The benefits of a TLT/Flashlight subscription are available to everyone at your institution: all faculty, all staff, all students. But no one person or office can use more than a fraction of those benefits. So, in order to get maximum value from a subscription, it's critical to frequently inform and remind people all over the institution that these benefits are at their fingertips. (If they hear about the materials and services at the right moment, and use them, they're also be more likely to support renewing your subscription later on!)

This page is linked to materials that can help you build such institution-wide use of these subscriber benefits. (Want to spread the use of Flashlight Online? read what's below and then click here for ideas specific to Flashlight Online.)  If you've got additional ideas, please share them with us so we can share them with the 150 other subscribing institutions!

• One of the most important potential benefits of your subscription is to create or strengthen a TLT Roundtable. At your institution who is responsible for coordinating institutional strategy for improving information literacy? for finding and filling gaps in support for faculty use of technology? for assuring that learning spaces work well for faculty and students as they use technology?   A Teaching Learning and Technology Roundtable usually advises the Chief Academic Officer and others on budgets, policies and practices. A TLTR helps to insure that information moves rapidly up, down and across the institution and that people get together across institutional lines to tackle important opportunities and problems. (Click here for details about TLTRs; does your institution already have one, perhaps called by some other name? or do you need one?). Because TLTRs have representatives from many constituencies (including faculty who are dedicated to improving teaching but who are not zealous technology users) they are great bodies for organizing or supporting initiatives the very kind of initiatives for which TLT Group benefits are designed (e.g., improving the scholarship of teaching, building community, or considering how technology can be used to improve general education). Bottom line: a healthy TLTR is not only a potential benefit of your subscription. A TLTR can also help your institution make full use of most of the other subscription benefits, too.
• Build a web site with news and training materials.
  • Bucks County Community College has developed a web page for faculty about "low threshold activities/applications" (LTAs), adapting this concept to disseminate "bite-sized" ideas for using technology.
  • Here's a site at Judson College, a Basic subscriber,  that interweaves TLT Group materials along with other resources to create a carefully designed teaching improvement resource organized around the 7 principles of good practice.
  • Do you have such a web page - we'd love to post it here, too!
  • Or you could ask us to develop such a site for you.
• Brownbag lunches; wine and cheese gatherings at the end of the day. Nothing works like free food to bring people together and help them bond. TLT Group resources almost always involve people working together in groups that wouldn't normally form: faculty and librarians working together to develop information literacy strategies; TLT Roundtables; coalitions developing the scholarship of teaching; virtual teaching, learning, and technology centers...  That's one of the strengths of TLT Group strategies - collaborative change - but it's also a challenge. How do you get new coalitions to form? Breaking bread together is an important step.
• Strategies for attracting people to workshops: One way to help assure turnout for a workshop is to work through deans or department heads. Let them know that seats are limited in this workshop and that they each have been given a maximum of, say, two seats in the workshop for faculty members or staff members in their units. Give them plenty of time to find people and get your event in their schedules. Pick high priority issues for your institution: building information literacy? scholarship of teaching? general education reform? learning space design?
• Use The TLT Group's subscriber bulletins. Every 2-3 weeks, we send an update to two contacts at your institution. We ask these contacts to forward these e-mails to everyone at the institution who needs to hear that particular bit of news. So one such e-mail might be for people concerned with distance learning, while the next e-mail might be important for people working on accreditation self-studies, faculty development, assessment, or general education reform.  If these e-mails aren't forwarded, selectively and energetically, many of your subscriber benefits will go to waste.
• Create your own e-mail distribution lists that you can use to pass along that e-mail from us: one list for people with faculty development responsibilities, one for those interested in information literacy, etc.  You might also have certain web pages where you post some of these materials. For ideas about spreading low threshold activities and applications to your faculty, click here.
• Make use of institutional or faculty newspapers or newsletters: such publications can post notices about new and existing benefits (e.g., spreading low threshold teaching ideas) as well as about workshops (e.g., Flashlight Online training).
• Post the list of TLT/Flashlight materials, indexed  by the offices and people most likely to need them.  Are there some materials where you think The TLT Group's password protection will interfere with use by your faculty or students. (Let us know!)  But you can also post copies of TLT Group materials on your own web site, so long as access is restricted just to members of your institutional community.
• Encourage people to subscribe to The TLT Group's free online publications:
  • Steve Gilbert and Steve Ehrmann now write a blog; take a look at their observations, their questions for you, and post  your own comments! Encourage others at your institution to sign up, too.  Add 'Two Steves and a Blog' to your reader.
  • TLT-SWG is a carefully moderated listserv comes out about once a week and covers the full range of issues around teaching and learning with technology.
  • F-LIGHT features useful studies of benefits, costs and problems of technology use in education, and comes out about 8 times a year.
• Buy TLT Group Online Institute "seats" in advance: Suppose, for example, that your library and teaching center want to encourage the development of an institutional strategy for promoting information literacy. The TLT Group and ACRL offer a series of online workshops throughout the year on this topic (one of many types of workshop and webcast available).  You could buy a set of seats in advance from The TLT Group and then give them to faculty and librarians as needed; they can be applied to any event and by anyone. Many of The TLT Group's materials and services are supported by such workshops, so it's also a way to put those those subscriber materials to work.  Instead of waiting for people to come to you and then filling out a separate purchase order for each one, take the lead, buy seats, and then organize teams. You can even give free seats as rewards or prizes for people who attend your own workshops on campus. For information, e-mail online@tltgroup.org or phone 301-270-8312.
• For additional training help, send e-mail to online@tltgroup.org and ask for advice (e.g., slides, handouts).
  • For example, the seven principles of good practice form the foundation of both some of our faculty development resources and of Flashlight. Here are slides that you can adapt to brief faculty on these and related ideas. The slides begin with an explanation of why activities are important, introduces the seven principles, and then quickly point to related TLT Group subscriber materials. Contact Steve Ehrmann to learn about the narration you might use.