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November 2, 2009, 03:32 PM ET
Budget Problems Put an End to a Long-Running Tech Newsletter
A long-running newsletter that covers higher-education technology will no longer be published because its author, an employee at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been laid off.
Carolyn Kotlas, who has written the monthly TL Infobits newsletter since 1993, will publish the last issue in November. About 27 positions in her department have been eliminated in the past year, said her direct supervisor, Charles Green, the assistant vice chancellor for the teaching and learning division at Information Technology Services at the university. Budget pressures have forced the division to focus on "mission critical" services, Mr. Green said.
Ms. Kotlas, an academic-outreach consultant in the division, has helped teach faculty how best to use technology, among other duties.
"It's a shame that support for faculty has suffered," Mr. Green said. "Training is one of the first things to go."
TL Infobits started out as a service for faculty members at Chapel Hill, but academics at other colleges and universities learned about it and asked to subscribe, Mr. Green said. "It just sort of picked up steam on its own," he said of the newsletter, which has more than 4,600 subscribers.
The latest newsletter, dated Oct. 29, provided information on a journal article about how course management systems affect teaching methods, summarized the results of a technology survey, and also suggested fun Halloween-related reading.
In an e-mail to The Chronicle, Ms. Kotlas said she spent at most 20 hours on each issue. "It's essentially a one-person operation with me doing both the idea generating, writing/editing, and the technical aspects of getting an e-mail newsletter out the door," she wrote.
Mr. Green said he's looking for someone who'd volunteer to continue producing the newsletter. Ms. Kotlas has "really been the sole force behind that for so long," he said. "It's a shame to see that disappear into the ephemera."
Comments
1. fuller11 - November 02, 2009 at 04:09 pm
Interesting that she doesn't see a way to monetize it's value.
2. meg_stewart - November 03, 2009 at 08:03 am
Mr. Green, no one should step up to volunteer for such an important function as keeping the newsletter alive. Your statement is insulting. Instructional technologists may be deemed "mission non-critical" but the elimination of these positions, at a time when technology is advancing at a pace greater than anyone can fathom, especially professors (and professors who have decided to take the administrative route), is very short-sited. Now is not the time to let educational technologists go. The institutional memory Ms Kotlas takes with her and the goodwill she brought to the university is gone forever.
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