F-LIGHT

E-Newsletter for the Flashlight Program

• At SE Missouri State, Investment in Faculty Development is Paying Off in Enrollment
• Research ideas: Costs of Different Models of Faculty Support
• Research Coordinator hired for Project BETA Course Evaluation project
• Upcoming Flashlight-related Webcasts and Conferences  
• New TLT/Flashlight subscription options (more benefits, lower prices)
• Learning More About Flashlight( free demo accounts), The TLT Group and F-LIGHT

At SE Missouri State, Investment in Faculty Development is Paying Off in Enrollment

David Starrett and Michael Rodgers of SE Missouri State studied who was being served by their institution's online courses. The University's investment in helping faculty use technology had been justified in large part by the hope that the resulting courses would serve students across the University's service area, students not close to campus. Their data indicated that online courses were serving precisely these students. Click here to see a summary of their study, and an e-mail address to get more data.

Costs of Different Models of Supporting Faculty Use of Technology 

Knowing what people actually do with technology is key to a) understanding whether technology investment is helping improve learning outcomes, b) understanding how technology investment is affecting total program costs. 

Nowhere is this more true than down the black hole of support costs. Few institutions currently understand the costs (not only in dollars but in stress) of how they currently help faculty use technology in teaching. Some of those costs are born by the faculty themselves. Others are hidden in a variety of budgets: information technology, buildings, the library, distance learning, departmental budgets, teaching centers... Almost as invisible are the activities that comprise different streams of support. 

I'm talking here not about how support is supposed to be provided, but how it really is provided. How much time do the people involve invest and waste (e.g., waiting on hold on the telephone; enduring a failure while waiting for an e-mail that isn't answered)?  What are the tradeoffs between supporting teaching techniques that require lots of training versus teaching activities that faculty can learn in a few minutes? what are the tradeoffs between using professional staff versus highly trained undergraduates under professional supervision?

If these costs and stresses remain hidden, they can't be understood or reduced. Many institutions face huge gaps between the support they can afford to provide faculty, staff and students, and what those people actually need. One of the reasons for the gap is models of service that date from the days when relatively few courses made much use of computers and the Web: the accepted methods of providing support cost so much time and money per beneficiary that the institution can't afford to help enough people.

I wouldn't expect a study to discover any universally applicable way to provide support at less cost (in all senses of that word) to the institution. Instead, at least in the short term, this is a research problem that each institution must address for itself. In the longer term, if enough institutions seriously analyze the overt and hidden costs of different strategies for providing support, some new, more cost-effective approaches may emerge that are also worth wider attention.

Steve Ehrmann

PS Check out our growing list of ideas for dissertations and grant proposals.

Research Coordinator Hired for Project BETA

The TLT Group is delighted to announce that Katharine Mason has joined our staff to serve as Research Coordinator  for Project BETA. Mason comes from the University of Michigan and has extensive teaching experience in two- and four-year institutions. She will work in Austin Texas with Project Director Robin Etter Zuniga, who also serves as Associate Director of the Flashlight Program.

The US Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) recently announced this major grant to The TLT Group to support development of model software, templates, survey items, training materials, and policies.  One of the major goals: to create evaluation processes that can simultaneously: 

• enable faculty to ask good, hard questions about their own teaching practices and other elements of a course that affect its quality, 
• enable the institution to gather such information about groups of courses;
• enable the institution to gather data that can be used in promotion and tenure decisions.

The project will test processes of inquiry that an institution can use to develop survey templates that correspond to its faculty's ideas about good practice, while also factoring in research findings on the kinds of courses that most often help students learn well. 

Upcoming Flashlight-Related Webcasts and Conferences

14th Annual International Conference on College Teaching and Learning, Jacksonville FL, April 1-15, 2003

Steve Gilbert will be a featured speaker at the conference.  The TLT Group is also helping to manage one track of the conference on mass engagement.

The TLT Group is also doing a full-day preconference workshop, "Teaching and Learning with Technology for Almost Everyone: Strategies and Materials for Mass Engagement and Institution-Wide Improvement." The workshop will be run by our three Steves: Gilbert, Ehrmann and Saltzberg.

Teaching Well Using Technology , Notre Dame University, South Bend, IN, July 14-17, 2003

This Institute, co-sponsored by Notre Dame and The TLT Group, will help a select group of faculty developers and technology consultants learn and implement a seven step workshop model that can help faculty take advantage of technology to make fundamental improvements in courses.  Gathering data is key both for faculty improving courses and for staff running these kinds of workshops. Steve Ehrmann will lead the session on assessment.

For details on this and other Flashlight and TLT Group events, both face to face and online, keep an eye on The TLT Group calendar. 

New TLT/Flashlight Subscription Program!

The TLT Group recently combined its two subscription series into one trio of institutional subscription options: the TLT/Flashlight Subscription Program:

• The TLT/Flashlight Basic Collection includes site licenses to dozens of program development and assessment tools and resources, while the 
• Comprehensive Collection also includes unlimited institutional use of Flashlight Online, our powerful, web-based survey system that includes validated items and peer-reviewed templates for typical educational studies. 
• Network membership includes both the Comprehensive Collection as well as benefits with two free days of consulting and sharply reduced rates for additional days: useful for training, grant-funded studies, accreditation self-studies, and a variety of other purposes. 

All three subscription levels include the option to submit assessment materials for peer review and publication, discounts to TLT Group events, invitations to regular online briefing sessions, and other benefits. There are now approximately 330 institutional subscribers. Is yours one of them? Check our list of participating institutions.

Among our newest subscribers are Colgate University, Oakland Community College, the University of Southern Colorado, the University of Texas Health Sciences Center, and Westminster College.

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The Flashlight Program for the Study and Improvement of Educational Uses of Technology is part of the non-profit TLT Group, Inc. Flashlight was created by Annenberg/CPB in 1993. The TLT Group is headquartered in Washington DC (but moving to the Maryland suburbs on January 1, 2003) with additional staff in Texas, and Senior Associates around the world. Our thanks to Washington State University for their many ways of supporting Flashlight, including developing and administering Flashlight Online and providing the listproc for distribution of F-LIGHT notices.  We are also grateful to St. Edward's 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,  Atlantic Philanthropic Service, 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.

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
   SUBSCRIBE F-LIGHT (the subscriber's first and last name)

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 the one line message
   SIGNOFF F-LIGHT

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