Maximizing Campus Impact

» Case Study 4

RIT's Teaching and Learning Technology Lab Offers an Open House that Shows Off Their Strengths
To demonstrate their strengths to faculty – and to the campus as a whole – the Teaching and Learning Technology Lab planned a friendly, approachable event that showcased TLT's offerings and also gave faculty a taste of what else they could do. Here is the story in their own words.

The Situation
Faculty at RIT do not always know where to turn when they are interested in learning how to integrate technology into their teaching. Online Learning needed a way to expose faculty to the myriad of services we provide to all faculty – not just distance learning faculty. Online Learning has a Teaching and Learning Technology Lab (TLT) which is a resource for faculty to develop their skills in online instructional techniques, to learn to create digital instructional materials, and to receive comprehensive training on a variety of educational technologies. We wanted to create a non-threatening, low stakes event to expose faculty to the variety of hardware and software solutions we had. More importantly, we wanted to expose them to the strong team of instructional designers and technologists that are here to guide them and assist in transforming their teaching.

The Action Taken In
2001, Online Learning offered its first "Tech n’ Treat." The week of Halloween, we picked one day and extended an invitation to all faculty to attend an open house of Online Learning and the TLT Lab. At each workstation in the lab, faculty could learn a variety of software tools from PowerPoint to Photoshop. Faculty could create and manipulate digital images or create short streaming video clips. Some hands-on activities were light – the first year, we demonstrated instant messaging as a way to communicate with students, or other faculty and staff. Last year, Online Learning staff did two stand-up presentations on our most popular tool: Clipboard, a versatile and robust survey tool. The tool was created internally by Online Learning technologists and co-op students and has seen widespread adoption since presentations began.

This year, we will increase the choices for faculty, allowing them to work in our self-serve studio and capture digital audio and video clips and create annotated presentations. The workstations will provide hands-on training in RIT's course management system – myCourses (Desire2Learn), RoboHelp, Captivate, the Clipboard survey tool, streaming video, and Macromedia Breeze. In addition, stand-up presentations will be given to demonstrate student response systems, Breeze web conferencing and the Clipboard survey tool.

The Effect on Campus
Each year we see an increase in the number of attendees and we anticipate this year to be our largest ever. An exciting example was the presentation of Macromedia Breeze last fall. The single presentation brought in over 25 faculty; as a result, we had more faculty wanting to use the tool in creative and innovative ways than we could support, since fall was a pilot time for us. It was the first time we had to turn faculty away from a pilot. The Tech n’ Treat workshops have aided Online Learning in steering our distance learning faculty away from recreating the stand-up lecture online and have demonstrated ways for them to create digital learning objects that can be used in many dynamic ways in the distance and on-campus environment. The attendees were also surveyed and over 90% of the faculty attendees rated their experience at Tech n’ Treat as "Very Satisfied" or "Satisfied."

Tips for Other Centers
Make it fun and non-threatening, and provide lots of support for faculty to actually create or work with a tool. Use the opportunity to make connections for potential projects. Offer and provide follow-up support. Attempt to reach out and personally invite the unusual suspects!

Be prepared for requests from non-academic units to use your tools. A constant challenge for RIT Online Learning has been to prioritize our limited resources to support both academic and non-academic use of tools. For example, an administrator wanted to use Breeze to conduct job interviews. This required training, support and dedicated licenses. We are a service unit and we try to accommodate all users but we do need to define policies internally to assist our team in knowing how to prioritize requests.