Faculty Development and IT Integration

Using technology to improve teaching and learning is of interest to every faculty member. Faculty have many questions: How do I enhance interaction through visuals and media? How do I build community online? How do I engage the students online? How do I ensure the integrity of student work? What are the best approaches to providing feedback? How do I manage the workload? This presentation will review a collaborative approach to identifying and addressing the needs of faculty in using technology in a blended and online format.

Launched in January 2006, the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) at the University of South Carolina is located in the heart of campus in the Thomas Cooper Library. Enabling the wise use of new technologies to enhance student learning and providing synergy to campus teaching support activities through a systems approach are two of the CTE's five stated goals. To achieve these goals, the CTE created a new associate director position for teaching technology excellence.

Faculty Innovators, a 24-month professional development program in the use of emergent technologies, was designed to meet increasing student skills and expectations for technology integration in higher education instruction. This session will highlight the program's seven-year evolution and impact on the teaching, learning, and research process.

Tablet PCs used in undergraduate field courses in archaeology and ecology have transformed the way we teach field-mapping and data-collection concepts. Curriculum redesign and assessment strategies were applied to two unique classes, introducing tablet PCs, an emerging mobile technology, with the goal of improving how spatial data are handled, viewed, and collected.

In 2002, UNH inaugurated a Faculty Instructional Technology Summer Institute (FITSI) to help our faculty explore emerging instructional technologies and instructional design best practices. This session will report how the overwhelming success of FITSI has led us to expand it to a national audience.

Members of a faculty learning community from a large urban research university will share the results of a study comparing expectations for technology use among faculty and students. Participants will engage in dialogue to address the presence (or absence) of a digital disconnect between teachers and learners and discuss the implications for instructional practice.

Additional contributors: Dina Bangdel, Teresa (Terry) J. Carter, Ed.D., and Frances (Fran) G. Smith, Ed.S., CVE, Virginia Commonwealth University.

Leveraging a faculty learning community has helped me do things I didn’t know how to do with technology, including podcasting my lectures.

The ELI Student/Faculty Questionnaire is designed to help you explore student and faculty experiences and expectations with technology in teaching and learning. Specifically, the questionnaire examines student and faculty

• Familiarity with learning technologies,
• Expectations for the use of technology in teaching and learning, and
• Views on how students prefer to learn.

This questionnaire provides insight into possible gaps that may exist at your institution, such as

• The difference between the learning technologies that are expected by today's students and those that your faculty feel comfortable using, and
• Students' self-described learning preferences contrasted with faculty perceptions of those preferences.

As a takeoff on the popular reality TV series Project Runway, Project Technology follows six faculty during a school year as they attempt to effectively integrate technology into their teaching to enhance student learning. Session attendees will learn and see firsthand how faculty members struggled with and mastered new technologies.