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Flashlight Online is a tool for supporting inquiry,
especially by communities of inquiry. The more people use
Flashlight Online, and
the more they use it to share surveys and data,
the more greater an asset can be for your institution. Each year, the
base of experience and the library of your surveys grows. So how you can encourage more
people at your institution to use it, for themselves and to help
one another? (To put it another way, how can you help make
it normal for faculty, administrators and students to use
surveys and other online forms
to help make decisions and improve practice?) The more
users, the lower the cost per user, too. Here are
some ideas for building your user base once your institution
subscribes. Please send more ideas like this to
flashlight@tltgroup.org.
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Champions needed:
Who has an interest in your institution to build a culture
of evidence? Assessment committee? Accreditation
self-study team? Programs engaged in program review or
evaluation? Distance learning program? Create a team
of these champions, meet, take a look at this web site, and
create your strategy: training? web pages of surveys people
might want to adapt? other steps below? See if you can
get a budget to support your efforts.
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Institutional strategies for fostering
the scholarship of teaching and learning (with technology): If you're using TLT/Flashlight materials
to improve evaluation, assessment and the scholarship of
teaching, several strategies can work, especially when used
in combination.
Click here to see how several institutions have gradually
succeeded in getting a substantial fraction of faculty and
staff using evaluation to help make decisions and improve
practice. Among the ideas you'll find there: using
Flashlight Online to gather evidence for institutional
committees; requiring assessment (and supporting it) as a
requirement in faculty mini-grants; using Flashlight to
support accreditation self-studies; using peer-to-peer
training strategies; developing libraries of locally useful
survey, rubrics, forms and other templates that many people
can share; strategies for getting people to come to training
sessions; and more.
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Regular workshops on Flashlight Online
use: The TLT Group offers free webcasts for subscribers
on Flashlight Online basics almost every month. We also have
archived
training sessions; post their URLs on your own web site. We
also suggest
that you organize your own workshops. As soon as you develop
a group of local authors, ask them to run these workshops:
peers helping peers.
In other words, one way to help legitimate and spread use of
Flashlight Online as a tool for faculty to improve their
courses is to have faculty run the workshops (thanks to
Johnson C. Smith University for this idea!)
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One of Flashlight Online's unique
strengths is the ability to create shared workspaces
("author groups") where users can share surveys and data.
Create groups of authors who are working on similar
problems (e.g., faculty studying similar issues in their
courses). These authors can include Flashlight Online users
at other institutions -- Flashlight Online is just one big
system shared by authors at over 110 institutions around the
world. Looking for users at other institutions studying the
same issue you are (e.g., studies of distance learning?
needs assessment forms? course evaluation?); send e-mail to
flashlight@tltgroup.org if you'd like help finding
collaborators.
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Create a web site
or post key Flashlight URLs (such as the
Flashlight Online log-in and
Flashlight Evaluation Handbook) on existing web pages;
make sure you remind people what to do if they don't have a
Flashlight Online or TLT Group username and password:
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Use Flashlight Online for surveys to
guide faculty development (e.g., use a survey to collect
"low threshold" activities and applications from your
faculty that your teaching center can then share with
faculty. (Click here for
details and a survey template.) Or do a needs assessment
survey. (Send e-mail to flashlight@tltgroup.org to ask for
ideas about such a survey.) Make sure the survey
itself has a note indicating that it was made with
Flashlight Online - this creates more awareness of the
system among faculty.
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Create your own listserv(s)
to spread the word about new templates, item banks, and
workshops.
Charles Ansorge has done that, and also the faculty survey
mentioned in the preceding bullet; he's at the University of
Nebraska.
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Train people to do
studies for a
purpose. For example, the faculty development program
might offer faculty a hybrid workshop (some parts
face-to-face, other parts online) on how to do studies to
improve online courses. For many people the hard part of
assessment and evaluation is not learning how to use
Flashlight Online; it's how to ask a productive research
question about their own work. Such workshops and materials
can help people get started. Johnson C. Smith University
routinely includes this strategy in institutional grant proposals. When the grant has been funded, it
makes faculty mini-grants available. One condition of
accepting the money is the requirement to do a study, paired
with one or two colleagues, and writing a report about how
the data has been used to carry out the grant (e.g., grants
to help build learning communities). The last payment of the
mini-grant can be made after the report has been submitted.
The report might also be used in faculty portfolios at
promotion and tenure decisions if the institution values the
scholarship of teaching.
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Tiers of
Support: The TLT Group and Washington State
University provide many kinds of support direct to
Flashlight Online users (e.g., free online training in using
the system; free office hours conference calls to discuss
issues; online help
from WSU). But we suggest developing a tiered system of
support that begins at your own institution. If one
department has lots of expert and novice authors, ask one or
two of them to do training and support within their own
department.
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The first line of help should be at your institution
- your local system administrator. The first time around
you'll almost always need to turn to level '2' below but
after awhile, we hope that most questions can be
answered at level '1. This connection also is a
way for the local administrator to learn more about what
users are doing, and what they need.
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If Level 1 doesn't work, the system administrator
should contact us
(flashlight@tltgroup.org or 301-270-8312) and
describe the problem. We suggest that the system
administrator take the initiative here, rather than the
person with the problem, so that the administrator can
learn about the solution. Obviously, sometimes it's more
appropriate for the person with the problem to make the
connection.
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If our office can't help or if the user or system
administrator realize that the problem can only be dealt
with by Flashlight's designers, Washington State
University has a help center at
http://support.ctlt.wsu.edu
- you can fill in a form there, describe the problem,
and indicate how urgent it is to receive a quick reply.
Their support is pretty good.
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(UPDATED) Applause/Publication:
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One way to help develop
institution-wide commitment to using data to improve
practice is to applaud those who have done it. How
about a special lunch to honor people whose inquiries were
especially productive or that had exceptionally high
benefits of payoff to effort?
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Another strategy: if there's a survey
that one person has prepared and others are using, a survey
you think at least a few people at other institutions would
like to use,
submit it for peer review. Most such surveys pass review
and become approved Flashlight Online templates, available
as part of the system to all users in the world.
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Another way to get attention to studies
that have made a difference is to submit an abstract for
publication in F-LIGHT.
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Be prepared to
deal with Frequently Made Objections. Most people at
institutions don't do studies and may not believe they're
worth the effort. If you understand their objections, it's
the first step.
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What other strategies also can help? Send
your ideas to
ehrmann@tltgroup.org for inclusion in this list! (Thanks
to Chuck Ansorge of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, for
several of these ideas!)
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