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    • When the Tide Turns . . . Are We Ready?
      Blog Post posted May 13 by Sam McCool
      319 Views, 2 Comments
      Title:
      When the Tide Turns . . . Are We Ready?
      Main post:

      I don't know about you, but I'm seeing a shift . . . slow maybe at first but growing fast: Faculty at Nevada State College are increasingly depending on WebCampus (aka Blackboard Vista) to manage advising, content, communication, assessments, and grade books.There's talk of gearing up the Community Systems module to support the VP of Student Experience's retention initiative.

      And the result? I'm swamped. Last night, I put my home-office workstation to sleep at 11 and woke it up again at 4 a.m. this morning. It didn't complain, even appeared happy to see me. The tide has turned - more and more faculty want WebCampus services, want support, and integrated resources - Wimba, Smarthinking, StudyMate, online testing, streaming media . . . and are we ready? Are there enough hands and minds available?

      There's only two of us here - Tonya Buchan and me. What once looked like a small Atlantic Ocean wave on a lazy South Carolina beach now looks like . . . is that a tidal wave I see in the distance? Or, is it . . a tsunami?

      I know I'm not the only one. Kathy Saville writes as she passes back the notes she vetted from last week that she's now sleeping with her iPod and laptop. Yeah, I'm there . . . I see it coming. Do you?

    Comments

    • Sam, I love this post. How exciting! Its almost a beginning of a new phase or wave. What do you think made your faculty reach this critical point? Were there any specific moments or initiatives that drove this? Just curious.
      Hope all is well!

      Sahar

    • Hi Sahar,

      The only empirical evidence that I have is the increase in support requests, and an increase in design and development requests in addition to the technical support requests. I'm not sure yet what has caused the change, and I plan to survey faculty and staff to see whether their responses to questions about service might provide some insights.

      In the meantime, I suspect that the following could be the delta factors:

      1. Students have become more insistent, through feedback sessions and end of term course evaluations, about having WebCampus (what we call Blackboard Vista 4) be the place where all course materials and communication tools are located for ALL courses. As a result, over the last 2 years the school administrators have begun to insist that all faculty post their syllabi, post critical course announcements, and conduct e-mail communication with students via WebCampus even if they teach classroom based courses.
      2. The Provost formed an Online Learning Task Force that has developed a matrix of Standards for Online Instruction and a rubric for faculty to self assess their courses -- both tools are still works in progress. During the past Spring 2009 term the Task Force polled faculty on the usefulness of the tools. The online poll generated a 49% response rate: 74 out of 159 full- and part-time faculty responded. This is an extraordinary response for a voluntary program to adopt a set of standards. Previously, we were happy to be able to get 10 to 20 percent of faculty to respond to similar polls.
      3. Finally, it could be that because we haven't shifted to a new interface for our learning management system since the fall of 2007, faculty are feeling comfortable enough with their WebCampus technical skills to now explore advanced online teaching strategies and thereby, more of the sophisticated features of Vista, i.e., grading forms, group assignments, randomized question pools and randomized answer sets. 

      The convergence of the above factors at this time may be the reason that more and more faculty are calling and asking for more than technical tips. Nearly half of our faculty have begun regularly to hit our online Faculty Resource Center -- a WebCampus course site in which every new faculty account is enrolled -- that includes manuals, tip sheets, and animated demos for all of the WebCampus tools and related powerlinks. And, recently we've gotten more and more interest in WebCampus plug-ins like StudyMate CS and Wimba pushing the school to adopt these tools despite their additional yearly cost.

      All of this is good news, and at the same time very challenging because we face cuts in resources and personnel. I am thankful that I serve an understanding and creative school leadership who are very supportive.