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Creating a Culture of Evidence (Introduction)
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Strategies for Increasing Use of Your Other TLT/Flashlight Subscriber Benefits
Flashlight Evaluation Handbook Table of Contents
One of Flashlight Online's unique strengths
is how easy it is for authors to show and share their
surveys with others, so that colleagues can build on their
work. The more people
at your institution who use
Flashlight Online, the more greater an asset the system becomes. Your
subscription provides a variety of guides, cases, and
workshop materials. Here are
some additional ideas for widening the use of Flashlight Online. Please send more ideas like this to flashlight@tltgroup.org.
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Integrate 'learning to use
the tool' with 'learning to solve your problems with the
tool.' People are much more likely to spend time
doing a second survey if the findings from their first
survey were energizing. Our
"Asking the Right Questions" workshop materials
exemplify this approach; each workshop is organized around
an important question that a novice author can use
Flashlight Online to answer. What other workshop materials
should we develop?
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One of Flashlight Online's unique
strengths is the ability to create shared workspaces
("author groups") where users can share surveys and data.
Create 'member groups' of authors who are working on similar
problems (e.g., faculty studying similar issues in their
courses). These authors can include Flashlight Online users
at other institutions -- Flashlight Online is just one big
system shared by authors at over 110 institutions around the
world. Looking for users at other institutions studying the
same issue you are (e.g., studies of distance learning?
needs assessment forms? course evaluation?); send e-mail to
flashlight@tltgroup.org if you'd like help finding
collaborators.
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Work with a critical
mass of colleagues who care about research, evaluation and
assessment: At any
institution, there are folks who care whether the
institutional culture encourages and supports the use of
evidence to make decisions: improving teaching, improving
services, improving the work of institutional committees,
and, of course, teaching students to use surveys in
productive, effective ways. Meet regularly with those folks
and talk together about how you can strengthen those
practices. Click here to see how several institutions have gradually
succeeded in getting a substantial fraction of faculty and
staff using evaluation to help make decisions and improve
practice. Among the ideas you'll find there: using
Flashlight Online to gather evidence for institutional
committees; requiring assessment (and supporting it) as a
requirement in faculty mini-grants; using Flashlight to
support accreditation self-studies; using peer-to-peer
training strategies; developing libraries of locally useful
survey, rubrics, forms and other templates that many people
can share; strategies for getting people to come to training
sessions; and more.
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Create a web site for your
authors:
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Create your own listserv(s).
Charles Ansorge has done that, and also the faculty survey
mentioned in the preceding bullet; he's at the University of
Nebraska.
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Use Flashlight Online to engage
faculty, staff and students in governance questions of
immediate concern to them. Valencia Community
College has pioneered this use of Flashlight Online,
regularly polling faculty for their opinions on new policy
questions, and polling students on course policies where
student opinions and engagement matter.
Click here to learn more.
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Use Flashlight Online for surveys to
collect teaching/learning ideas from faculty (Click here for
details and a survey template.) Or do a needs assessment
survey. (Send e-mail to flashlight@tltgroup.org to ask for
ideas about such a survey.) Make sure the survey
itself has a note indicating that it was made with
Flashlight Online - this creates more awareness of the
system among faculty.
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Regular workshops on
using Flashlight Online
to solve problems: As part of our monthly online
sessions for Flashlight users and administrators, we usually
include a segment on workshop content and strategies.
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Offer very brief
workshops (5-20 minutes long) as agenda items in
departmental faculty meetings or in brownbag lunches.
(For examples, see "Asking the Right Questions" workshop
materials.)
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One way to help legitimate and spread use of
Flashlight Online as a tool for faculty to improve their
courses is to have faculty run the workshops (thanks to
Johnson C. Smith University for this idea!)
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If
your institution is a Network
subscriber, we can design
a workshop for or with you, on a topic of your choice,
and offer it on campus or online. Popular topics:
evaluating your (mini)grant; using student feedback to
improve your course.
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Tiers of
Support: The TLT Group and Washington State
University provide many kinds of support direct to
Flashlight Online users (e.g., free online training in using
the system; free office hours conference calls to discuss
issues; online help
from WSU). But we suggest developing a tiered system of
support that begins at your own institution.
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The first line of help should be at your institution
- you may want to build a team, including people who are
good at evaluation design. The first time around
you'll almost always need to turn to level '2' below but
after awhile, we hope that most questions can be
answered at level '1. This connection also is a
way for the local administrator to learn more about what
users are doing, and what they need.
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If Level 1 doesn't work, the system administrator
should contact us
(flashlight@tltgroup.org or 301-270-8312) and
describe the problem. We suggest that the system
administrator take the initiative here, rather than the
person with the problem, so that the administrator can
learn about the solution. Obviously, sometimes it's more
appropriate for the person with the problem to make the
connection.
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If our office can't help or if the user or system
administrator realize that the problem can only be dealt
with by Flashlight's designers, Washington State
University has a help center at
http://support.ctlt.wsu.edu
- you can fill in a form there, describe the problem,
and indicate how urgent it is to receive a quick reply.
Their support is pretty good.
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Be prepared to
deal with Frequently Made Objections. Most people at
institutions don't do studies and may not believe they're
worth the effort. If you understand their objections, it's
the first step.
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Applause/Publication:
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One way to help develop
institution-wide commitment to using data to improve
practice is to applaud those who have done it. How
about a special lunch to honor people whose inquiries were
especially productive or that had exceptionally high
benefits of payoff to effort?
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Another strategy: if there's a survey
that one person has prepared and others are using, a survey
you think at least a few people at other institutions would
like to use,
submit it for peer review. Most such surveys pass review
and become approved Flashlight Online templates, available
as part of the system to all users in the world.
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What other strategies also can help? Send
your ideas to ehrmann@tltgroup.org for inclusion in this list!
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One Columbia Avenue,
Takoma Park,
Maryland 20912
Phone:
301.270.8312/Fax: 301.270.8110
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To talk about our work
or our organization
contact: Sally Gilbert |
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