Virtually Anywhere

Sharing Effective Practices for Innovation in Liberal Education

Nancy Millichap and Rebecca DavisNational Institute for Technology in Liberal

Education (NITLE)

NITLE

• An initiative working with 128 liberal arts colleges and universities, as well as with partner organizations and consortia

• Helping liberal arts colleges explore and implement digital technologies

• Concerned with the integration of technology into teaching and learning

NITLE Network

Plan for This Session …

In a discussion of videoconferences that faculty have used to share their teaching innovations …

• We’ll show two clips from a session• We’ll share their impact as faculty

development• We’ll invite discussion of such

sharing on your campuses• We’ll pull you back together for a

final discussion

The Problem? A Vicious Circle …

One Solution: Sharing Classroom Innovations Digitally• At NITLE colleges, faculty lead short

interactive videoconferences over the Internet on their pedagogical practices

• Brief (60 to 90 minute) presentations reach faculty in their offices

• 22 such programs over past 2 academic years, in several series

Experience a Virtual Event

• Highlights, Notes, Tags, & Comments: Teaching Critical Reading of the Internet with Diigo

• Social Bookmarking & Website Annotation

• Gabriela Torres, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Wheaton College

Why Faculty Lead

• Gain recognition, exposure for pedagogical innovation without expense, time commitment of conference attendance

• Discuss innovations with interested peers (campus colleagues may not share the specific interest)

• Develop connections with other early adopters – eventual goal is to forward inter-institutional collaboration

Why Participants Take Part• Opportunity to gain fresh ideas

without leaving campus• Opportunity to engage in discussion

with peers from other campuses who share an interest in the innovation/technology being considered

• Easy to fit into busy professional life

Professional Development Preferences

Evaluations of these programs, recent surveys of faculty, observations by academic support staff suggest that

• faculty today care about specific affordances of technology, not technology in general

• faculty learn most readily from other faculty

Response to these programs• Topics are rated highly

– Mean, 4.38; median, 5

• Time is the scarcest resource: faculty want immediately useful information directly available to them

Representative Topics

• Teaching with Blogs• History Engine: Tools for Promoting

Collaborative Education and Research among Students

• Imagining the Unseeable: Molecular Visualization with UCSF Chimera

• Technology and Less Commonly Taught Languages

• Digital Identities: Maintenance, Boundaries and Ethics for Students and Faculty

Responses to Technology

• Ease of use of technology– Mean, median responses were both 4 of

possible 5• Likelihood of attending future

videoconference programsNo Yes

Maybe

MIV Sessions as Campus Resources• Are webcams scary? Not so much …• Some groups participate as

faculty/campus “brown bags”• Recordings, whiteboards available

after the program for review, sharing

Discussion: Sharing Innovation

• Innovative Practices on your campus• Small groups of 4-6 each• Take 10-15 minutes to discuss your

question• Share results with the full group

Questions, follow-up?

• NITLE – www.nitle.org

• Nancy Millichap – nancy.millichap@nitle.org

• Rebecca Frost Davis – rebecca.davis@nitle.org