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TLT Group's LTA Home
Page: http://www.tltgroup.org/LTAs/Overview.htm
Mainstream
Faculty Start with Low-Hanging Fruit?
Steven W. Gilbert
President, The TLT Group
July 28, 2002
Many have recognized the growing
need to offer professional development programs responsive to the differences
between “pioneers” and “mainstream” faculty members with respect to integrating
technology into instruction. Do you
think the following progression – beginning with a few faculty members sharing
a few Low Threshold Applications -- could help more “mainstream” faculty use
information technology more effectively to improve teaching and learning at
your own institution? I think you’ll see
how this applies to you if you’re someone who is:
- responsible for helping those faculty members
- a colleague who likes to help those faculty
members
- one of those faculty members yourself.
Better yet, try this
approach and let me know how to improve it!
Send suggestions to gilbert@tltgroup.org
Look for Low-Hanging Fruit – Courses & Faculty
Members
Identify a few courses in
one or two departments where you are likely to find support for your efforts, a
few individual faculty members likely to be receptive, and a few Low-Threshold
Applications that meet their needs.
Pick courses that have as many of these characteristics as possible:
- unusually large enrollments;
- high administrative overhead (e.g., require many
hard-to-grade assignments or exams);
- clearly identified “instructional bottlenecks”
where many students get stuck each term;
- depend on pedagogical approaches that might
benefit from technological support (e.g., student-student collaborative
learning or projects); or
- where the current teacher (possibly you!) would
most like to get someone else to teach the course.
Pick faculty members who
currently teach these courses AND whom you know well enough to expect a good
reception to your requests and to your offers of help.
Begin Assembling a Collection of LTAs
Next, assemble a modest
collection of Low-Threshold Applications[1]
(LTAs). [For more on LTAs, including more detail about several of the
suggestions and resources introduced below, see: http://www.tltgroup.org/LTAs/Overview.htm.]
Search for some via the
growing number of collections available online (e.g., Merlot and Open
Source/Open Course collections) and the TLT Group’s LTA of the Week
series. Search for others at your own
institution.
When assembling LTAs, start
with yourself and closest colleagues.
Get people to examine what they’re already doing successfully with
technology in their own courses. Look
for applications that seem so simple, so natural, so obvious that the faculty
using them don’t even think to mention them to anyone. Look for ones that actually save time by
helping with course-related or classroom management (e.g., templates for
organizing, calculating, and sharing grades with students). Look for ones that actually seem to help
students learn more, more easily, or more quickly based on the observations of
the faculty involved.
Look for ones that other
faculty will be able to adopt or adapt with low incremental cost in dollars,
time, and stress. Usually, these are based on technologies (hardware, network
access, software) that are either (1) “almost ubiquitous” (e.g., Microsoft
PowerPoint), (2) available commercially at low-cost to teachers and learners
(e.g., GradeKeeper, XanEdu), or available from “open source/open course”
collections of instructional and professional development resources (e.g.,
Merlot, Harvey Project). The latter
collections require little or no payment but encourage users to contribute to
the development of the resources.
Organize Your Online Collection of LTAs
Ask one of your librarians
to help structure and catalog your collection and provide guidelines about how
to describe the individual LTAs so that most faculty members will be able to
find those that match their needs.
Learn, Teach, and Assess – Workshops and One-to-One
Sessions and Beyond! (30 Minutes Plus One 5X7 Envelope!)
Learn how to use some of
these LTAs on your own or from others.
Most useful LTAs can be introduced to a potential faculty user in a 30
minute meeting accompanied by a nested set of 5X7 inch envelopes and cards – or
a Website equivalent. [See
sidebar.] This can be done as a
face-to-face large workshop, in online events, or in smaller, even one-to-one
sessions (each possibly supplemented by a variety of resources).
Finally, once the faculty
member has mastered this new instructional use of technology, he/she should
find another colleague who would also benefit from it and teach that other
person how to do so – using the same approach and perhaps the same materials. This colleague should be encouraged to teach
someone else, in turn; and so on.
Many institutions now have
advanced programs where (1) students serve as technology assistants or
consultants to faculty members and/or
(2) faculty members are supported by the administration and their departments
to serve as collegial mentors with respect to educational uses of
technology. In both cases, the student
assistants and the faculty mentors can help transfer the LTAs. These mentors and assistants can also help
faculty to use assessment templates and tools to improve the effectiveness of
subsequent uses of the LTAs[2].
Community of Support –
Learning by Teaching and Sharing LTAs
Most people can achieve a
higher level of mastering a new educational use of information technology by
helping someone else learn how to use it as well. There are other reasons for faculty members to help their
colleagues with LTAs. Doing so is more than
just passing along a favor while increasing the depth of ones own understanding. The more faculty who are using an LTA, the
easier it's likely to be for everyone to find help with associated problems and
learn additional variations.
So, it doesn’t seem
outrageous to encourage every mainstream faculty member to learn and teach one
new LTA to one colleague. Such a
program would accelerate the common informal sharing among mainstream faculty
at most colleges and universities -- the way in which most mainstream faculty
have already learned to use the basic technology tools (office suite, Web
browsers, etc.) for their own work.
Does your institution
already encourage and support many faculty members to discover, use, and share
new educational uses of information technology – including modest adaptations
of commonly used applications? Is your
college or university ready for a few faculty members and a few support
professionals to advance these practices and build such an environment around a
small, growing collection of LTAs?
SIDEBAR (approx. 200 words)
Standard LTA Introductory Session (30 Minutes Plus
One 5X7 Envelope)
The initial introductory
session should be no more than 30 minutes long, supplemented with just one 5X7
“nested envelope.” One side of the 5X7
outer envelope should be adequate for any prepared notes, and the new learner
(faculty member) should require no more than the other side of that envelope
for personal notes. [Note: “introductory session” could be a
face-to-face workshop, a one-to-one tutorial, an online event, etc.]
At the conclusion of the
session, the faculty member should be able to do something demonstrably useful
with the LTA with no additional references beyond the two sides of the
envelope. However, most LTAs also have the potential for more complex uses or
other instructional options. The
faculty member new to this LTA should be able to look inside that 5X7 envelope
and find additional 5X7 envelopes and cards, each of which enables him/her to
do something beyond the introductory level with this technology application.
Obviously, instead of actual
5X7 envelopes and 5X7 index cards, a very similar structure could be easily
constructed as part of a Website. The
point is that the new user needs no more than a brief introduction and very
little reference material to get started, and has access to similarly
structured resources if and when he/she wants to move further.
SIDEBAR [approx. 300 words]
Mainstream Faculty Members’ Requirements
Most “mainstream” faculty
members are already over-extended with their current professional and personal
commitments. They may be pioneers with
respect to their own discipline or in other areas of their lives, but not in
initiating new instructional uses of technology. They also share many of the following requirements for changing
how they use technology in teaching and learning:
- Want easy-to-learn applications that require
minimum “start-up” and that deliver real time-savings;
- May be uncomfortable approaching or working
collegially with technical support staff;
- Are more comfortable asking for technical help
from conveniently located, empathetic, familiar, and receptive faculty
colleagues (esp. in the same discipline, teaching similar courses) who are
a little more advanced in their use of technology;
- Are willing to accept technical help from
students who have demonstrated their ability to listen and explain
technical matters with clarity and respect;
- Are reluctant to “publicly” acknowledge their
own technology learning needs;
- May be unlikely to attend workshops on instructional
uses of technology simply in response to announcements;
- May not even notice announcements of related
workshops and available support services;
- Need confidence in the availability of congenial
technical support services;
- Need easy private access to easy-to-use user
manuals and related support resources;
- Need explicit educational reasons;
- Need external incentives;
- Need reliable applications that won’t waste
“valuable class time” by failing to operate as and when expected;
- Know that teaching someone else is one of the
best ways of learning.
[For an exploration of the
reasons that might compel so many to make the effort to improve teaching and
learning with technology in spite of this long list of needs, see “Why Bother?” at http://www.tltgroup.org/gilbert/WhyBotherHOME.htm]