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F-LIGHT
E-Newsletter for the Flashlight Program
SUMMARY OF MARCH 2002 ISSUE
- Getting started in the scholarship of teaching: helping faculty use data to improve their own courses
- Flashlight expansion and upgrades - Time to Subscribe?
- Study Package on Course Management Systems: Special Offer for a limited number of WebCT-using institutions!
- Upcoming Events
- Video series on teacher education and technology.
- New Flashlight subscribers
- New Flashlight staff member (and organizational partner)
- Have a Question about Educational Uses of Technology?
- Learning More About Flashlight( free demo accounts), The TLT Group and F-LIGHT
Getting Started in the Scholarship of Teaching: Helping Faculty Members to Ask Questions
To state the obvious (except that it isn't always obvious), to do a study of a course a faculty member must first:
- Understand that it can sometimes be worth the time and effort to ask a question (do a little study) before deciding what to do next as an instructor. A significant minority of faculty have difficulty imagining how to improve a course, other than by teaching the course better. Using data to figure out how to improve the course is not a possibility they can conceive. If asked to advise a peer on gathering data to improve teaching, they'd give advice to the peer on how to teach better, for example. If you ask what sorts of data about their own students might help them figure out how to improve the course, they may not understand your question This essay is intended to be ready by such faculty, and by faculty developers who work with them.
- Understand the conceptual difference between (1) a technology (e.g., e-mail), (2) the activity for which it is used (e.g., giving students quick feedback on their math homework) and (3) the resulting improvements in learning outcomes (e.g., understanding the central limit theorem in calculus). For studies intended to help the faculty member and students get more leverage from technology in order to improve learning outcomes, the study must pay attention to the activities making use of the technology. Are they proceeding as hoped? If not, why not? The importance of these three elements (also known as a "triad") is explained in this narrated slideshow.
We're trying to find good ways to help large numbers of faculty (and administrators) understand these two core ideas. It's difficult to design a useful study without these fundamental insights. Attached above are our best efforts to explain these two ideas to people who don't already understand them. We don't claim they're perfect. Far from it! Please let me know how we can do better. If you like, please feel free to use these materials in your own faculty development work; let us know how they work!
Flashlight Expansion and Upgrades! Time to Subscribe?
The Flashlight collection of tool kits, study packages, rubrics, tutorials and other evaluation resources has probably quadrupled in scope since the last time you looked. In contrast to our many free resources, most of these resources are available (by site license) only to subscribers. If your institution subscribes, in other words, all its staff and students have free access to all these resources (plus everything new, upgrades, etc. for as long as the institution subscribes).
In addition, Flashlight Online has been upgraded: it's even easier now to use surveys created by authors around the world as a 'rough draft' for your own work and to return the favor by publishing your own for their use. Creating surveys that look just the way you want is now possible too: your own logo, font, explanatory text between sections or at the end. And its easier to use Flashlight Online to create sets of surveys for multiple sections, or multiple courses. If you haven't seen Flashlight Online in the last month and your institution would like to consider subscribing to the Flashlight Network or Tool Series Plus in order to get it, send e-mail to flashorder@tltgroup.org .
WebCT Funds Flashlight to Develop Evaluation Tools to Assess and Improve the Use of All Course Management Systems: Case Studies Sought
Thanks to a generous grant from WebCT, Flashlight has developed a study package to help institutions assess and improve their use of course management systems. The study package is designed for use with all such products, commercial and home-grown (not just WebCT). The beta version of this study package can be used to improve faculty development, course development services, and technology support.
If your institution subscribes to Flashlight OR uses WebCT, please contact us if you would like a copy of the beta version of this study package. And if you'd like help in beginning to use it, come to our workshop at the WebCT users conference in Boston this July.
We continue to collect studies that colleges, universities, corporations, schools and others may have done of their uses of such Course Management Systems (CMSs), especially studies at the departmental or institutional levels. We've begun to assemble and annotate the studies we've found. Not many so far: we need your studies and suggestions! Here are the kinds of studies and instruments in which we are most interested:
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Studies and instruments designed to document how an institution's system has been used, how it hasn't been used, what kinds of support and training were successful or unsuccessful, and what factors affect the system's use for different purposes.
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Surveys, focus groups, data collection by the CMS's themselves, and other means of investigation.
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Studies that produced findings that were seen as useful by the institution (e.g., helped to confirm or alter arrangements for training or support; helped confirm or alter decisions about what CMS to use).
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Studies that helped document whether the system was of educational benefit to students, departments or the institution as a whole.
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Studies of the obvious and hidden costs (including time) of maintaining such systems.
If you have done such a study could you please send us a copy or a URL? We'd also like to talk with you about whether or how you might improve the study design. If you know of such a study, could you tell us how we can find it?
P
lease send your information and suggestions to Steve Ehrmann.P.S. The TLT Group also has other resources helpful in choosing a Course Management System.
Upcoming Events
"Issues for Chief Academic Officers (CAOs): From Hair-Pulling to Reflection?"
We're excited about a webcast on Tuesday April 2 at 2pm ET on helping your institution's provost focus on the best ways to use technology to advance your institution's educational mission. It resumes the popular series of webcasts, moderated by Steve Gilbert, that drew hundreds of participants earlier this year.
Help us continue to develop a set of useful issues,
questions, myths, and recommendations about teaching,
learning, and technology for Chief Academic Officers. Register
for the Webcast, complete a brief survey, see
the latest version of the list!
This first free webcast of the new series is entitled,
"Issues for Chief Academic Officers (CAOs): From
Hair-Pulling to Reflection?"
The webcast features Steven W. Gilbert and Stephen C.
Ehrmann of the TLT Group. It's sponsored by The TLT Group and Horizonlive,
which has generously supplied the webcast service.
It's free, but registration in advance is required on the Web.
Please help us today by completing a 3 minute online survey about issues of importance for your institution's CAO. (This is also your chance to see a product of the upgraded Flashlight Online survey system. The upgrade made it possible for us to include color, logos, explanatory text anywhere I wanted to put it, easy reordering of questions, etc.)
Background readings: Within the framework of our Portfolio of Strategies for Collaborative Change, we already provide sample questions, myths and misimpressions (and a few recommendations).
Finally, here's an early version of the issues to be discussed in the Webcast.
Workshop on Institutional Evaluations of Course Management System Use
Steve Ehrmann will run a day-long workshop on using the new Flashlight study package to assess and improve the educational benefits of using course management systems. The workshop is at WebCT's user conference in Boston this July. We're grateful to WebCT for its generous support of the development of this package, which can be used to evaluate the use of any course management system.
Syllabus 2002: Preconference Workshop on Using and Assessing Low Threshold Applications and Activities
Steve Gilbert and Steve Ehrmann (a.k.a. "The Two Steves") will run a two-day preconference workshop at Syllabus 2002 in Santa Clara, California on "low threshold applications and activities". Hardware and software (the applications) and ways of using them to improve teaching (activities) that take so little user time, and require so little institutional training or support, that they can spread rapidly and widely. The workshop is for faculty members and, even more, for people with responsibility for supporting improved teaching and faculty uses of technology. Together we'll review and expand our catalogue of LTA's, discuss how to assess needs for them and their use, and explore ways of spreading their use even more rapidly. Syllabus 2002 runs July 27-31.
(Fascinating by the LTA idea and its potential for helping all faculty use technology quickly to improve teaching? Can't wait for Syllabus? Come to Jacksonville, Florida, April 10 for a one-day workshop on LTA's.)
For more Flashlight and TLT Group events, keep an eye on The TLT Group calendar.
By the way next week, on April 4, CREN will present what looks to be a very interesting online event. Here's the CREN announcement.
"COLLABORATION TECHNOLOGIES AND STRATEGIES FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING
A free, live, streaming audio interview
from CREN on
Thursday, April 4, at 4 pm Eastern time.
http://www.cren.net/know/techtalk/events/collab.html
CREN's guests on this topic are JULIE LITTLE and JOHN PETERS of
the
University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
"You might ask just "What is collaborative learning?" John's program's website defines it as "constructing knowledge collectively as people work, inquire, and learn together based on a shared purpose."
"Join the CREN Tech Talk Co-Hosts, Howard Strauss and
Judith Boettcher
as they quiz our guest experts about the latest technologies to
enhance
and maintain collaborative learning."
CREN has been of great help to The TLT Group over the years, and their online events are usually extremely good. I've posted this particular event because the topic seems likely to be of interest to many F-LIGHT readers.
"PT3 Now!" Video Series
Flashlight has been helping with the production of PT3-Now, a video series on how colleges of education should be helping tomorrow's teachers learn to use technology. Steve Ehrmann, director of the Flashlight Program, is one of the four panelists in this ongoing series. The videos are periodically available via satellite download and later may be available in hard copy; contact the series producers for more information.
Flashlight Subscribers
Among our newer Network members: the Board of Regents of Louisiana, Fairfield University, and the University of New Hampshire. Currently, over 180 institutions and projects subscribe annually to Flashlight tools/services. For an almost-current list of the approximately 340 institutions and projects around the world that are subscribers or licensees of Flashlight tools, please visit our list of participating institutions.
New Flashlight Staff Member - and Organizational Partner
Michele Demarest has joined our staff, working from the campus of Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. We were approached several months ago by the Indiana University system, asking whether we'd be interested in hiring a full-time Flashlight expert jointly with them, working half-time for IU and half-time for TLT Group. Michele, who started on March 4, is the result. In the coming months she will be working mainly on projects in distance learning, nursing, and the evaluation of Course Management Systems.
Have a Question about Educational Uses of Technology?
Sometimes you just need a bit of help - a contact, an idea, a reaction. We try to be as helpful as we can, so drop us an e-mail and let us know what's on your mind.
About Flashlight (including free demonstration accounts), the TLT Group, and F-LIGHT (starting and stopping subscriptions)
The Flashlight Program for the Study and Improvement of Educational Uses of Technology is part of the non-profit TLT Group, Inc. We're headquartered in Washington DC with staff in Texas and Indiana, and Senior Associates around the world. Our thanks to Washington State University for their many ways of supporting Flashlight, including providing the listproc for distribution of F-LIGHT notices. We are also grateful to St. Edward's University and Indiana University for extensive support for Flashlight; to the corporate sponsors of The TLT Group; and to funders whose dedication to higher education has aided the TLT Group's work, including Annenberg/CPB, APS, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), and the National Science Foundation.
If your institution needs to get a better look at Flashlight Online, the best way is for someone at your institution to request a temporary, free demonstration account. Send e-mail to Flashlight@tltgroup.org with the header "Free Demo Account" to ask for details. One account per institution, please.
The TLT Group publishes F-LIGHT every month or three. You can see the name of the author-editor at the bottom of this message; please feel free to send me mail about issues of evaluation or research on teaching, learning and technology.
If you know someone else who would like to be alerted to new issues of
F-LIGHT, please suggest
that they send e-mail to LISTPROC@LISTPROC.WSU.EDU with the one line message
Do the same
for yourself if you have changed e-mail addresses.
To stop receiving the bulletin about F-LIGHT, please send e-mail to LISTPROC@LISTPROC.WSU.EDU with
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Number of visits to this page:
Stephen C. Ehrmann, Ph.D.
Director of the Flashlight Program and
Editor, F-LIGHT
The Teaching, Learning and Technology Group
Headquarters office hours: 10AM to 6PM Eastern
Directions to:
One Columbia Avenue, Takoma Park, Maryland 20912 USA
phone (301) 270-8312 fax: (301)270-8110 e-mail: online@tltgroup.org