then, as a modest first step toward this "coming to terms" with the international at Columbia. There are severe limits to what is possible to map in this first phase, much less to adequately convey the significance and scale of so many global projects and programs that are underway or being planned. We inherit no University-wide database that records cross-regional or regional transactions as they occur within all of our units. We are a decentered universe, for better or worse.
I must rely on the cooperation of schools and departments, centers and institutes to share the ways in which each is involved in international projects and programs. We will do our best to enrich our site with the latest information that we receive from every sector of the University and to devise increasingly precise and streamlined ways to capture both the flow and the specificity of that information.
Let me add a word about two units with which my office will be working very closely.
The first is the International Students and Scholars Office (ISSO) under its Director, Associate Provost Rick Tudisco. Students and scholars from around the world are assisted in virtually every aspect of their arrival and settlement by ISSO. This is an office that has kept a careful database of our international population. In 2006, Columbia will rank third in the country (behind only USC and the University of Texas) in the number of international students and scholars whom we host and who contribute crucially to so many of our departments and laboratories.
The second is a newly created unit: The Office of Global Programs. Under the leadership of its Director, Kathleen McDermott, this office will be the hub of efforts geared to managing and creating opportunities for our undergraduates to study or to intern abroad, in developed and developing parts of our world; also to generate exchange relationships that will increase the number of international students at Columbia, again, from all of the world's regions and populations.
Periodically, I will invite others in the University community to use this Announcements forum to address an issue that relates broadly to Columbia's international relations and plans. I will be back often with further details about the efforts of this office, working closely with all of you, to provide an appropriately local, indeed a New York and a Columbia accent, to what we deeply mean by "the global."
The Vice Provost for International Relations
