Phase 1 Report of College Instructional Technology Study

In Fall 2012, the Instructional Technology and Design (ITD) team from the Academic Technology Department at North Shore Community College initiated a campus-wide project to investigate the uses and needs of faculty as it relates to instructional technology at the college.  The public document of this project can be found at this link http://goo.gl/mUZ7u.  After a year of successful discussion and work, we are proud to announce our findings on Phase 1 of this project.  We had the benefit of hearing from more than 75% of the academic departments.  This has been a very successful experience and we are greatly appreciative of all the feedback from faculty and administration.  Before moving into Phase 2 of the project, we wanted to reach out to the community to share our findings and, even more important, some of the actions and plans we will be implementing based on faculty input.  The Report on Phase 1 can be found here at this link http://goo.gl/B6gsYR.

This report captures the findings of the first phase of a two year study of instructional technology use at North Shore Community College, conducted by the ITD team.  Over the 2012-2013 academic year, the team met with and discussed instructional technology with representatives from 35 academic departments.  These meetings were largely focused on gathering information about faculty's use, challenges, and concerns around instructional technology.

The overall positive findings of the project revealed that a significant majority of the faculty are using a wide array of instructional technology with their courses including regular use of our learning management system, ANGEL, and the suite of Google tools.  It was also clear that faculty  utilized and appreciated the support regularly provided by ITD.  Faculty also showed significant interest in pursuing additional instructional technologies such as publisher and other third party eContent, library-supported digital resources, social media, Web 2.0 tools, ePortfolio, and web conferencing platforms.

The challenges encountered by faculty fell into three main areas: clarity around the roles of  Information Systems (IS) and Academic Technology (AT), technical issues within the classrooms, and faculty/student interactive technology challenges.  Given these concerns, this report identifies the different actions that AT will pursue in the next year. These actions include the following:

• Pursue a two-tiered approach to address and improve student preparedness for online learning.
• Investigate and choose a survey that accurately assesses online preparedness
• Develop an Online Learning orientation course to address the most common gaps in preparedness.
• Develop a Mobile Guide for faculty and students to increase awareness of what is available and useful, and to assist in troubleshooting mobile usage within the college.
• Establish the Learning Environment Modeling Lab (DB234) where faculty can try out new methodologies and technologies before deploying them in the classroom. This is an initiative of the Classroom Architecture Group comprised of key Academic Technology staff from ITD and Instructional Media Services (IMS). This initiative will work in conjunction with the newly established Education Technology Innovations Group.
• Develop an Open Educational Resources Guide in partnership with the Library and the Education Technology Innovation Group.
• Promote and integrate the recently acquired college-subscription to Atomic Learning which provides instructional videos on technology with over 50,000 tutorials of 1-5 minute walk-through videos.

To check out the various materials we have been using for this project, visit this Google Folder at this link http://goo.gl/5jBP15.