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Scheduled
Briefings l Other Upcoming
Topics l Past Briefings
These free online Flashlight
Program briefings are usually only open to faculty, staff
and students at TLT Group subscriber institutions, as
well as individual subscribers to TLT. Most of the
briefings focus on how to do a particular type of study
related, directly or indirectly, to educational uses of
technology. They often include descriptions of how
to use relevant templates and item banks in Flashlight
Online, but these briefings are about methods and cases,
not about any particular tool.
For each briefing, we invite you to bring your own
relevant studies or instruments. If you can send them in
advance it will be easier for us to post them so that
other participants can see them, too. We'll try to
do a good job of balancing making good use of your time,
informality, and spontaneity. All these sessions are led
by Steve Ehrmann and Lisa Star. See below for guest
leaders.
To Register for a Flashlight Briefing
visit the TLT Group Calendar at -
http://www.tltgroup.org/OLI/calendaroli.htm
Event:
Flashlight Program Briefing
Date: Oct. 3
Time: 3:00-4:00 Eastern
Title: “How faculty can use Flashlight to improve
teaching and learning with technology in their
courses.” (This briefing is open to everyone,
including but not only people at subscribing
institutions)
Description: Research by other people and
personal rules of thumb can do only so much: to
improve teaching and learning with technology in
their own courses, faculty sometimes need to gather
evidence from their own students. This briefing
describes Flashlight templates, and our new “Asking
the Right Questions (ARQ) workshop program. (ARQ
can help your faculty learn how to use those
Flashlight tools, but non-Flashlight users can
benefit from ARQ workshops, too. The two most
distinctive features of typical ARQ workshops: a)
they’re extremely brief (5-20 minutes each) so they
can easily be inserted into a faculty member’s busy
day (e.g., agenda item in departmental faculty
meeting; brownbag lunch topic), and b) they’re led
by local facilitators. The TLT Group will offer
online workshops to train local facilitators,
starting October 9, free for staff and faculty from
subscribing institutions.
Event:
Flashlight Program Briefing
Date: Nov. 7
Time: 3:00-4:00 Eastern
Title: Using Evaluation to Improve Faculty
Development/Support Services [advertise to
non-subscribing institutions, too]
Description:
What kinds of evidence could help you gauge the
benefits of your service for helping faculty use
technology? Its costs? What kinds of evidence could
help you improve the service's performance? (and
that's a very different question). Take a look at
this chapter in the
Flashlight Evaluation Handbook (if you
don't remember it, your institutional contact can
tell you the username and password for TLT Group
subscriber materials on the Web).
Upcoming topics for
this series of free, subscriber-only Flashlight
briefings also include:
If you want to read ahead, these and many
other topics are discussed in the
Flashlight Evaluation Handbook. We're always
looking for case studies (using your methods or ours) to
include. The most important section to read is the
Flashlight
Approach. We're also always looking for subscribers with whom
we can work on such studies; if you're willing, we can then
include our work together in the Handbook.
Thursday,
July
26 at 4 pm EDT - "Applying the Flashlight Approach to
Blended and Hybrid Courses"
Thursday August (TBA) at
4 PM EDT - Using
Evaluation to Improve Faculty Development/Support
Services - Uniform Impacts, Unique Uses [open to
non-subscribing institutions, too]
What kinds of evidence could help you gauge the
benefits of your service for helping faculty use
technology? Its costs? What kinds of evidence could
help you improve the service's performance? (and
that's a very different question). Take a look at
this chapter in the Flashlight Evaluation
Handbook. We're opening this particular
briefing to non-subscribers as well, as a free
sample of TLT Group services. If you have colleagues
at other institutions that might be interested in
this briefing and in a TLT Group subscription,
please let them know about this provocative session!
Thursday July 12 at
4 PM EDT - Should We Roll Out This New
Technology for our Whole Institution? Evaluating
Pilot Tests
One frequent
task of Information Technology Services and Academic
Computing programs is to pilot test new web services
and software for possible institution-wide
deployment or support. The questions a pilot test
should answer include: a) how valuable could this be
if we made it available institution-wide, b) will
supporting it institution-wide kill us?
This chapter of the Flashlight Evaluation
Handbook deals with such evaluations. We'll focus on
one example, a pilot test of Adobe Connect by Purdue
University. If your institution is thinking about
how to evaluate a pilot test of a new service or
software package, let us know (ideally in advance)
and we can talk about that in our session, too!
Joining us for this session will be the co-author of
this chapter, Bart Collins of Purdue University.
Thurs May 24th at 4
pm EDT - "How (not) to Evaluate Grant Funded
Projects for
Technology Use in Learning."
Suppose your program is getting, or has gotten, a
grant that has something to do with educational uses
of technology - for training or for development of
academic software, for example. What does a good
evaluation plan look like?
Think again - we're going to challenge some common
assumptions. For example, is step 1 to set up goals
that your project is supposed to achieve and then
figure out to measure progress toward those goals?
Not so much. We'd also like to hear about
evaluations that have proven useful for participants,
for external grants for educational uses of
technology, and for internal grants programs, too. Take
a look first at
this chapter from the Flashlight Evaluation
Handbook and come prepared with questions and your
own examples! And
here are the slides we are
using for this workshop (subscriber password
required) in case you'd like to adapt them for a
workshop at a subscribing institutions.
Thurs May 10th at 1 pm EDT - Using
Evaluation to get More Value from your
Institution's Course Management System.
We
will describe some of the kinds of evidence that are
most likely to be helpful for improving teaching and
learning with your course management system. The
session will focus on a study we're currently
designing with Oregon State University, but will
also briefly discuss other Flashlight tools and
techniques you can use. Take a look first at
this chapter from the Flashlight Evaluation
Handbook.
Wed April 18th at 4
pm EDT - Flashlight templates that faculty can use to
guide their own teaching.
We'll describe templates currently available to
subscribers, and how some subscribing institutions
promote their wide use. We hope you'll each bring
one or more surveys that you, and faculty
colleagues, have used (whether or not they used
Flashlight Online). Take a look at
this chapter in the Flashlight Evaluation Handbook.
Guest speaker: Pat Nellis, Valencia Community
College. [ There is no archive of this session; we
will repeat it later in 2007.]
