Historically, technology in
education has been supported through a Big Push (often with
a grant), techno-centric, or "laissez faire" (focus mainly
teaching how to operate the hardware/software). Or the
institution may focus on teaching and learning but may find
that its support services mostly reach the same few faculty,
time after time. The results are often the same: few faculty
discover ways to help students learn better and technology
that becomes obsolete without ever fulfilling the hopes
raised when the institution bought it.
-
Incremental
and low threshold steps that can be
conceived or learned in minutes; done with little extra
effort (and often time-saving thereafter), zero or low
"cost" in dollars and stress); usually different
'small steps'
for each member of the academic staff.
-
Widespread
and Frequent
(large numbers faculty and staff each are able to make
more such small steps, more frequently, resulting a quicker
pace of improvement in large numbers of courses)
-
Cumulative. Over a period of years, the sum of many of these tiny
improvements, across many courses, can gradually affect
who learns at the institution (access)and what they have learned
by the time they graduate.
-
Guided by
evidence (productive assessment and evaluation,
mostly done by the faculty themselves as part of their
teaching); and
-
Supported with
collaboration across boundaries (departments,
levels, institutions).
We refer to this centralized
support of 'bottom up' change as 'thinking small.' If you are not already
familiar with these services, take a look at the
table below. It includes links to more detailed
descriptions of TLT Group services. If you'd like a narrated slideshow as an
explanation or preview of the table below,
click here.
If you have suggestions for additional ways in which
institutions can support improvement by thinking small,
please let us know by emailing info @ tltgroup.org.
|
Dimension of Improvement |
TLT Group Services supporting this dimension |
| Incremental and
low threshold |
Collections of Low Threshold Applications
and Activities (LTAs) (e.g., our
LTA collection; our '7
Principles Collection of TLT Ideas;
discount on
MERLOT subscription). |
|
Incremental and low threshold |
Watch
FridayLive! (free webcasts at 2 PM ET most
Fridays); many of these webcasts focus on LTAs |
| Widespread and
frequent |
Help you
harvest LTAs from your own faculty and
share those ideas among all interested faculty; |
|
Widespread and frequent |
Brief hybrid workshops to engage more faculty
(including peer to peer support) |
|
Widespread and frequent |
Help you train undergraduate
student technology
assistants with IT and consulting skills to help
faculty improve TLT in their courses |
|
Widespread and frequent |
Reward and support
compassionate pioneering among your staff. |
|
Cumulative |
Work with faculty and staff to develop consensus
about learning activities and goals that are
important to advance as the sum of each person's
individual steps forward (e.g., improving retention?
improving undergraduate research? developing
learning communities? making learning more
'authentic'?)
|
|
Cumulative |
Use on how people can use
Flashlight Online and other assessment
techniques to illuminate progress and problems. The
core questions, "is the sum of what we're doing,
over time, also beginning to add up to something
larger? Why or why not?" |
|
Culture of Evidence |
Flashlight Online as a way
for many staff to find, share, and adapt
research tools |
|
Culture of Evidence |
"Asking the Right Questions" (ARQ) workshops and
Flashlight Evaluation Handbook: help staff
learn techniques for gathering evidence in order to
improve practice. |
|
Culture of Evidence |
The TLT Group can provide
external evaluation of
your program's current strengths in this arena, and
opportunities for improvement |
|
Collaboration Across Boundaries |
To help improve coordination and address conflict,
help your institution organize an appropriate form
of Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtable. |
|
Collaboration Across Boundaries |
Help organize or upgrade a virtual TLT Center (close
collaboration among units that report to different
VPs and provide overlapping services to faculty) |
|
Collaboration Across Boundaries |
As our
external evaluation of the iCampus project
illustrated, it's useful to create routines that
bring academic staff (e.g., professors, instructors)
together routinely to talk about teaching
(especially when they teach similar courses) while
developing trust. Several surprising
ways to do this are spotlighted in that study. |
