Summary Report
Expert Group on Information Technologies in Instruction
University Committee on Information Technology
Submitted by Mable Kinzie
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April 16, 1996
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Committee Membership: John Alexander (ITC), Glen Bull (Education), Mable
Kinzie (Education, chair), Jude Reagan (Teaching Resource Center, Drama),
and Robert Ribando (Engineering)
Executive Summary
The Expert Group on Information Technologies In Instruction was formed in
the fall of 1995 to serve in an advisory capacity to the University Committee
on Information Technologies. It is composed of three subcommittees: Classroom
Evolution (chaired by Robert Ribando), Classroom Tools & Multimedia Resources
(chaired by Glen Bull), and the Teaching + Technology Initiative (chaired
by Jude Reagan). This report is a compilation of those completed by these
hard-working subcommittees.
Within the Classroom Evolution Recommendations, the following emerge as
important for consideration:
- Financial support for instructional technologies should be provided
from a variety of resources.
- Several approaches should be pursued for provision of technical support
and technology-enhanced classroom facilities, including the centralized
model embodied by the Wilson Hall implementations as well as the locally
managed facilities found in schools and departments such as Architecture,
Education, and Engineering.
- A funded amortization schedule for on-going upgrade of both central
and local facilities is crucial.
- Flexible use of computing laboratories, enabling some use by classes,
is encouraged. ITC-School/Department partnerships are advanced as one model.
Recommendations regarding Classroom Tools & Multimedia Resources include
the following:
- An on-going review and selection of promising emerging instructional
technologies by ITC will help deploy fixed resources more efficiently. These
efforts should be informed by technical and instructional expertise within
ITC and by experts on data standards from the University library.
- Documentation of instructional tools and "best practices"
can complement faculty workshops and reduce the level of staff support required.
Methods for doing this are outlined.
- External commercial markets should be surveyed prior to undertaking
tools development locally.
- Departmental needs for Web resources are varied; there will not be a
single strategy that will address them all. However, strategies are advanced
for administration of Web materials for course support, departmental use,
student exploration, and library services.
- Future inquiry should be directed toward recommendations on site licensing
of instructional software and support of Web-based multimedia databases.
The Teaching + Technology Initiative (TTI) report provides a summary of
the involvement of the Teaching Resource Center (TRC) in the administration
of the TTI program:
- Instructional Technology Advisors have been provided for TTI fellows.
- Monthly meetings, open to the University community, have sponsored guest
speakers to address special issues such as copyright, cooperative learning,
and technology in higher education.
Recent efforts, including those of the TTI subcommittee are also summarized:
- Proposals for the '96-'97 TTI fellowships were solicited and 23 were
received.
- The TTI subcommittee reviewed the proposals, ranked them, and provided
feedback for each.
Future plans include the following activities:
- Improvement of the TTI Request for Proposals
- Publicization of the TTI program
- Dissemination of TTI products and findings, including a possible monograph
- Interaction between TTI fellows, University Teaching Fellows, and University
Seminar Faculty
Expert Group on Information Technologies In Instruction
Subcommittee Recommendations/Reports
Classroom Evolution Recommendations
Subcommittee Membership: Paul Jones (Institute for Advanced Technology
in the Humanities) Ryan Nelson (Commerce), Robert Ribando (Engineering,
Chair), William T. Scherer (Engineering), Randy Smith (Commerce)
Instructional technologies will play an increasing role in classroom teaching.
It is important for faculty and students to have ready access to the widening
range of emerging instructional technologies. If students only have access
to these instructional technologies in selected classes taught in distant
facilities, it will send one message. If students have routine and ready
access in the classrooms in which they take the majority of their classes,
it will send a different message.
Effective support will therefore require a variety of strategies. Many departments
will not have the financial resources or the inclination to support local
instructional technology facilities. Therefore provision of some central
facilities administered by ITC are crucial. At the same time, some schools
and departments have demonstrated considerable initiative in developing
their own sources of support for instructional technology. For example,
in the School of Architecture, once seed funding for departmental support
was provided by the Provost's Office, the School quickly recognized how
vital this support was and succeeded in re-prioritizing to find its own
internal resources to sustain that support. Certainly these local support
people will provide vital service and departments and schools should be
encouraged to develop these positions. At the same time, care must be given
by both the departments/schools and by ITC to make sure that all parties
are working in coordination. Ongoing coordination and cooperation are essential.
Many schools and departments have provided their own local support staff
and facilities. These local facilities provide greater flexibility, allow
the facility to be customized to meet the needs of particular discipline,
and can provide greater access for students in that discipline. It is important
for ITC and the University to encourage continued development and maintenance
of such local facilities through provision of matching support. This strategy
will reward schools and departments that choose to invest their own resources.
A funded amortization schedule for the on-going upgrade of both central
and local facilities is also important. This issue has been under review
at UVa for nearly a decade and needs to be addressed. Significant faculty
time has been spent studying this issue and special thanks is due to the
committee chaired by Randy Smith of the Commerce School and to Dave Phillips,
current Chair of the Academic Computing Advisory Committee, for their work
in addressing this very difficult issue. It is undeniably everyone's issue
that a funded amortization schedule be put in place. The fact that both
the faculty and ITC see this as a priority is encouraging. Knowing, however,
our limited budget, we call on the Provost's Office to raise the priority
of this project. It is a national problem, one with no easy solution. We
must address it aggressively.
State classroom utilization policies and accounting procedures currently
skew use of classrooms at UVa. In order to ensure that classrooms and computing
laboratories are utilized efficiently, it is recommended that the current
ITC policy regarding computing laboratories be reconsidered. A solution
which many schools and departments may find attractive is to remove a classroom
from the inventory (in careful coordination with the Registrar) and to make
that room a special use computer laboratory. This has been done successfully
in such schools as Education and Architecture, where faculty in those schools
routinely conduct classes in space that they control. The current drawbacks
for the school or department to this approach are two, primarily:
1) it must equip the room from its own resources;
2) it must develop its own support mechanisms/staff.
Both ITC and the Provost's Office should consider that if progress can be
made on such recommendations as a funded amortization plan and increased
departmental support, these drawbacks could be overcome. We think, therefore,
that the benefits of more effective utilization of the remaining classrooms,
and more effective local control of these special use labs doing more discipline
specific applications would result.
ITC-School/Department partnerships could encourage this desired result.
For example, a school or department might agree to staff a local lab and
provide on-going support for ITC machines. Innovative approaches such as
this could address the vexing problem of how to provide distributed, local
facilities without overtaxing an ITC staff that is already overburdened.
Clearly no one model will address all circumstances, and exploration of
innovative strategies tailored to meet local needs and conditions will yield
maximal instructional benefits.
We note that these recommendations for flexible scheduling can only be implemented
if the Registrar's Office has the essential tool of a powerful database,
capable of tracking the capabilities of rooms and making these kinds of
adjustments and the essential staff support to maintain it. Currently, the
faculty member knows more about the equipment in the room than the Registrar's
database. Faculty frequently survey rooms personally, to be sure that even
low-tech "equipment" like chalkboard space is adequate. This is
a waste of faculty time and an ongoing frustration to the Registrar's Office
as well.
Finally, adjustments must be made depending on the disciplines likely to
use a classroom. The room is more likely to work effectively and reliably
if it does not attempt to be all things to all disciplines. For this recommendation
to be effectively implemented, however, the Registrar's database, mentioned
above, must be supple enough to capture the intended use so that the faculty
member from another discipline would be aware of the trade-offs and drawbacks
in a given classroom.
Classroom Tools/Multimedia Resource Recommendations
Subcommittee Membership: John Alexander (ITC), Peter Baker (English),
Glen Bull (Education, Chair), Jim French (Engineering), John Jackson (Medicine),
Jude Reagan (Teaching Resource Center, Drama), and Tim Sigmon (ITC).
University instruction is being transformed by information technologies
in a variety of ways. A 1995 survey found that six percent of all university
courses now actively use the World Wide Web as a component of the course,
for example. This process of transformation is likely to continue for the
foreseeable future.
It is important for universities to actively support faculty who are incorporating
information technologies into the teaching process. In addition to the recommendations
outlined below, it should be recognized that this may also require provision
of teaching release and other forms of support for professional development
and training.
On-Going Review of Emerging Instructional Technologies
A rapidly evolving mix of technologies with potential instructional applications
is emerging. Some of these technologies will consume resources on shared
computing facilities and all of them will consume staff support. For those
reasons, it is desirable for ITC to evaluate the more prominent of these
instructional technologies as they emerge and develop recommendations regarding
adoption and central support.
This process will yield several potential benefits. It will help deploy
fixed instructional computing resources more efficiently, and reduce unforeseen
and costly surprises. It will allow the ITC help desk and user support staff
to focus support on a narrower range of central technologies. (Faculty may
still choose to explore educational technologies that have not been endorsed
by ITC, but will be on their own.)
For technologies that involve shared computing resources, responsibility
for evaluation of emerging instructional technologies divides itself naturally
among several groups within ITC and the University library:
- The ITC Advanced Technologies division directed by Tim Sigmon is in
the best position to make recommendations regarding the effect of new technologies
on deployment of computing architectures and resources such as bandwidth,
shared disk space, technical support and maintenance requirements, etc.
- The ITC Instructional Technology group managed by John Alexander is
in the best position to make recommendations regarding usability, effect
on instructional needs, instructional support and maintenance requirements,
etc. In addition, this group is already leading University-wide planning
efforts to set standards for hardware and software.
- The University library is in a position to play an important role in
the evaluation and recommendation of data standards.
All three groups should coordinate their overlapping efforts and share recommendations
for review.
Documentation and Communication
Documentation of instructional tools and best practices can complement faculty
workshops and reduce the level of staff support required. The Instructional
Technology group within ITC should assume responsibility for a "Classroom
Technologies" web page that will provide on-going and up-to-date information
about teaching technologies that are recommended or supported by ITC, and
emerging technologies that are currently under review by ITC. This page
can be supplemented through links to other schools and departments within
the University that have developed local teaching resources and documentation.
The Instructional Technology group has already developed some of these reference
materials via its "meta-index" (available at http://cti.itc.virginia.edu).
Local Development of Teaching Tools
Because of the specific configuration of computing facilities at UVa, some
class-related capabilities will require local development of tools. Administrative
management tools such as automated generation of electronic class lists,
mailing lists, and electronic submission of grades fall into this category.
However, it is invariably more efficient to acquire commercial instructional
tools when they are available than to develop them locally. Because commercial
tools can be amortized over a larger user base, developers can invest greater
resources than can be devoted to local development.
For that reason, it is important to survey the external market for tools
that are available or under development before allocating local resources
to construction of tools. The ITC Instructional Technology group is leading
this effort in active collaboration with other ITC and University groups.
Academic Web Pages
In the near future, at least, Web pages will consume a substantial amount
of academic computing cycles, disk space, and bandwidth. The subcommittee
concluded that because of the diversity of the University, no one strategy
will address the needs of all departments. However, there are some recommendations
that can be made regarding certain categories of instructional use:
- Classroom Administration --
The Instructional Toolkit developed by ITC
provides central disk space on the Classroom Technologies Initiative (CTI)
server for class web pages and tools that support standard management capabilities
such as posting of course outlines, etc. In addition, space will be allocated
on the CTI server for additional coursework and class support (beyond the
capabilities provided through the toolkit). Instructors will be allocated
a standard quota of disk space for each course. The subcommittee recommends
that departments be given the opportunity to purchase additional disk space
for class Web pages when the need emerges. [This recommendation has been
adopted by ITC.]
- Class Web pages will often be of interest to colleagues at other universities.
They also will be of interest to students who are considering enrollment
in a course, as well as to prospective applicants to the University. For
that reason the subcommittee recommends that the web pages for classes that
are taught on a regular basis be optionally left on the server (at the instructor's
request). [This recommendation is under consideration by the CTI and server
support groups.]
- Student Web Pages -- It is recommended that each student be given a base
allocation of disk space, with an additional increment for each course that
requires a Web-related project. [This recommendation has been adopted by
ITC.]
- Departmental Web Pages -- Many departments are likely to develop Web servers,
either through centrally-supported servers or through local resources. Many
aspects of departmental Web pages are likely to have instructional components.
Careful planning to support effective linkages among departmental Web pages,
class Web pages on the CTI server, and student Web pages is recommended.
- Library Web Pages -- It has been suggested that just as the library now
serves as the repository for academic materials such as doctoral theses,
it could potentially serve as an archive for networked electronic materials.
It is also notable that the library has assumed responsibility for administration
of the Web content of the University Web site. For these and other reasons,
the library should be explicitly involved in choosing and implementing relevant
standards.
- One category that is not addressed by the recommendations above involves
collaborative projects in which several students in a class work as a group.
The mechanisms for shared permissions and access during development of collaborative
projects presents an on-going challenge and requires further study. There
are at least two parallel mechanisms that should be explored. Remote file
sharing that will allow directories within a Web server to be remotely mounted
on the local desktop of a PC may be a satisfactory solution for active authoring
(avoiding the necessity of a login shared by several class members). A fill-out
form function allowing students to transmit documents on a local file system
to a class repository may provide a satisfactory means for submission of
individual student web work.
The recommendations in this section reflect the completed committee work
to date. Because of complex and changing instructional and technologic environments,
other issues will continue to emerge throughout the year. Two issues which
the committee is currently considering (but for which recommendations have
not yet been developed) include:
- site licensing of instructional software and
- provision of appropriate mechanisms for support of Web-based multimedia
databases.
The committee will forward recommendations regarding these and other issues
as they are developed.
Teaching + Technology Initiative
Subcommittee Membership: David Hudson (Biology) Mable Kinzie (Education),
Michael Kubovy (Psychology), Jude Reagan (Teaching Resource Center, Drama),
and Larry Richards (Engineering).
Ex-Officio: Rafael Alvarado and Judith Thomas, Technology Advisors to TTI
The use of instructional technology in higher education has not transformed
overnight the teaching/learning culture, but it is discernibly growing as
a classroom option for faculty. As Stephen Gilbert writes in the current
issue of "Change" magazine, "We have observed a gradual--perhaps
accelerating--process in which individual faculty members find, try, discard,
rediscover, adopt, adapt, and use applications of information technology
to improve teaching and learning."
UVa's Teaching + Technology Initiative is one of the university's most visible
efforts to support faculty as they invest time and talent testing how to
use various forms of information technology to teach better.
A Brief History of the Teaching Resource Center's Involvement with the
Teaching + Technology Initiative:
After the first flight of TTI Fellows had been selected in May 1995, the
TRC was asked to develop a program for faculty interaction during the year
of the Fellowship. Judith Reagan, Associate Director of the TRC, took on
that task.
The new TTI Fellows gathered at a meeting in June 1995, with Polley McClure,
Barbara Nolan and Judith Reagan and spoke about some of the needs they had
identified for their TTI projects. A primary need was for IT Advisors for
TTI Fellows. Judith Thomas and Rafael Alvarado were subsequently hired to
fill that role.
We established a monthly meeting schedule, including a Retreat that was
held at Birdwood during which Fellows chose topics of concern to them in
their TTI projects, identified potential guest speakers, and began to talk
to each other about the specifics of their course development. Fellows decided
that their meetings be advertised to and open for anyone with an interest
in instructional technology in the UVa community.
At most of the monthly meetings two Fellows took an hour each to update
the group on their work. Outside speakers (non-Fellows) were featured at
several meetings:
- In Sept. we arranged for a panel to address copyright issues (Ed Ayers,
Dept. of History; Rick Provine, Media Librarian; Scott Keeney, Director
of Printing and Copying Services).
- Karl Smith, from the University of Minnesota, was keynote speaker at
the Retreat in October, addressing Fellows on projects linking instructional
technology and cooperative learning.
- In December another hour was devoted to copyright/patent questions with
a panel (Nancy Essig, Director, Univ. Press; David Hudson, Assoc. VP for
Research; J. Hoult Verkerke, Assistant Professor, Law).
- In February Kenneth Green, director of the Campus Computing Survey and
the Technology, Teaching and Scholarship Project, visited from Claremont,
CA, and offered a national perspective on the use of technology in higher
education.
Current Efforts, Merging Ongoing TRC Presence in the TTI Program and
Chairmanship of this Subcommittee
My first focus as Chair of this subcommittee was to solicit proposals for
'96-'97 TTI Fellowships. In conjunction with the Provost's Office and ITC
a Request for Proposals was developed and disseminated.
I assembled the TTI subcommittee to read proposals and select Fellows. In
two lengthy meetings the committee considered each of the 23 proposals received.
We conveyed to Polley McClure and Barbara Nolan our ranked list of proposals
along with feedback on each.
I am meeting with the Manager of Instructional Technology and the Technology
Advisors to create orientation activities for next year's TTI Fellows and
to see what limited advice or support might be given to authors of non-funded
TTI proposals.
Future plans for the work of this committee include:
- We will further refine the RFP, based on this year's experience, to
clarify eligibility of faculty for the program.
- We will look for opportunities to further publicize the TTI program,
both inside and outside the University community. We will continue to announce
TTI events in "Teaching Concerns", the newsletter of the TRC,
and to the TRC's e-mail list of interested teachers (over 600 faculty and
TAs). We will apprise the Director of University Relations of TTI Fellows
and activities.
- We will continue to encourage Fellows to spread the gains made with
their projects, perhaps making a departmental meeting about or showcase
of the work a feature of the application process.
- We will try to cross-fertilize various programs the TRC oversees, perhaps
offering occasions for TTI Fellows to interact with University Teaching
Fellows and/or faculty teaching University Seminars.
- We might be able to publish a monograph of observations by Fellows who
have completed their TTI year.
