F-LIGHT

E-Newsletter for the Flashlight Program

• Using Data to Evaluate and Improve an Online Program
• Research Idea: What Kinds of Virtual Programs Are Most Likely to Receive Alumni Gifts in the Future?
• Upcoming Assessment-related Online Workshops and Conferences
• Note from the Editor ("Ehrmann's Travels")  
• New subscribing institutions
• Learning More About Flashlight( free demo accounts), The TLT Group and F-LIGHT

Using Data to Evaluate and Improve an Online Program

Jacqueline Moloney and Steven Tello report on a series of studies on online programs at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.  They've been working with the Transformative Assessment Project (TAP); Flashlight has been support this project of EDUCAUSE's National Learning Infrastructure Initiative; also helping have been the Coalition for Networked Information and the American Association for Higher Education.

For a summary of their findings about learning effectiveness (which are excellent) and how they have used those findings to make further improvements, click here for excerpts from an article by Moloney and Tello.

To read the whole article, which describes U Mass Lowell's implementation of transformative assessment, click here.

Collection of Flashlight Research Ideas

What Kinds of Virtual Programs are Most Likely to Receive Alumni Support in the Future?

Some virtual programs emphasize the convenience of studying alone, on one's own schedule, and aid that process by a learning process that consists primarily of reading, doing research, and getting periodic feedback from a tutor or faculty member.  Other virtual programs place far more emphasis on team projects, seminar-style discussion, role playing debates, and other pedagogies that build relationships.

Some virtual programs rely on software that is relatively anonymous. Aside from the institution's logo and other, perhaps, temporary elements of design, the virtual program could be anyone's; nor does it do much to develop relationships, either to current people or to the institution's past.  Other virtual programs (I hope - I haven't yet seen examples) create software environments that are conducive to building those kinds of relationships.

This brief essay suggests several hypotheses about how program characteristics such as these may make it difficult later to elicit alumni support.

Upcoming Assessment-Related Online Workshops and Conferences

Webcasts on How TLT Group Materials Can Help Institutions Make the Most of Tight Budgets - Subscribers Only!

Starting in November, The TLT Group will offer a series of free webcasts open only to subscribing institutions. The topic: how they and their staff can use subscriber materials to make the most of scarce resources when using technology to improve teaching and learning. Among the topics for the series: efficient, effective strategies for mass faculty support; governance and planning; cost analysis as a way of easing stress on people's time as well as on budgets.

Flashlight Online training - Subscribers Only!

We'll continue to webcast periodic training sessions for Flashlight Online users, administrators, and trainers. E-mail will be sent to subscribing institutions about times and how to log on.

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. 

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 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.

New and upgraded materials are added frequently to the Collection. Now available, or to be added soon, are:

• Sample surveys for collecting student feedback to improve faculty use of PowerPoint. This has been available for some time as a Word document; the sample surveys are now available as templates in Flashlight Online.
• The second edition of the Flashlight Cost Analysis Handbook,  
• The second edition of the Student Technology Assistant Program Workbook, 
• A survey for collecting easy-to-share teaching ideas from faculty (using the "Seven Principles of Good Practice") and a resource page on the Seven Principles; 
• A diagnostic survey that faculty can use to improve student interaction online and another diagnostic survey faculty can use to get helpful feedback on classroom use of PowerPoint;
• A guide to gathering data about a college's e-portfolio initiative (asking the right questions in order to increase the program's influence on teaching-learning practices while controlling costs, risk, and stress), and 
• A new, peer-reviewed survey for studying Course Management System use developed by Cheryl Bielema and her colleagues at the University of Missouri St. Louis (see article earlier in this issue).  

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.

The TLT Group subscription program has been growing.  About 180 institutions, systems, boards of regents, and multi-institution projects now subscribe. Among institutions subscribing, or resubscribing, so far this summer are Barber-Scotia College; Bethel College, Minnesota; Bethune-Cookman College; California State University - Sacramento; Florida Memorial College; Judson College; Kent State University; Manatee Community College; Monash University (Australia); Newman University; Ohio University; Pomona College; Regis College; Saint Louis Community College; Saint Mary's University of Minnesota; Spring Hill College; and the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez.

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Ehrmann's Travels

People often ask me how much I travel and what I do on trips.  It's been pretty busy since our last issue in August. Here are a few my recent and upcoming stops:

• Early in August I visited Washington and Lee to do some introductory work on assessment.  Jeff Overholtzer has a great web site to help faculty use Flashlight Online.

• I'm serving as a consultant to an evaluation of technology use in the schools in Hong Kong. It's one of my favorite cities in the world so I was delighted to go there again in August. I'll be returning in May 2004 to help with a later phase of the work. (If you're on that side of the planet and you'd like to add another stop to this long haul, let me know!)

• Early in October, I went to Maryville College to give a briefing to the College's excellent National Advisory Committee. It was a wonderful visit, working with some sharp and very friendly people.

• Later in the month, I gave the opening talk at an Amherst College workshop entitled, "Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever." Quite an honor to have a symposium named for an article I helped write. It drew people from five states around the region.

• Last week I did a couple of sessions at the League for Innovation in the Community College's Conference on Information Technology. The TLT Group has been a regular contributor to this conference for many years.

• I'm writing on the closing day of the Association of American Colleges and Universities' Conference on Technology and Intellectual Development in Cambridge, MA.  Of all the conferences I've been to in years, the quality of questions and comments from the audience has been the highest here. If you have the opportunity to attend, or (better yet) speak at one of these conferences, grab it! You'll be with some very engaged people.  Two memorable comments, both from Chris Dede of Harvard in his talk here. 'If you want to understand communication, discover in what modes of communication students feel that they're most able to express who they are, the media in which they're most comfortable.'  The second comment was, 'The greatest challenge in using technology is for faculty and administrators to unlearn some of what they've previously thought about education.'  An important observation because cognitive science has shown how difficult it is to unlearn things. Yet we've seen repeatedly seen barriers posed by erroneous common sense. Examples: assessment is about grading or being graded; evaluation of technology should focus on the technology itself, satisfaction with it, and outcomes; high failure rates are a sign of high standards and good teaching. There are many common sense things to unlearn when it comes to making long-term improvements in outcomes.  I'm sure you can come up with other examples of how common sense can be misleading.

Upcoming trips include EDUCAUSE (where I'm headed from here), the University of the District of Columbia (a very short trip for me), and Denver for the FIPSE Project Directors Meeting. As always, if you'd like to add a stop to one of my trips, please get in touch.  

Upcoming virtual travel continues include monthly workshops for faculty at the University of South Florida; they've asked us to work with a growing group of their faculty over the full academic year.

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.

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