Technology: Putting the Pieces Together, Implementing Campus Technology Support Strategies
11/17/97 videoconference, Kirkwood Community College
http://www.kirkwood.cc.ia.us/futuretracks/
videotape and handouts available from MCLI (731-8300)

Review
by Alan Levine

This second in the series of video conferences (see the review of the November 17 videoconference) was geared to ideas for implementing specific strategies once campus plans were developed. It featured panelists from Kirkwood Community College, Dallas County Community College District, and Houston Community Colleges.

While the presenters showed some interested examples of what they are doing with technology, I did not see whole lot about how their institutional plans were clearly tied to and driven by student learning, nor how these plans were developed and implemented into the future. Most of it was focusses on software training and devlopment for faculty or efforts in promoting distance learning.

Kirkwood has an initiative called "ETA 2000", started in 1995, with a goal of "mainstreaming technology into the classroom" by the year 2000. The handouts include the presenters slides and other supporting documentation. They discovered that they needed much more faculty/staff training then they initially thought. They also found that 4 hours was too long for workshops, so they have been pared down to 2 hours. In response, they created a program of "Faculty Institutes", a week-long program, where faculty spend the morning getting trained in computer hardware/software, and spend they afternoon working with support staff on a project in their own discipline.

They do not have enough staff for office-visit support to faculty so they have developed their own in-house training.

They repsented their process for handling technical problem calls; they log all requests and their yearly report shows statistics on the amount and nature of support being sought. (See their handout on the Help Desk Work Flow) Their response time to any porblem is within 2 hours and have set up a priority system so that faculty in tech-equipped classrooms get the fastest response.

Houston Community College has undergone major shifts in emphasis in technology support. In ther past, they focused on supproting faculty development of commercial quality CD-ROM multimedia, producing 32 titles on impressive content. (Showed they example of "Faces of AIDS"). They have transformed their efforts more into faculty support/training with an emphasis now on web development.

They had indetified a gap ibetween needs and services, so they created a steering team with faculty reps from each of their colleges. Their efforts included:

1. doing an exhaustive inventory of existing technology and resources
2. creating a 5 year action plan "("3 year is much more realistic")
3. defining support a space + software + hardware
4. recommending a fully-funded position as "Instructional Technology Developer" at each college
5. recommending creation of a Teaching and Learning Center at every college.
6. creation of a "Faculty Fellow" program for support of key faculty members interested in learning specific technologies

** Houston is somewhat similar to Maricopa in the sense of dealing with centralized versus college issues.

Dallas Community College has long been involved with telecourses and now offers 19 courses via the web, and students can now earn an AA completely via distance learning format. You can learn more by visiting their web site at the LeCroy Center: (http://ollie.dcccd.edu/).

They consider "tech support" as "customer support", and provide faculty access to lists of Frequently Asked Questions. Every tech support request they recieve (by phone, email, or web) is logged into a database (using a web front end), so that they can track and generate a Problem Report. They promise a 2 hour response time to a request (in the hours of 8:00 AM - 8:00 PM)