This is about consortial issues in educational technology.

Differences in infrastructure--different LMSs, different server setups.  Mellon grant for $665,000 with the following goals:

• expanded courseware support
• faculy workshops
• training a student production team
• creation of multimedia library resources

Expanded courseware support:

• created centralized system that everyone used
• redundancy
• streaming media server
• course request system
• partial sis integration
• password dissemination and reset utility

New support team:

• centralized support for all schools
• dedicated staff
• student production team
• various IT staff of The Claremont System

Question for myself: so someone from Pomona calls one place and someone from C-M might answer their question?

This project was faculty driven. Provide many levels of support.

Sponsored workshops which were attended by 437 people.

• pedagogy
• webct
• microsoft office
• macromedia dreamweaver
• geographic information systems
• online research
• digital imaging

Question: how did you get faculty to attend? what incentives did you have?

Answer: demand existed and paid them $150 for full day and $75 for half-day. opportunities for collaboration.

Student Production team--40 students!

• scanning
• pdf creation
• ocr
• streaming audio and video
• video editing
• (ack changed slide!)

Students need to have interest in technology. Need to be committed. Worked in other computing areas and so that provided even more expertise in those areas.

Digitized material is archived in the library--that's a cool idea!

Now the faculty perspective.

• Can't change what they're doing pedagogically (I find this a little sad).
• Help faculty do what they're doing better.
• access to class resources all the time

Presenting class material

• this is the main purpose of an LMS
• content is stable
• all communication is electronic
• supplemental readings
• links to web resources
• copies of lectures

Me: I know LMS's are a place to present course material, but to me this just replicates the "sage on the stage" model of teaching.

Use New Tools

• changing the pedagogy
• online quizzes
• drop-box for papers--use feedback tools including voice

Some other things one can do

• after-hours classroom
• need to learn the etiquette of online communications
• chatrooms
• facilitate group projects

I think this part of the presentation probably represents where most faculty are.  They're using slighly more than the basics, filling the shell with content, but not integrating much else. Which is fine.  I'm just trying to push the envelope a bit. 

It's interesting how existing structures within institutions affect how one pursues a new program. I like the way they enforced excellent work from the students.

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