2009 Day 2 11:00 - 12:00 Discussion: Engaging faculty in higher level use of LMS’s (lead by Linda Murphy-Boyer and Aldo Caputo)

From OUCEL Wiki

• EDUCASE published an article on TL challenges 09

Question # 1: What is experience and culture of your institutions? Do your instructors use technology effectively? How to engage faculty to use tools that are more advanced?

• Richard Pinet: For power users LMS is not enough; at Ottawa U his team touch a fraction of faculty; they are trying to come up with strategies to encourage faculty to come to the Centre

Teaching with technology day – it seems successful strategy

• Aldo Caputo: The Distance education program at Waterloo is a positive force that contributes to adoption of technology because courses are completely online
• Patrick Lyons: One reason why many instructors are not the 'advanced' users is we and instructors should consider different teaching strategies and approaches.
• Cheryl Dickie: if instructors use LMs mainly to post course material, it does not always mean that they are poor users; maybe they this way can use class time for more face-to-face interaction with students; in a true blended environment you can move everything online and use class time for more interesting issues
• Linda Murphy-Boyer: At the U of Toronto there is a problem because instructors come to introductory workshops, but they do not come or express interest in using advanced tools. How to encourage them?
• There are a few possibilities:

a) approach for a particular instructor

b) explain instructors that this will save time and effort

c) once you start a dialogue – it provides an opportunity for other questions

• Karen Maki: Faculty have invested a large amount of time in PowerPoint and now they only place slides inside LMS
• Brian Campbell: Every time when something new comes, the underlying issue is that professors see themselves as content specialists and this is difficult to change
• Changes cannot be quick
• You need to have a dialogue about what education is
• Faculty members also do not want to waste their time on new tools
• Jeanne Drouillard: At the U of Windsor they moved to Sakai; the group is growing; IT steering committee posted a capture of good courses at LMS site
• Giulia Forsythe: At Brock teaching is not rewarded enough; most innovative people – intersection between teaching and research
• Technology needs to be easy to use and it has to be beneficial
• Wendy Hardman: we need to be realistic and look into different approaches for different type of users