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“Flashlight Online is one of the four or
five most important collaborative technologies we use at the
College,” Sandy Shugart told me. He’s President of Valencia
Community College, one of the biggest users of our web-based
survey system. President Shugart went on to say that
Valencia’s Faculty Council frequently solicits feedback and
opinions from all faculty (and he stressed the importance of
including adjuncts) on policy questions. Flashlight Online,
he told me, was a key way of keeping all faculty involved in
shared governance.
You can understand why this was great for us to hear. Most
of the ways The TLT Group serves subscribers involve helping
people collaborate with one another: in improving faculty
support, assessment, planning, learning space design,
meditating ‘dangerous discussions,’ etc..
Flashlight
Online is a web-based system shared by about a hundred
subscribing institutions. It’s easy for authors from
different institutions to see one another’s surveys, use one
another’s items, co-author surveys, analyze data together.
(Of course, authors can also keep a survey and data private,
if they choose.) Previously we’d thought of Flashlight
supporting collaboration by helping survey authors work
together. So President Shugart’s observation was a
delightful new way to see Flashlight Online as a tool for
collaboration.
At that moment, I realized I’d already seen another, quite
different example at Valencia of using Flashlight Online to
promote shared governance, one where students were the ones
being engaged. As we’ve already described in our blog, Prof.
Pat Nellis has developed a Flashlight Online survey for
students to vote on class rules. He uses public debate and
secret ballots to help assure that, if there’s a rule,
students follow it. This kind of practice teaches students
about the strengths and weaknesses of democracy in ways that
go beyond what high school civics can teach. (Click
here to see a Nellis survey.)
At other institutions, Flashlight Online has already been
used in a faculty union election and other forms of voting.
We can imagine using
Flashlight Online as a tool to engage a whole institution's
worth of students (including commuting students and 'distant
learners') in governance. On what questions of policy and
practice would be useful to uncover student preferences,
opinions, and activities? On questions where the institution
could use student input, work with student government and
make it a regular practice to
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Ask students, then
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Report back to students
about how their input has reshaped policy, services,
etc.
Over time, I predict you'll see an increase
in response rates to your surveys, student involvement,
student identification with the university, and perhaps
even, over the long haul, alumni giving. (I admit I'm an
optimist, but I believe that if you ask people questions
whose answers are important to them, they'll invest a bit of
themselves in responding.)
Is anyone at your institution using Flashlight Online to
support collaboration, shared governance, or voting? Want to
know more about any of the cases mentioned above? Please let
us know by writing flashlight @ tltgroup.org.
- Steve Ehrmann, Director, The Flashlight
Program
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