F-LIGHT

E-Newsletter for the Flashlight Program

• Building an Institutional Culture of Assessment: Case Study of Johnson C. Smith University
• Upcoming Assessment-related Online Workshops and Conferences
• Integrating Assessment and Faculty Development - A New TLT Group Service
• Ehrmann's Web Log ('Blog)  
• New subscribing institutions
• Learning More About Flashlight( free demo accounts), The TLT Group and F-LIGHT

Building an Institutional Culture of Assessment: Case Study of Johnson C. Smith University

Flashlight has been working with EDUCAUSE's National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII), the Coalition for Networked Information, and Washington State University on a project on transformative assessment. We've been studying how institutions can use pervasive assessment (feedback) to guide and accelerate educational improvement using technology.  One of our earlier products is a self-assessment guide [click here to get a free account; then choose "transformative assessment branch."]

More recently we've begun to profile institutions that seem to be doing an unusually good job at transformative assessment. This case study describes Johnson C. Smith University, a small college in North Carolina.

One of the early IBM laptop institutions and a long-time subscriber to The TLT Group and its Flashlight Program, Johnson C. Smith has made a persistent, four-year (so far) push to widen and deepen their uses of assessment to improve courses and services. Today about half their faculty have been doing studies of courses they teach and the library is a major user of online surveys for feedback.

Their progress seems to be a result of several, mutually-reinforcing factors, including a clever use of grant support to help a growing number of faculty to take the lead and the ease of using Flashlight Online as a tool for creating and sharing surveys and data across a faculty.

Take a look at this brief case study to see what they've been doing and some of the lessons they've learned.

Upcoming Assessment-Related Online Workshops and Conferences

(REGISTRATION CAPPED; NO MORE SPACE) Information Literacy and Assessment (Online workshop: Feb 5-19, 2004)

A sequence of three synchronous Webcasts will introduce four important activities and/or documents relevant to assessment of information literacy programs. These include:

This online workshop is co-presented by ACRL and The TLT Group. Discounts are available to staff at institutions that are members of ACRL or subscribers to The TLT Group. For more information from ACRL, click here.  Given the demand for this online workshop, we'll almost certainly offer it again. Watch this space.

Flashlight Online training - Subscribers Only!

We'll continue to webcast periodic training sessions for Flashlight Online users, administrators, and trainers. The next online training session is scheduled for March 1.   Click here for more information.   If you're not sure if your institution is a current subscriber, click here.

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. 

Integrating Assessment & Technology Use into a Sustained Process of Faculty Development

How do faculty support units at your institution help faculty use technology to improve courses?  Is assessment treated as a separate topic from ideas for better teaching? Are there only isolated, voluntary workshops with little continuity and some one-to-one help from a professional? Do you

Through our work with the Center for 21^st Century Teaching and Learning at the University of South Florida, The TLT Group has developed another strategy for helping to create increasing improvement in a growing number of courses.

Here are a few of the key elements:

1. TLT Group and local staff help a cohort of faculty improve one or more of their own courses during an academic year through a summer institute and a series of monthly online events, while also
2. helping them learn to do evaluative studies in order to modify/improve those changes, and
3. preparing each faculty member to help one or more colleagues (e.g., through online workshops; departmental workshops; coaching).
4. This initial cohort of faculty can also play a leadership role in assisting the second, perhaps larger cohort the following year.

There's a lot more to it than this, as you can glimpse in this web page:
http://www.tltgroup.org/programs/Sustained_Faculty_Support.htm

The TLT Group intends to work with no more than five institutions in 2004-2005, starting with a summer institute for the participating faculty. If you'd like to discuss the possibilities, take a look at the web page above and contact us as soon as possible. Capacity is limited!

TLT/Flashlight Subscription Programs and New Materials

• The TLT/Flashlight Basic Collection includes site licenses to dozens of program development and assessment tools and resources, while the 
• 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 some consulting/training time, free subscriber-only webcasts, the option to submit assessment materials for peer review and publication, discounts to TLT Group events, and other benefits. There are now approximately 120 institutional subscribers.

New and upgraded materials are added frequently to the Collection. Each subscribing institution gets free access to all of these materials, along with the rest of the Collection, for its entire faculty, staff and student body.This web page links to recent notices we've sent to subscribers about updates and additions.

Over 120 institutions, systems, boards of regents, and multi-institution projects now subscribe. Is yours one of them? Check our list of participating institutions. Among institutions subscribing, or resubscribing, since December are:

• Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
• Mount Saint Mary's College
• Northern Arizona University
• Ohio University
• Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame
• Seattle University
• University of Iowa-School of Business
• University of Southern Indiana
• Ursuline College
• West Virginia State College

Top of Page

Ehrmann's Web Log ('Blog)

January began with a trip to the University of Wyoming in Laramie.  The assignment was a stimulating one: help them think about smart classrooms as they began planning to renovate a classroom building.  I developed this web page ("In What Ways Can a "Classroom" be "Smart?")  to help them think about physical, virtual, and blended learning facilities. it's organized around the kinds of teaching/learning activities you'd most like a classroom to support.

I hope the page proves useful as a planning aid. Equally important, the page provides a framework for evaluating such learning spaces. It's already lead to more activity for us, including an invitation to help plan a new NLII workshop for this fall, on designing learning spaces.

Later in the month, I was on the West Coast, first at the NLII's winter meeting to report on my case study of Johnson C. Smith University (see first article) and then to Los Angeles for an initial meeting with the staff of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. Shoah has received a Mellon grant to use Internet II to test how its tens of thousands of videotaped testimonies from Holocaust survivors might be put to use for education and research at Rice, the University of Southern California, and Yale. I've just been engaged to do the external evaluation for the project. I'll report later this year on what I'm learning from this experience.

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 Takoma Park, Maryland, just outside Washington DC, with additional staff in Texas, Richmond VA, and Pittsburgh; 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

Top of Page

Number of visits to this page: