Summer Meeting 1999 at University of Puget Sound April 24, 1998

Morning Break-out, Track B: Academic Services
Faculty Development, Where are we now?

Types of opportunities provided to facutly

• Training
• Helping them figure out how to use IT to teach better.
• Open labs as follow-ups to workshops. They allow people to work on individual projects and get assistance as they need it.
• PLU & Willamette both provide some "do it for you" web page development.

How can we do things better?

• Be sure we know the needs of faculty before we try to provide a solution.
• Listen closely to what faculty say they want. For example, they are independent and they often describe problems getting access to equipment.
• Use troubleshooting situations to create learning opportunities for faculty.
• When possible, try to create a balance between the availability of equipment and the number of requests for the equipment.
• Proactively wander around to visit people you've helped before (periodic, informal check-ins). See if things are still working . The idea here is to respond to hurdles that faculty might encounter, but might not tell us about. If they can't overcome the hurdle, they may not try anything else new.
• We should model the use of spaces that we create for faculty to use. For example, if we give a presentation, we should use a technology-enhanced classroom to demonstrate how the equipment might be valuable to a discussion.
• Try to assess how someone learns, they try to present your response in a way that's conguent with that person's style.
• The kinds of things faculty are asking for: CD-based databases (with authenticated web access), putting folders on file servers, streaming video, to create their own databases, class mailing lists (LC, last year, automatically created closed email lists for every class.)

Is Simple Better?

Should there be consistency between the computers that are in classrooms and computers that are in offices, and if so, how do we accomplish this?

Should we encourage faculty to be self-sufficient or should we do things for them? There seemed to be a consensus that while it's a positive to encourage faculty to become self-sufficient technically, sometimes it's helpful to do things for faculty the first couple of times. Most faculty are respectful of our time and try earnestly not to become a burden.

Concerns

• Faculty don't have time to consider ways to use technology due to demands of the institution (research).
• Faculty tend not to use technology consistently. They'll use it to create a project, then the project will remain static. Willamette discovered that they could achieve greate response to the Web Camps, faculty tended not to continue their project development or maintenance once they realized what was required.
• How do we provide faculty access to computers & projection devices in classrooms for infrequent use (so someone doesn't necessarily need to be scheduled into a tech.-enhanced classroom for every class). Carts have met with mixed success at most schools, though at PSU, each floor has a mobile cart and they work really well.
• Reliability & delivery of equipment to classrooms for infrequent use is hard to keep consistent.
• Providing support to in-class technical problems is a challenge.
• How do we support a faculty's style of teaching (for example, the impulsive teacher) and can we adapt in a way that can get people service reliably?

Notes were prepared by Shelley Owen (owen@ups.edu). Email Shelley with any additions to the notes or questions regarding this session.