After holding introductory meetings and establishing relationships throughout the year with technology service providers across campus, InTRO inventoried and categorized the types of services provided to faculty. There are a wide variety of “just in time” sources of support, developed around perceived local need for UO schools and colleges, and wider areas of responsibilities for central service units. The five categories reviewed here–classroom technology, help desk support, multimedia services and production, instructional design, and teaching innovation and pedagogical support–offer the most significant functions currently provided at varying levels of service by different instructional technology units.
Common vocabulary and definitions for educational technology services vary broadly, at UO and nationally. For our current working definitions, please see the Glossary and its presentation of the issues involved in identifying and defining the most significant terms.
Classroom Technology
Most UO classrooms feature a technology box (seen here at the right) that includes a Crestron panel and cables to hook up a faculty member’s own portable computer.
Direct support for technology in UO classrooms comes from many sources. The Center for Media and Educational Technologies (CMET) has primary responsibility for the design, acquisition, and maintenance of all classroom technology in centrally controlled spaces. CMET has identified and deployed a standardized technology package, and has also developed a refresh cycle for their supported systems. CMET also provides design services and acquisition support for technology placed in classrooms controlled by departments, schools and colleges, although help services, maintenance and additional equipment are the responsibility of local IT units.
IT departments in the schools and colleges provide a wide variety of classroom support to their academic units, including additional available hardware (for example, resident computers in the Lundquist College of Business classrooms, laptop checkout services from College of Arts and Sciences Information Technology or videostreaming services for the School of Music and Dance). In addition, school and college IT units often act as the first stop for service requests from faculty for rooms in local buildings (whether the rooms are centrally or departmentally controlled).
Academic Extension (AE) IT supports classroom technology needs in the Baker Downtown Center and the UO Bend Center, while UO Portland IT supports classroom technology in the White Stag Block.
Help Desk Support
Information Services’ Tech Desk is a first-stop destination for many UO students, faculty, and staff.
There seem to be at least nine help desks across campus that provide a measure of instructional technology support. In addition, all relevant technology service providers have individual intake processes of their own. The number and distribution of campus service providers is not the primary hindrance for faculty seeking support, however. Rather, the disconnected process for faculty to request assistance among all of these providers might be the biggest barrier to access to instructional technology support services. One unit, Information Services (IS), has addressed their internal process by instituting a single-point service model for all IS-related issues.
It will become increasingly complex to provide instructional technology support for online, hybrid, and flipped classroom delivery models, as faculty who engage in this pedagogical work will require services and assistance from multiple campus units within the current UO organization. For those faculty looking to find support, a single intake process, utilizing a robust, common tracking and workflow application, might ease frustration, could provide increased coordination between service units, and would likely bolster faculty success in adopting new technologies in their courses. Many service providers use Request Tracker (RT) to manage service request workflow, but do so in quite differentiated ways. Communication between queues is difficult, and tracking of information is idiosyncratic.
A lack of common vocabulary, and the corresponding identification of areas of service responsibility, hinders communication between service providers, as well as between service providers and faculty.
Multimedia Services and Production
Students at work in the Cinema Studies Lab, Knight Library.
Video production, web conferencing, livestreaming, lecture capture, and video asset management services are provided by multiple campus units at varying levels of service. CMET Media Services offers high-quality and studio-based (for broadcast) video production services for the campus, but there is a limited availability for individual course support. College of Arts and Sciences Information Technology (CASIT) can assist with some video creation on a case-by-case basis for CAS faculty, while fee-based services are available from the School of Journalism and Communication and VentureDept as well as outside vendors under contract to UO. The Digital Scholarship Center supports customized multimedia creation for faculty and graduate student instructional projects that should be a permanent part of Library collections, or that focus on research collections and should be open access.
Video conferencing and live streaming support is provided by CMET Media Services, and can be scheduled for events or individual class meetings. Nine centrally-controlled classrooms are permanently equipped for video conferencing. The Lundquist College of Business (LCB), College of Education (COE), UO Portland and Academic Extension IT units also provide services in this area through applications such as Kaltura, Panopto, and Blue Jeans, usually within limited-use contracts for their own school and college faculty and staff, or for their own facilities. The McKenzie Collaboration Center continues to offer videoconferencing services for the short term through LifeSize.
Video asset management is an area with significant gaps. CMET Media Services is seeking an enterprise-wide video asset management application to expand service support currently provided through the UO Channel. The migration from Blackboard to Canvas revealed that a few faculty were overusing Blackboard for video storage–which an LMS is not designed to provide in large quantity. Some video conferencing applications provide storage as well–as Panopto currently does for a limited amount of COE use. The Yamada Language Lab offers video storage on an ad hoc basis for a few language courses. Capacity is limited to use during a single term in direct support of instructional activity. In general, ongoing video use and storage online require more carefully considered Fair Use and Copyright Clearance processes, a more informed faculty, and improved access to resources.
Recent lawsuits against high visibility institutions involved in online programming have made accessibility to digital course material, and especially video, a high-priority issue nationally. At UO, the Accessible Education Center, CMET Media Services, and Academic Extension are developing a method to have videos used for instructional purposes close-captioned through an outside vendor, 3Play Media.
Instructional Design
One hallmark of instructional design is a standardized development process.
Instructional Design is occasionally misidentified as an umbrella term for the work of educational technology staff, or as a broad category encompassing all aspects of the development of digital curriculum. At its best, it is a more specialized category of service, involving the implementation of a standardized course development support process–one based upon best-practice theories and principles of learning, pedagogy, and content frameworks–to create teaching materials and experiences for technology-enhanced courses.
UO’s instructional design services are currently small in scale, but there is campus-wide interest in expanding capacity. At the most robust level, Academic Extension provides extensive instructional design services to faculty and programs developed and maintained by academic units in conjunction with AE. Additional campus units are increasing their focus and staffing in this function as well. The Obaverse team is growing its instructional design support capabilities to serve courses and programs which select Oba as digital education delivery mechanism, and CMET is building up its instructional design consultation services with a recently hired professional staff member assisted by experienced GTFs. CMET’s services will integrate Canvas design with the broader educational technology experience, supporting the physical and virtual learning environments across campus.
As selection of online, hybrid, and flipped classroom delivery models increases at UO, instructional design support will increase in demand, requiring training and developmental assistance from experienced instructional designers. A number of peer comparator institutions have created design teams, pairing instructional designers with educational technologists, media developers and curriculum builder as necessary to support their digital education efforts.
Teaching Innovation and Pedagogical Support
Teaching a class at UO Portland’s White Stag Block.
There is widespread interest in pedagogical innovation at UO, but the decentralized nature of the relevant service units challenges the University’s ability to provide a consistent level of support to all of its faculty. The Teaching Effectiveness Program (TEP) is currently the primary service unit providing pedagogical support to campus faculty and graduate students, but it has a small budget relative to the size of its campus-wide service audience, and its programming is necessarily limited in scope. In an effort to address this known service gap, other campus units–including some ad hoc groups based in academic departments–have partnered with TEP and with one another to support innovative development of courses and programs utilizing instructional technology. Some examples of this grassroots effort include:
- TEP, CMET, and the Yamada Language Center have partnered to run a training group for Active Learning and Teaching, now working with its second annual cohort of 16 faculty.
- LCB has asked TEP, AE, and CMET to develop an online teaching faculty development program, combining asynchronous online modules and face-to-face peer-learning labs to guide faculty through the process of creating a fully online course.
- AE provides instructional design and curriculum development support to faculty to promote innovative distance education, especially through online delivery.
- A&AA Faculty and Tech Services staff created a flipped course development program in 2014, and trained selected A&AA faculty in a variety of techniques through which a face-to-face course might be enhanced via online curriculum delivery.
- Grant funded programs and institutes throughout COE design and deploy technology-oriented teaching modalities. Most are aimed at K-12 educational needs, but a number of these efforts are also designed to inform practices in higher education. The Obaverse team can provide innovative pedagogical support for faculty using their system.
