LTAC Summit - Afternoon

Craig Bartholomew, general manager of the Education Products Group at Microsoft, welcomed us to the Evil Empire (his words). Example of not being evil - 60% of the MS employees donated over $72 million to charity last year (employee donations matched by company). Gates Foundation's 3-R's: Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships.

Panel Presentation: Establishing Course and Content Quality Standards - Keith Hampson, Bill Evans, and Michael Feldstein.

• Bill Evans, Cal Sate Chico - Data warehousing and analytics have been largely ignored but they are now starting to get more attention. Anecdotes from the CSU & Beyond: 1) Accessible Technology Initiative (ATI): universal design improves courses for all students. 2) Assessing Online Facilitation (AOF): peer evaluation of facilitator skills/process, 3) Exemplary Online Instruction (EOI) Awards: faculty recognition and reward 4) Institute for Teaching and Learning (ITL): support for the highest standards of university teaching excellence, 5) Peer Review of Online Content: peer experts evaluate learning objects, 6) Rubric for Online Instruction (ROI): course design and evaluation guidelines, 7) Transforming Course Design (TCD): sustainability, student success, quality of learning outcomes, cost of instruction, outcomes assessment, sharing of exemplary practices.
  
• Keith Hampson, Ryerson University - we have been hampered by the cottage model of online course development, where the faculty member is responsible for the development of the electronic course content, which leads to an inconsistent student experience, high support costs, limited volume, limited rich media, poor navigation, and no brand. But you also get happy faculty, no management grief from faculty, and less change and fast startup. Academic freedom is often interpreted as occupational autonomy, which are really two different things. He wonders whether content really matters. We don't seem to kill ourselves to ensure that we have great content. However, he also believes that this an area where institutions can get a competitive advantage over others. Students continue to shift to a shopper-style approach to higher ed and we could use great content to convince them that we have better quality than the competition does. We also have to realize that the for-profit institutions pay more attention to content than we do, and we may need to play catch up.
• Michael Feldstein, Oracle Corp and formerly with SUNY system - Here are a few tidbits that particularly got my attention: 1) almost all software is odious; what we put out is not good. That is because it is really hard to do it well, not because we don't care or because we (programmers and designers) are stupid. 2) We don't really see cognitive theory translate itself into teaching theory. 3) How do we know good (high quality) content when we see it?
  

Panel Presentation: Faculty and Staff Training for Application of Learning Technologies - Glenn Trammel, Mark Jenkins, Connie Broughton.

• Glenn Trammel, Delta State University - home of the Fighting Okra (actually the Statesmen, but they prefer the unofficial mascot). Faculty Technology Institute is a five-day training session for new WebCT users. It is facilitated by the Director of Instructional Technology and two faculty instructors. He compared fully-online courses with "fully-static" (traditional classroom) courses. I've never heard the fully-static term before.
  
• Mark Jenkins, Portland State University - PSU uses both WebCT and Sakai. He views online learning as a combination of storytelling, experiential learning, something else, and community building. Online learning is not a strategic objective at PSU, which is a demotivating factor. There is an eternal cycle of early adoption which does not result in any sustainable results. Whatever he does there can't cost anything, since there is no significant funding made available. Co-dependency relationships between faculty and instructional designers are not productive ways to grow capacity for online learning.
  
• Connie Broughton, Washington Online - more than 60,000 students took an online course (05-06). 12,434 FTE system-wide. 34 community and technical colleges. Nine staff members. Supports about 25% of completely online courses in CTC system. Shared search engine, with cascading sections as they fill up. Students get separate transcripts from each college from which they take a course. WAOL Instructor Training class is different from what individual campuses might do. Four-week, completely online course (about 50 hours; where first half they are treated as a student and second half they transition to the faculty role. This training is required for any instructor teaching in WAOL. Over 2,000 faculty have completed the training over the past ten years.
  

Panel Presentation: Higher Education Technology Leadership - Debra Saunders-White, Robert Sapp, Paul Kim

• Paul Kim, Stanford University - Does Academic Technology Competency Make CIO 2.0? Transformations of CIO roles in Higher Ed: CIO 1.0 was concerned with connectivity, legacy systems, email service management, dreaming of ERP, putting out fires. CIO 2.0 era more concerned about productivity, security and identity management, too busy trying to learn new solutions. CIO 3.0 now focuses on accountability, resource visualization, learning outcomes as measurable ROI with rubrics and matrices, too busy convincing faculty senate.
  Parallelism paradox in academic technology R&D - research trends include high tech innovations, working with schools that well-developed technology infrastructure, ICT research follows the innovations not vice-versa.
  Creating new traditions
  
• Robert Sapp, University of Maryland University College: Expecting Growth and Growing Expectations. Their growth is phenomenal, with over 10,000 additional new students each of the past two fall terms, as well as new programs and services. Over 90,000 students worldwide, only 45,000 in U.S. 44% are minorities. median age = 32. 179,000 online enrollments in '06-07. Rise of the CIO as an executive: 1) member of president's cabinet, 2) increasingly a partner in senior decision making and determining institutional policy, 3) more of a service partner than service provider, 4) required participation in strategic activities such as planning, budgeting, policy development, etc., 5) form and manage external strategic partnerships and alliances.
  
• Victor Wong, University of Michigan - Leading up to Innovations: a Case for Off-line Leadership. Cross-cutting innovations - they cut across core missions, core organizations (silos), disciplines, even technologies. Basic organization principle: place authority where responsibility resides.
  

Planning for Emerging Technologies - Bill Corrigan, U. Washington: Integrating iTunes U because students come to the institution already having the equipment and knowledge to use the technology. Outsourcing email: trying to decide between two large vendors (Google and Microsoft?) and manage the problems that come with this - sharing info with a third party, advertisements. Service Oriented Architecture - what things do we need to provide online and do we need a governance process around that. Testing services with Google Calendar. Collaborative applications including social networking (need to do a lot of listening) and virtual worlds (Croquet, SL). Web services for researchers (compute cloud, for example Amazon). A new formula for customer engagement - Bob Greenburg.

Paul Kim, Stanford University - Pocket School: $16 mp3/mp4 player for developing countries. Putting language learning on a small device for poor people (children) in developing countries. In Ecuador, 18% benefit from full-time education, but only 1% of the indigenous population. mLearning - truly nomadic learning. This was excellent - good luck with this project!!