Faculty in Student Affairs are quite varied. We have military professors in ROTC who rotate out after 2-3 years. We have a large number of faculty in Physical Education, some of whom have been with the department for many years. Many of our Music faculty have long histories with the department, though many are not in full-time status from what I can tell.
This diversity – of faculty, and of curricula – has alway somewhat stifled my inertia to provide more support in a proactive manner. However, my attendance at this event truly has me motivated to start down that path.
At first, I was thinking we could provide some training and education for all faculty, which would also serve to connect this somewhat unusual (to Student Affairs) classification of employees with each other.
However, it seems clear that the needs would be quite different in the three areas. For example, I could see where mnay of the on-campus PE courses wouldn’t be interested in a lot of these tools. They are used in DE courses. However, I need to learn more about their operation.
Here are some things we could focus on, in no particular order:
- Use of Blackboard Vista
- Use of Elluminate
- Use of Wolfware
- Use of Wikis, Blogs, Twitter
- Tech Fluency – Students and Faculty both
And, later we could try to provide similar support for the odd course here and there (Peer Mentor Class, RA Class, and so on) to bring those staff up to speed as well.