Background


Five Colleges, Incorporated received a planning grant of $50,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop, test and evaluate a model for training faculty, staff and students in the uses of interactive video classrooms. The training is a key project being undertaken by the five colleges at the behest of the board of directors to explore how residential and liberal arts institutions might use technology to enhance teaching, learning and the creation of new knowledge.

In preparation for developing the training model, we have informally surveyed many institutions of higher education that use videoconferencing for teaching and found that most, especially the smaller liberal arts institutions, are not satisfied with their training program for faculty, staff and students. After an initial opening event or online demonstration, most videoconferencing training is done on a ad-hoc basis that usually consists of a technical staff member showing a faculty member how to push buttons on the equipment. There is often little follow-up after a faculty member has used the facility. In addition, institutions have had difficulty finding faculty willing to try piloting projects in such facilities and have found that interest levels wane once the novelty of the new technology wears off.

We have also learned from these institutions that faculty like to hear from other faculty about their experiences. In addition to brief button-pushing training, faculty want to explore issues of pedagogy, such as:

  • How they might incorporate interactive video into their style or philosophy of teaching

  • How to use the technology to help students meet established goals for learning

  • How to select which technologies and what pedagogies truly add value to the material they want to present and the kind of inquiry they want to lead

  • How to design a technologically-mediated course that reflects the needs of a diversity of learners; and

  • What is the impact of technology

Campuses that have had the most success provide feedback to their faculty as well as getting feedback from them. They tend to pair faculty up with technical help and instructional design staff. And they provide a forum for faculty to explore issues of pedagogy both before, and after the instructional experiments.

The Training Model

Our new training model will draw on the experiences of the colleges and universities that have gone before us, while addressing unmet needs and customizing it, in its pilot iteration for the Five College context. The centerpiece of this model will be three-day summer workshop for faculty, staff and students. Designed to provide enough time to explore various aspects of teaching in interactive video classrooms, the workshop also allows time to form work teams who will be trained together and serve as resources to each other after the summer session. Follow-up seminars and forums for the participants will help them share valuable experiences and lessons with each other as they develop their projects in the following academic year. With the hope of widening the field of interested faculty and recruiting new faculty for future trainings we will disseminate information on the possibilities availed by the new classrooms.

Goals of the Training

  1. Facilitate the use of interactive video classrooms in teaching. The training will introduce faculty, staff and students to the uses of interactive video for teaching and learning. These faculty members then will develop courses and learning experiences that utilize the classrooms.

  2. Build networks and encourage collaboration. We will use a team approach to help create long-term working relationships and collaborations between faculty, staff and students with benefits to all.

  3. Create a successful training model that can be shared. We will evaluate the training program in order to refine and improve it, then share the model and our experiences with interested colleges and universities. Our participants will stay in contact with each other after the initial training through a listserve, web site and in two follow-up seminars. This will provide a rich forum for supporting faculty as they embark on using this new technology and a way for Five Colleges to evaluate the model we have chosen for this training. We will work with leaders of the Mellon Centers for Educational Technology so that our model can be integrated into their efforts and be useful to other colleges and universities.