Wednesday, December 12, 2001

LOGGING IN WITH . . . Sarah E. Cheverton At James Madison U., 'House Calls' Help Professors With Technology for Online Courses By DAN CARNEVALE Sarah E. Cheverton, manager of faculty-development services at James Madison University, helps run an extensive faculty-support system for the university's distance-education program. Among other services, her department offers a series of workshops and "instructional house calls" in which faculty members are taught to use various tools and computer programs. The university uses a course-management system from Blackboard that allows instructors to add a range of online components to their courses. Q. How do the workshops and tutorials work? A. We offer a complete Blackboard course, which is a total of five hours split up across a couple of days. They pretty much get the full gamut of Blackboard tools that are available. It's very hands-on. We enroll them as students in a Blackboard course so they can see things from the student's perspective. Then we give them a practice course where they're instructors so they can go in and do what we've just done as students. That seems to work pretty well. We also have training on how to use electronic library resources -- how to make connections to journals that are online in databases so that they can pull those into Blackboard and try to get away from scanning and that type of thing. Q. What is an instructional house call? A. A faculty member calls us and wants us to come over to their office and sit down with them as they are applying the tools to their real instruction. We can help them out. They can come here, too, to our center, if that's more convenient for them. But most of the time they like us to come there. So we go out all over campus and sit down with folks and just help them to do with whatever they're trying to do. Q. The support system is considered "multilevel." What does that mean? A. It means that when we think about support, we think about it from an infrastructure perspective as well as a direct customer-service perspective. So that we make sure ... that we have backups for servers that go down -- we have those types of things in place. We make sure all the tech folks are working together to make sure the system works, that departments that need to be collaborating are collaborating, that department heads are aware of what's going on, and we try to draw them into decision making. But it's also very important to make sure that we provide good customer service on the direct levels. So that if a person calls, we give them what they need. We try to go beyond what's expected to help them out. Q. Why put so much emphasis on faculty support? A. Because I think there are a lot of faculty who want to use the technology but may not feel comfortable knowing how to use the technology. There are some faculty who don't want to use the technology but are being forced to. And having assistance available to them is a comfort. I think it has actually made converts of some people. ... I really have seen some people move from being very resistant to being champions of using some of the technology. Q. Any specific issues that faculty members need help with the most? A. A lot of it has been more on the technical side: How do I get in? How do I create these documents? But now we're finding more questions about, OK, so now I know how to push these buttons, how can I make this really work effectively for my students? How can I go beyond trying to transfer my classroom experience or my classroom approach to something that's more meaningful and more interesting? Q. Any points you think are important for other institutions that may be expanding their faculty-support systems? A. One of the things that we stress is that multidimensional approach and really paying attention to the politics in your university, paying attention to the very specific day-to-day needs that faculty will have, paying attention to the infrastructure, and communicating with all the people involved. Really anticipating who needs to be in this group and who needs to hear what's going on, what kind of effective communication methods can we use. We do try a number of things. We have a Web site for our distributed- and distance-learning services. We have a Web site for instructional technology. We are creating one for specifically for Blackboard. We try to get announcements out. We have announcements available on all the sites. We do send out e-mails on occasion for any really important changes in software, hardware, or other types of things. And we just try ... to let people know that we're here and available. I feel like that does make a difference in how that technology is accepted. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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