Minutes from Instructional Technology Meeting

Instructional Technology Committee




Meeting October 27, 2010 3:00 p.m.



Attendees: Giorgi Shonia, Christine Wolfe, Kellie Demmler, Da Zhang, Deb Smith

Unable to Attend: Alan Middleton



The meeting was called to order by Deb Smith as Chair of 2009-2010 academic year.



Christine Wolfe nominated Deb Smith as Chair for the 2010-11. Seconded by Giorgi Shonia. Vote was unanimous in favor.



A discussion ensued among the members regarding major goals for this upcoming year.



The following were listed:

1. Need for information from IT

a. What is the refresh cycle?

b. What is the standard image for faculty and classroom technology?

c. Update of information on the P drive needed

d. Mac users can’t access the common drives

e. Need of a knowledge base of common solutions for problems with hardware and software

f. Policies of classroom technology – refresh, image, etc.

g. Software and hardware inventory on this campus

i. Smartboards, slates, Maple licenses, clickers and licenses, etc.

h. Check out procedure for technology

i. Clickers, smartboards, smartboard tablets, microphones, web cams, etc.

i. The committee discussed the need for a webpage with the possibility of online checkout of items as a way to increase use of software and hardware.

2. Training

a. Faculty training – Bb, clickers, SmartBoard, pedagogy

i. Methods, timing, sustainability

b. Student training

i. Methods, timing, sustainability

c. Best practices of use of classroom technology

i. Faculty recognition

ii. Web page with demonstration projects

3. Printing –

a. Identified as a faculty concern last year

b. How much is free for students?

4. Adjunct faculty

a. IDs don’t work in adjunct faculty rooms

b. Hardware in adjunct faculty rooms boots very slowly



The following information was shared:

1. Bb9.1 is scheduled for release as early as Winter quarter

a. New training may be required



After discussion, it was decided that the committee would review the list above and prioritize the problems for future discussion and to address with administration.



The committee stated that a report at every faculty meeting would be helpful in raising awareness and getting input from faculty.



The committee briefly discussed performing another survey of faculty.



Meeting was adjourned.



Respectfully submitted



Deb Smith

Academic Year 10-11 Committee Input Technology and Distance Learning Committee

Hello everyone,

After today's faculty meeting, Alan and I thought it might be helpful for all of you to take a look at the committee charge that was approved last year when the committee was formed.

First, let me say that the official name of the committee last year was Technology and Distance Learning Committee instead of Instructional Technology as is listed on the hand out we received today.



The charge that was adopted last year and approved by the dean was:



The Technology and Distance Learning Committee recognizes the importance of technology in the educational arena and endeavors to consider, evaluate, recommend and promote best practices in instructional technology, classroom technology and other technical assets that serve the mission of the faculty and students at Ohio University Lancaster.



In addition, we created a blog for the committee last year that we used to communicate.

The link to the blog is: http://techanddlcommittee.blogspot.com/



We posted meeting minutes and information on the blog.





If the charge is agreeable to everyone, we still need to decide the following:



1. Chair for this year

2. Rotation of members





I will post this email on the blog. Please comment on your willingness to be chair and your ideas on term limits/rotation of members on the committee.



For now, I will be glad to monitor the blog and report our agreement on the Committee form to Janet before Oct 27.



Thanks

Deb

MapleTA

Few notes from MapleTA March 25th presentation.

Platform is the most spectacular, way ahead then any other alternative (WebAssign, WileyPlus). In math content creation it is ahead of competitors probably by few degrees.

Platform has all the usual online homework features. Content organization, navigation, reporting is equivalent to other competitors (Blackboard integration available as well). What makes MapleTA to stand out is content creation. Platform allows to create content all the way from click and drag user friendly high level interface down to raw coding and tweaking geeky levels. A very rich usage of variables, images as variables, access to maple engine core (with spectacular 3D graphing, all the calculating power, symbolic math) are all there. Platform can interface with adobe flash, one can create visual problems (way richer then publisher compiled WebAssign can offer). In one word, it is state of art of online math assignments.

The price for platform is $200 installation + $16 pa per student (hosted by MapleTA). Interestingly this is half price of WebAssign access that we are currently asking students to pay for. Beyond the pilot further discounted pricing schemes are available (especially if hosted by the university). It has many of the same features we are seeking in TutorTracks. The practice problems will be available to OUL students, will be reusable and can be incorporated in the KB database much the same way as other sources could be. It doesn't have to be TutorTracks project, but probably worth mentioning. Athens math department is one possible partner to get engaged in this project.

OLN update

I thought to post OLN online tutoring options that Karen Boyd explained during today's teleconference.

Ohio State subsidy expires July 2011, it subsidizes price of SmartThinking tutoring from $29 to $21 per hour and there are only ~500 minutes left. There is a good chance those will be gone too in couple of moths. SmartThinking is currently used in Athens, contact person for it is Pam Brown @ OU.

Another option with OLN is their inHouse eTutoring platform, which is relatively new (started this January). Essentially this is a collaborative scheme, where all participants provide 5hours/week tutor time (those could be our on-campus existing student tutors, payed by us) and get 100 sessions/quarter for it (more can be purchased if needed). There is also a fixed annual fee of $2'500. They use AdobeConnect interface and sessions are manually saved (and can be databased and linked) at a hosting providers (Connecticut) servers.

Not all subjects have tutors available at 24/7. We discussed if beyond participating in collaborative we could use their platform to have our existing on-campus tutors operate online channel as well, during daytime (instead of doing that in BlackBoard or elsewhere). Answer at this point is unclear, we'll be following this up with hosting provider's contact.

eTutoring doesn't enforce "one student per one tutor at a time" policy, but they allow group sessions.

OLN is part of OSU, but reports directly to reagents and often act as a state education agency.

Advisory counsil of participating institutions is scheduled to meet May 10, where we will be invited too (even though not participating. ).

eTutoring is undoubtedly cheaper then commercial alternatives (by degree). But this comes at a price of somewhat sparser schedule (not all subjects covered 24/7) and somewhat poorer interface (at least for the moment, when project is just starting). We discussed the pilot nature of our interest and they are encouraging our approach to consider multiple providers while exploring habit formation on OUL campus. Their collaborative scheme has a chance to fit well with what we envisaged as "Basic Tier" of our online tutoring, the one based on inHouse resources.

I will also follow up this report with some institutional specific information over the email.