Melissa McDowell & Danielle Mirliss

Concurrent Track : ePirate: Using Web2.0 Tools to Capture Faculty Interest
Session I, Thursday 10:30am - 11:30am

Biography

Melissa McDowell is a Senior Instructional Designer in charge of supporting the TLT Center’s faculty development programming. She has 10 years of experience supporting the use of instructional technology in both the k-12 and higher education fields. She holds a masters degree in Technology in Education from Harvard University. She is a highly creative individual and is interested in developing innovative learning opportunities for faculty.

Danielle Mirliss is the Associate Director for Instructional Design and Training at the TLT Center. She has 7 years of experience supporting teaching and learning in higher education. She hold a masters degree in Instructional Technology and Media from Columbia University and is a doctoral student in the same program. She is interested in emerging technologies and their role in building communities of practice.

Abstract

During this session we will discuss the faculty outreach efforts of Seton Hall's Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center. To increase our support to faculty we have implemented a marketing campaign to advertise the resources available for faculty, engage the SHU community in innovative projects, and promote faculty development training. Our successful efforts include creating a brand called the ePirate, constructing a blog and electronic newsletter, creating Moo cards and using Facebook to push out information related to teaching and learning to the SHU Community. All of these elements have helped to promote the TLT Center to both faculty and students.

This presentation will cover the TLT Center’s effort to broaden our support to faculty, promote the TLT Center among the Campus community and increase attendance to faculty development events through various marketing strategies. The TLT Center has offered computer training and faculty development workshops since its inception. Over the years various efforts have been employed to attract faculty to these opportunities with varying success. In addition, as we near the end of the Microsoft Office 2003 lifecycle, attendance has declined for application specific training sessions. In order to breath “new life” into all of our outreach efforts, the TLT Center set out to explore innovative course offerings as well as the potential of Web 2.0 tools to reengage the community.

The computer training curriculum was revamped in Fall 2007 with courses focusing on Google tools (Earth, SketchUp, Calendar, Docs and Picasa), Multimedia (Photoshop and Premier Elements), and Web 2.0 applications (Moveable Type Blogs and Pod/Vod Casts). The Fall 2007 semester also kicked off our faculty Boot Camp series in which faculty attended various sessions that included a pedagogical focus as well as epoint and click. Faculty were rewarded for their participation in 6 or more sessions with a color printer. Finally, the TLT Center has been experimenting with hands-on full day workshops in which faculty engage in a technological supported student-centered project that they can then integrate into their curriculum. Along with a new approach to offering training and development opportunities comes a new approach to marketing. In order to get out the message, the TLT Center started a new blog, called the ePirate that supports the SHU Community with information related to teaching and learning with technology and includes posts about various events. The blog is advertised in all of the TLT Center staff email signatures, through various flyers and posters, and a Facebook fan page. The blog serves as the foundation for our electronic newsletter that is published once a semester. The electronic newsletter is actually constructed from various blog postings, the first few lines of the story appear in the newsletter and in order to read the full post, users are redirected to the blog. This has been extremely effective in driving traffic to the ePirate.

We are continually exploring additional ways to engage faculty in training and professional development opportunities that they see as valuable and that support their academic pursuits. We are also investigating the potential of additional web 2.0 tools to spread the word about the services of our Center. We will share both the anecdotal evidence and quantitative analysis comparing the 06-07 academic year and the 07-08 academic year to show the increase of the TLT Center’s presence on campus and the increase in faculty development attendance. We will also share statistics from the ePirate blog, obtained from Google Analytics, and share strategies for increasing community traffic to this site. Supporting faculty in teaching and learning is a priority at all institutions of higher education. Faculty are usually burdened with teaching multiple course sections each semester, serving on various committees and working on research projects, leaving little time for faculty development. What we have learned at Seton Hall is that if you provide training opportunities that support what faculty need and provide an accommodating schedule, they will take advantage of the opportunity. In addition, free and easy to use Web 2.0 tools support marketing efforts for these opportunities as well as expose faculty to tools that can also be used in teaching and learning (i.e., blogs and Facebook).