Introduction
At the request of Information Technology Leadership Council (ITLC), key administrators and thought leaders across the campuses were asked to identify 3-4 challenges and opportunities facing each campus with respect to teaching and learning. The intent was to not focus so directly on the technologies deployed but, instead, to broaden the conversation and establish lines of communication.
After an initial analysis done in 2010-11 (see section entitled Initial Year Analysis 2010-11 below), the ETLG is embarking on this effort again for our current academic year.
Through these campus conversations, the ETLG hopes to surface faculty needs, analyze the information gathered, and share our results with the ITLC and various stakeholders.
Current Year Analysis (2011-12)
Goals:
- Maintain an awareness of how faculty needs are unfolding
- Improve communications between those concerned with pedagogy on our campuses and local IT Divisions
- To begin to share our findings with the broader community of stakeholders systemwide
Objectives:
- Facilitate the process of gathering 3-4 top pedagogical challenges / issues from each of our campuses
- Aggregate those individual campus responses into a report to be delivered to ITLC
- Based on this report, determine an action plan and establish a list of ITLC-approved objectives that can inform the work of the ETLG in the near future
Thought Questions
The following questions may be used to stimulate discussions on your campus (please add others if you wish):
- How do we merge technology and pedagogy so that those who know pedagogical issues can frame their pedagogical needs in a way that translates those needs into solutions that can be understood by those who know technology?
- Whose problems are we (currently) solving and are we actually solving them?
- What are your biggest pedagogical challenges right now? What are you trying to solve? For example, we can observe that lecture capture can enhance enrollments - and that it doesn't do any harm to instruction.
- How did we get to the room design that we currently have? Can we currently describe our room design based on usage statistics? - Can we use an evidenced based approach to bridge our communication gap?
- How do you distill objectives across multiple section courses? How will we define our learning objectives (with multiple sections / multiple syllabi / different courses taught by different instructors over a number of years ... "syllabus creep")
Timeline:
- Campus discussions through January, 2012
- Aggregation of campus needs in February, 2012
- Draft of Report to ITLC in early March, 2012
- Finalized Report to ITLC at the end of March, 2012
Task:
In an effort to begin our information gathering process, please list below any ideas you feel are essential or ideas that have been expressed to you by a thought leader on your campus.
- Paradigm shift from on-the-ground to online teaching
- Paradigm shift from lecture to more active types of instructional design (shift from "instruction" to "learning")
- Aligning course curriculum with instructional design, assessment strategies, and Learning Objectives.
Initial Year Analysis 2010-11
In our inaugural year, the most common grouping of issues reported were:
- Faculty workload
- Insufficient faculty support, and
- Funding to meet faculty instructional technology needs
All of these top tier concerns stem primarily from a general lack of funding for support for teaching and learning.
After budget/funding issues, the second most pressing issue noted in our pedagogical issues discussion came from senate faculty concerned about the prospects of online courses.
Finally, the following group of issues are tied in third place and are each listed by five campuses :
- Time to Degree
- Lack of assessment of learning outcomes, and general evaluation
- Lack of rewards to faculty for teaching excellence