My first blogging experience.

Harshad Deshpande (Intel) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:51:40 +0000

Here goes my first blog!

I had been toying with the idea of writing a blog but was hesitant to do so for unknown reasons. Perhaps the fact that I was exposing myself and my writing to the scrutiny of the whole wide world( Surprisingly shortens to www !)

I have been thinking about a topic that I would like to write about and found that I wanted to write about many of them. This being the first blog ... shall dedicate it to the experimentation that I did related to blogging.

Last night I asked a question to few people to test the waters and was really surprised to see the responses that I received. I asked the following question and was inundated with repsonses some ranging from whacky solutions to some real good stuff.

The question: What are the best methods of influencing University Faculty to update their curriculum to the latest technologies? Also what are the top 3 factors that could influence Faculty to Blog and post comments and be an active member of an academic community?

The Answers:

Paul Erickson - Academic Technology and Middleware Coordinator

In my experience, there are a number of factors that need to be addressed in order to engage faculty to update their curriculum to make better use of technology. The first is to work with faculty who are early adopters and find ways (together) to lead by example. This is probably the most key strategy. It not only provides concrete examples to their colleagues of why using technology could be valuable to them, but it also strongly influences the second factor. Once our institution reached a certain level of technology adoption and maturity, it was the students who drove the adoption of new technology by faculty (client-driven... as it should be). Based on their experiences in other classes, they have great examples of how technology is directly valuable to them, and they demand that their other instructors adopt the same techniques. Third, the culture of the departments needs to change. Ideally, online work should be evaluated by a peer review process, and considered in the Promotion & Tenure process. Please note that you will probably need to have the first two steps solidly in place for some time before step 3 will be possible. The institution has to already see great value before they will place any value on online work. Also, your faculty needs to have grown (or imported) enough expertise on campus to be able to competently evaluate online work. There is no magic bullet for this process, and it will take years to get where you're going (although it would be easier now than it was 10 years ago, because there is less general fear of technology).
With regard to the top 3 factors to inspire faculty to actively engage in an online academic community... I don't know that there are 3 clear-cut factors, but here are some approaches. Demonstrate the value of the medium. Work with faculty leaders to engage them & give them special help. It may be helpful to start at the departmental level. It will be easier to focus on the needs and on developing best practices, and then work with that department to inspire other departments.
With any of these efforts, you are unlikely to have much success if you mandate behaviors from the top down. Administration can play a key role, however, by modeling good practices and by demonstrating that they're committed to the value of using technology in the teaching & learning environment, and to collaborate.

Elizabeth

A. Evans - Information Technology Services - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
I've worked at an R-1 university for over 25 years and most of that time, I've spent working with faculty in various ways to incorporate "latest technologies" in their work, whether that work was administrative, instructional, clinical, or research. There is no simple answer, but here are some things I've found to be effective or that faculty say would be effective:
1. Change the promotion and tenure system so that innovation is rewarded. This is what our innovative faculty say would have a major impact. At an R-1, faculty are rewarded for research and publishing *primarily*. If promotion, pay raises, and tenure decisions don't reward innovation, most are going to be reluctant to dive in. I'm putting this first to get it out of the way. This isn't something that's going to change at most universities easily or quickly, if ever.
2. Find out what the technology offers that they currently can't do/don't have. Whatever these things are must matter to the faculty member. This means you have to listen to what they say. What do they wish they could do? What do they struggle to do with their current method? If *you* think something is spiffy and useful and they don't care about it, they won't use it. Changing how you do something takes time and effort. Most faculty work very hard already. They teach, they do research, they write, they serve on committees, they perform public service. There's little time to spend learning something new just because somebody else thinks it's cool.
3. Offer excellent training and support for free (or bundled with the license). If faculty try to use something and it doesn't work or it's harder than they thought, they're going to spend their time on something for which they see a bigger positive impact. If they ask a question and it doesn't get answered, they'll give up. If you sell them on how useful a technology will be and don't provide enough training to get them going, they'll give up. If you nickel and dime them for everything, many won't be able to pay. Package support and training and product so that if they buy something, they know they will be able to learn what they need to use it effectively and efficiently.
4. Pay attention to central IT groups and what standards and technologies they support. If you sell a product to an individual faculty member or to a department, and the central IT group can't support it with existing infrastructure or because of security issues, usage will die and everybody will be unhappy with you and with each other. Get to know the recurring issues campuses deal with: FERPA, HIPAA, authentication, bandwidth, etc. Nobody wins if you ignore the central IT group and the services it provides.
5. License the product appropriately. Understand what education issues campuses have to manage: Is the campus residential? Mostly full-time or part-time students? How much distance ed is conducted? Make it easy for campuses to license products to suit their needs. So, understand the variety of needs out there for different campuses and make the licensing fit the needs.
6. Use early adopters. All campuses have some faculty who are interested in adopting technology. In conjunction with central IT, offer to make the product available to some of those faculty as part of a pilot. Offer deeply discounted prices or other incentives. Include a way to assess the success of the pilot and have a marketing plan to share the success with the rest of campus.

Richard Tabor Greene - Professor of Knowledge and Creativity Management at Kwansei Gakuin University

No faculty whatsoever should update their curricula to the latest technologies under any circumstances. It is both a waste of time and immoral. Any medium involves reformatting ideas initially developed as oral talk or written notes. Any reformatting inserts delay between new ideas and others hearing them. So lecturing for 8000 years plus has been the unimproved method of choice for instruction BECAUSE it involves minimal delay from idea invention to dissemination and that happens because NO reformatting is involved. Pod casts, PowerPoint, eLearning--all involve major amounts of reformatting--they are dead on arrival and just make ideas once gotten out of date. Reformatting is the killer.

If you want ideas in better newer media DO the OPPOSITE of Kindle the stupid Amazon technology---do what SCRIBD did--the site DOES the reformatting for you so idea inventors do NO reformatting. THAT is the future!!!!!!!

Links:

• https://www.youpublish.com/richard-tabor-greene

• http://www.scribd.com/people/view/310309-richard-tabor-greene

Charlotte Engelbrecht Lecturer at UKZN

Faculties’ biggest issue is time. If you want to let them do something on the web, it must be client friendly easy to read and easy to respond to. Proffies are also people who get tired of reading long hard and difficult stuff. Bring something that makes it worth their time, like proper conversation or just the joy to connect. If faculty believes that what you offer them will enhance their profile and ability to qualify for publishing and research grants, you might also get their attention

Love from a not-prof-yet- but- surely -on -my- way

Arun Gupta - CIO with business acumen, IT Turnaround specialist with multi-industry experience

Having done some influencing in the past, my observations on what works:

1. Approach it with the Management of the University/College, not professors to begin with on how it will help their students do better in the industry

2. Get a toe-hold in by offering to do guest lectures and then connect with the Academic Council(s) to influence the curriculum

3. Set expectations with the Placement Groups if you visit those colleges regularly by illustrating the kind of skills and knowledge you would be interested in

4. Use Alumni groups to provide feedback to the college

Most of this works well with the professional courses and MBA programs. In the case of general education, it is an uphill task.

Jaydeep Singh - Head - Enterprise Sales at Prometric

In my experience, selling the idea to the University/College management council works much better than individual faculty members. Faculty members, as a breed are extremely diverse in their opinions and thus getting them to lead a change in the curriculum might not be the 'path of least resistance'. If the University (Mgmt/academic council) agrees to bring in a change, the same faculty members are more than willing to contribute & critique the proposed change (faculty members as such make poor decision makers but great influencers). The motivation for universities/colleges are many - challenge of employability for their candidates, attract the best of the talent to their institution, alliances with best IT technology vendors and finally access to latest technologies (as long as it is not done as a hard-sell, involving huge monetary commitments).

Fennegien Brouwer-Keij - Advisor to the board of Groningen University

We have several prizes for good teachers; the jury is students and some board members. In another project we combined video of the lecture and PowerPoint. The online lectures were used by the students preparing for the exam. We showed the lecturer the hits on his/her online lecture. Before the class student took a small intake exam which showed the lecturer where students needed more explanation. The grades improved!

Manish Mohan Vice President at NIIT

This is a question that the learning and training fraternity has been trying to answer too!!! For the corporate world, see views at http://learningcircuits.blogspot.com/. While I don't have many views on academic fraternity, you could try searching edublogs for answers, or even post the question there. You could scrounge around http://www.edublogs.org to see if it helps.

Links:

• http://learningcircuits.blogspot.com

• http://www.edublogs.org

Vodmon Lapliwiskasahan Engineer at Bookemon

Everyone who do things need motivation. So, why they want to do update if they can use current one? So, the key is to find something force them to do. For example, if they do not upgrade, no one select the course. But can that be done? Or, will they care? Actually, why you are waiting them to upgrade, why you do not learn by yourself. The University Faculty is the most dummy group in the world. They become University Faculty because of they can not find other jobs. That's it. Even if they can be a truck driver, they will not become University Faculty. Ha!, Kidding. But it's really true, it's the most dummy and lazy group.

Chris Wren (Freelance) Information Security/Risk Consultant:

I think this is a realy hard sell as I see no benifit to the university professors as individuals...... perhaps you can try to sell it to them that they will be doing a good service to the university and the students.

Michael Penney - Managing Director at Moodlerooms, Inc.

Make it easy for them to do and if that doesn't work, find some way to pay them extra to do it - UMassOnline has a great model for this, IMO -provide extra support, and extra pay, for folks who want to teach online:-).

Seeing such a set of diverse responses in such a short period of time was really comforting to me. It actually helped allay my fears of the web world and has motivated me to write some more and ask some more questions.

So here goes one question for the Academic fraternity:

What are the top 3 things that put off academic folks when approached by technology corporates who recommend an upgrade or change in your existing curriculum?

Feel free to share your views by posting your comments or sending me an email on harshad.s.deshpande@intel.com

Blogs » Harshad Deshpande (Intel)

My first blogging experience.