Mission Statement for Educational
Technology at Duquesne University

The Duquesne University community is dedicated to the discovery, enhancement, and communication of knowledge and to the preparation of students for wise, creative, and responsible leadership in our society. The mission of educational technology at Duquesne is to enable faculty, students, and staff to make optimum use of information technology to assist in realizing these goals.

Goals of the Educational Technology Committee

The goals of both the University and School Educational Technology Committees (ETCs) are to identify promising educational technologies and to promote and support their usage to enhance teaching and learning, scholarship, and instructional delivery.

The University ETC will identify strategies and techniques for all parties (e.g., the various Schools, Center for Communications and Information Technology, Center for Teaching Excellence, the University Library, and others) to cooperatively plan for, implement and maintain promising technologies, as well as the requisite training for faculty, staff, and students in their effective use.

Subgoals

Technology and Teaching

The possibilities for enhancing course materials and generating new teaching and learning strategies is limited only by the imagination of the faculty and students. The alliance of curriculum-based instructional materials, networking, and classroom management tools will equip the university faculty member with resources for teaching that will be virtually unlimited.

The University and School ETCs will identify ways to support faculty in developing sound pedagogical uses of technology, acquiring necessary technical skills, and obtaining appropriate access to hardware, software, scholarly information resources, and the University computer network. The ETCs will continuously monitor and ensure that necessary levels of service and support are provided.

Technology and Learning

The work and research environment of the next century will require sophisticated computer usage. Therefore, we must guarantee that each student leaves the university with knowledge, understanding, and hands-on experience in the application of information technology. To prepare our students for successful participation in an information-based society, we must educate them in the access, evaluation, and use of information from both print and electronic sources.

Because of the importance of these skills for all citizens, ETCs will seek to guarantee wide access to technology resources and to ensure that students gain requisite technology skills and information literacy.

Technology and Scholarship

Scholarly communication, data collection, simulations, and analyses are facilitated by technology. Certain modern research is computationally intensive.

As we plan for the use of technology at Duquesne, the ETCs will seek to guarantee that faculty have the appropriate resources to pursue their research and scholarship in this changing milieu and that the network technology will enable communication among faculty, students and information resources such as the library and the Internet from both on and off campus.

Technology and Instructional Delivery

New ways of removing obstacles of space and time are becoming available through technology. The desire for just-in-time and lifelong learning create potential new students for the university.

To capitalize on these possibilities, the ETCs will identify areas of special expertise held by faculty within the university, audiences for that expertise, and the technology that will link our faculty expertise with these potential students.

Approved by the Goals Subcommittee of the University Educational Technology Committee on November 3, 1995.