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Technology and Your Institution’s Mission

August 1, 2011, 11:00 am

By Ryan Cordell

Liberal Arts DoorThis summer I’ve been thinking a great deal about how technology intersects with my particular campus: a small, residential, liberal arts college. We’re an interesting case. In order to serve our students, we must integrate new technology into our research and our classes. This won’t surprise you coming from a ProfHacker writer, but I believe that technology opens up the classroom in ways that benefit both students and professors, and is ignored at the expense of both groups. But there are technologies that perhaps don’t fit our mission. Because we’re a residential liberal arts college and emphasize the value of close teacher-student collaboration, for instance, many of our faculty, staff, and students view the idea of offering online classes as problematic.

I’m curious about how those of you in the ProfHacker community have wrestled with technology as it relates to the missions of your institutions (please construe “mission” however makes sense for you). Does your institutional culture lend itself to certain technologies? Or, does your instutional culture argue against certain innovations? To ask these questions another way: how should a college’s technological decisions be shaped by local or institutional factors? I hope you’ll contribute to a lively conversation around these questions in the comments.

[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user mamamusings.]

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  • http://samson.engin.umich.edu Perry Samson

    A research university may be a different beast.  Each faculty member is like a shop at the mall.  We’re all under one roof but save for common parking issues we pretty much work independent of institutional oversight.  

    I was able to build new technologies for my large classes (http://www.lecturetools.com) under the radar because 1) I have tenure and 2) I got my own funding.  Once the tool became popular the university even contributed funds to scale it up and, most recently, is helping commercialize the tool along with the National Science Foundation.  In short, the institution viewed my technological efforts in the classroom as just another research grant and as long as it led to scholarly work no one complained and once the research showed promise they actively participated and now will hold an equity position in the commercialization.

    That said, my departmental chairman might not be very comfortable with my career change.  I was hired in the College of Engineering to do research on air quality issues.  Now that I’ve veered away to focus on educational technology and its impact on the large classroom I’m not sure he sees how this fits under the purview of our department.  But, hey, did I mention I have tenure…?

  • jandersen

    Perry…We did the same (technology use).  We lost BB due to cost (paid for by grant for 5 years) and our department found Moodle and for 2 years created and delivered online and blended courses for our students.  As other faculty became interested and wanted in, the administration cam on board.  Since then we have been making progress.  It was a high concern when we offered first summer school online courses to the administration.  It was highly received by the students and faculty, so progress continues. 
    We are a small liberal arts college and I have experienced as much closeness to the student if not more utilizing this technology to enhance my offerings. 

    From Non-Tenured (17 year) faculty member.

  • pippi

    At this community college, the biggest issue is student access to technology. I surveyed my spring class of freshmen and only 4 had access to smart phones, for example. Many of our students are returning adults who are unemployed or underemployed and have not invested in personal technologies. Of course, we can offer good software in the computer labs, but we can’t always expect that students have access at home. I’m really interested in Second Life, but we can’t assume that our students would have computers able to access that environment.

    We do have to recommend minimum standards for technology to take online courses, and then we can incorporate web-based technologies in those, but we can’t really assign projects that require mobile technologies. I think access will become increasingly available to under-served communities, but it may take a while in this economy.

  • mathgirl

    How would an online classroom open for discussions after class and office hours cause distance between teacher-student collaboration?

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