EdTech provides consulting, training, outreach and educational services
for faculty, instructors and staff using educational technologies.
EdTech provides consulting, training, outreach and educational services
for faculty, instructors and staff using educational technologies.
It is both a strength and a weakness of the U of I campus that our technology resources, services, and support staff are diversely positioned and widely scattered. Historically, the campus has allowed a great deal of freedom for colleges, departments, and units to explore and develop their own software, services, and programs. Innovation has been high, with many firsts in the world and bests in the nation (PLATO, Mosaic, the National Center for Super Computing Applications, the Beckman Institute, The Graduate School of Library and Information Science), but campus-wide coordination and clear mandates are not always in place. If you come from a smaller campus or one that was highly centralized, the diversity on the U of I campus may seem a daunting maze. Our main advice, then, is to accept the decentralized reality of the U of I campus and to work toward developing your own personalized technology support/resources “map” (or contacts list) that suits your teaching with technology needs and desires.
Suppose you're a new faculty hire here at Illinois and want to get your new office computer set up before the start of the first semester. Oh, and you need a copy of the software that will let you transform your lecture graphs into PDF documents that students can easily print and, by the way, you would like to try some online quizzes for the first time instead of taking up valuable quiz time in class; and it would be nice to teach in a computer lab a few times during the semester to give your students a guided tour of the best online materials available in your discipline. One more thing: you could use some help with the statistical software you use for the data from your dissertation research. And, come to think of it, there is one last thing: your personal laptop may have a virus because you now notice that browsing on the Internet has become noticeably slow.
In some institutions, a new faculty member can go to one person or place for all of her technology problems and needs. However, on our campus nearly all instructors and staff rely on various local, college-based, campus-wide, and national resources for their technology resources and support. By the time you eventually complete your wish list of technology needs as described in the hypothetical example above, your network will draw upon a broad array of people, units, and resources, as is evident in our solution scenario for our hypothetical new faculty member described above. Consequently, to take advantage of the best and broadest range of software, services, and technology support on our campus, you have to consider the layout of our technology smorgasbord, which ranges from the local to the global:
You can use the Technology Resources and Support Matrix in the sidebar to start building your personalized map. We have listed the resources available across the entire campus, some college resources, and left open the local resources that you may fill in. Please review our campus resources map for an appreciation of the geographical diversity of campus technology resources.
Lastly, an obvious conclusion that cannot be stressed too much is that some of your best assistance will come from within your own department and from your new colleagues. Informally, every department has at least one or two teaching assistants or instructors who are seen as valuable local resources who are willing to consult with colleagues regarding technology. More formally, many departments will designate and compensate undergraduates, graduate assistants, or instructors to be part-time or full-time technology assistants. While these local resources can be experienced and smart, they are typically first and foremost students, teachers, and researchers, so their time is limited, and, additionally, most will not be technology and teaching professionals who have made a career of assisting faculty. Thus, we would suggest that you build a relationship with local technology gurus but that you also seek out college or campus-wide resources. This combination will provide the best and broadest network of support (and will help you from wearing out any one support person if you happen to be especially needy!).
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