Staff Message

Greetings to all of you at the beginning of the spring semester! We hope that you had a wonderful winter break and look forward to an exciting new semester ahead. It has been a busy couple of months for the Center for Teaching Excellence and Learning Technologies (CTELT), and we are eager to share with you some highlight of our activities in the previous semester.

CTELT faced new challenges last semester, starting with the transition of new staff members and then Blackboard problems which were resolved with great support from the Virtual College and the Computing and Telecommunication Center. We had four new staff members: the Front Office Manager, the Technology Support Specialist, the Integrated Learning Technologies Specialist, and the Faculty Development Coordinator. All of them positioned themselves well in a timely manner, and helped us have another successful semester. Kudos to Shanna, Bo, Matt, and Jake for their good work in CTELT.

A major enhancement to CTELT services was the campus-wide implementation of Respondus and LockDown Browser. As an effective tool to create online tests offline and a tool to prevent online cheating, Respondus and LockDown Browser were purchased and made available to the FHSU community after a successful pilot in summer 2007. DyKnow was also upgraded to version 5.0 with many new features. CTELT technology support staff members have been busy providing training and support for these new tools.

Another important project on the off-campus course development is the Virtual College Course Development Resource Manual, which we created in collaboration with the Provost’s Council and the Virtual College. As an academic support unit, CTELT is a continuing champion for quality assurance in course development. Although we are not a policymaking administrative unit, we want to provide all faculty course developers with more support. With that end in mind, we have put some basic course development resources online for both on-campus and off-campus faculty. This online resource is available at http://webbasedinstruction.googlepages.com/index

One more project we have just launched is the standardization of Blackboard course shells for effective data management on the server side. With the rapid growth of online programs, the increasing number of blended courses, and the shrinking server space of the Blackboard course management system, CTELT has found a great and urgent need to standardize the format of creating course IDs and cleaning the course database. After approval by the Provost’s Council and communication with the Deans, the Chairs, and the faculty, our Blackboard support staff has started the process. We want to thank you in advance for your cooperation and support during this time-consuming process.

Finally, CTELT conducted focus groups and administered a needs assessment survey among the faculty last semester. The valuable feedback from the three focus groups and the campus-wide survey will help us shape, plan, and enhance the faculty development programs in the future.

We are excited to see more faculty members attending our workshops and other faculty development activities. In particular, more faculty members and departments are utilizing the teaching excellence component in CTELT services, which is headed by Dr. Robert Luehrs, our Teaching Excellence Coordinator. Dr. Luehrs has been busy providing individual consultations, conducting classroom observations, and paying visits to individual faculty members. We are impressed with faculty dedication to excellence in teaching and learning. Please watch for the upcoming workshops and other activities during the spring 2008 semester. We hope you will plan on being a part of them.