Keith Newhouse:

Along with being a graduate student in educational technology, I work as a graduate assistant in the College of Education at the University of Florida. Although Distance Education is probably not the “buzz word” in my job, I can see some real benefits to online learning in my Instructional Technology department.
In the Instructional Technology department I have two coworkers who deal mostly with programming the College of Education website, while my duties mostly concentrate on helping professors use technology to support their classes and research. My coworkers already play a large part in Distance Education as some of their programming skill is used to improve the College of Education’s Distance Education classes. Up until now however, my job has had very little to do with online learning. Through this course, I hope to change that.
My work with professors can range from creating DVDs to teaching them how to use computer voice transcription software. While a lot of the requests are specific to the professor, there are some requests that I feel like I’ve answered for every professor in the college and I’ve definitely answered for the same professors hundreds of times. Right now I am answering many of these on an individual basis, but since starting my job I’ve been trying to work on getting a few workshops where professors could be taught at the same time.
This idea was met with mixed reactions. Although I have had a few professors interested in workshops on various topics, the majority have said that they don’t have the time or desire to take extra time to learn about technology. Maybe if professors had these tutorials online either as separate tutorials or part of a Distance Education course, they might be more interested.
Of course putting an entire course of tutorials online without even knowing if there would be any interest is a risky and possibly useless task. So for the purpose of this assignment I want to narrow this down to one tutorial to test the waters and see if there is any interest to professors.
The request that I get most often is to assist professors in setting up Macromedia Dreamweaver to work with the school’s web server and teach professors how to use it to create personal websites and sites for their departments. So far this has just meant doing the setup work for them, and then giving a face to face tutorial that I created while teaching four face to face sections of EME4406 Integrating Technology into the Secondary Classroom. I needed an easy way to teach basic Dreamweaver concepts while having the students create something they could actually use at the same time. Through my lesson, the students created their first Professional Web Presence.
One issue that my department has faced is that professors expect my department to just do their technology work for them either because they are too busy or are scared of it or just don’t want to deal with it, which is not what we are there for. My department’s mission is to work very similar to a corporate training office, we are there to help professors with their professional development in technology and help them get comfortable with technology so that they can accomplish their goals themselves. While we don’t really stick to our mission as most of our requests involve performing duties for professors, whenever we can we try to teach as well as do. If a professor asks us to edit a video for them, we try to get them to learn how to do it themselves either before or while we do it so that next time they can do it on their own. Although I won’t know until I’ve tried, I think putting the Dreamweaver tutorial online will give a better idea of our mission to teach compared to the perception that we should be doing all jobs related to technology for them.
As most of the professors’ main reason for not wanting to learn about Dreamweaver is that they don’t have enough time, putting the tutorial online should allow them the time because they can do it whenever they want, wherever they want. If they can set aside a few minutes every day, they’ll be using Dreamweaver in no time. Even after they’ve completed the tutorial, having it online lets it act as a reference so they can return and get help anytime they want.
Besides the fact that it’s cost effective for my department freeing me up for more important tasks, having an online version of the tutorial is beneficial to the busy professors because they can complete it on their own time, and as it’s always available they can later return to it as a reference.
An online tutorial would be extremely cost effective as well allowing me to perform other duties in my department. In 2009 the college will be scrutinized by the National Council for Accreditation of Teachers Association, making sure that everything at the college is being run according to standards. One of my priority jobs at the moment is creating a website showing how we are meeting or exceeding the standards and cleaning up the College of Education website to help get it up to standards. Giving teachers and online tutorial would free up more of my time for the Accreditation website that would normally be spent holding professors’ hands through the Dreamweaver process. This week alone I’ve given the tutorial to two professors which if online I probably would have been able to spend at least an hour or two more working on the website.
Right now Instructional Technology has no website for itself and currently serves just the University of Florida College of Education. Creating a Distance Education program in my department could help us expand to create friends and partners in other schools Instructional Technology departments allowing us to get a better idea of what is involved in Instructional Technology in other parts of the country and even other parts of the world.
Although the College of Education has an excellent Distance Education program run by some very dedicated and creative people with some help from my coworkers, our Instructional Technology department’s Distance Education is practically non-existant. The closest thing we have at the moment is a couple of “Knowledge Books” that are accessed through the Help Desk, and are only available to students and teachers in the College of Education. Although the Knowledge Books that we have created are useful and on some good topics like setting up and checking the college email, and how to use the survey program the college purchased for our use, there are very few of them, and they are not advertised at unless we receive a request for them.
Using Distance Education in Instructional Technology, I think we can connect more with professors by helping them get more comfortable with technology and making them want to explore and use more. Right now many of them are afraid to use iMovie, but with a little encouragement and by teaching them how to explore new software, we could have faculty pumping out Final Cut Pro videos, or creating full fledged websites, or even wanting to learn how to create their own programs if we created an online Programming Guide.
I would be very curious to see if we could develop relationships with other colleges as well. There are all sorts of conferences around the country dealing with educational technology for students and K-12 faculty, but I’ve never heard of any conferences for how to teach higher education faculty to use technology. We could have a whole new area of research.
Even in the National Staff Development Council website, compared to K-12, there is very little about higher education faculty, who are very different to work with from K-12 teachers. I think there is a need for either a brand new council or a division of the NSDC specifically for professors based on some of the NSDC ideals. Sections of the NSDC site can be used but need to be rewritten for professors.