|
|
TMAPP: Faculty Access to Computers and Technology
In early 1998, Hartnell College was awarded a $371,000 Technology Model Applications Pilot Projects (TMAPP) grant to provide faculty access to computers and technology. The Project Director is Colly Tettelbach, who is also Director of the Regional Health Occupations Resource Center. This project arose out of an identified need for faculty training in the area of technology-mediated instruction. Specifically, as colleges were provided with interactive teleconferencing capabilities, the need for faculty members to be skilled in using these media became even more apparent. A second demand driving this project is the need for student populations in rural and semi-rural areas to have access to low enrollment for otherwise unavailable courses that could not be offered in their locale. The project also seeks to create learning communities between community college faculty and students using video conferencing and computer-mediated instruction. This project comprises a consortium of seven community colleges around the state of California. Two colleges are located in urban settings: Evergreen Valley College and Ohlone College; the other five colleges- Hartnell College, Butte College, College of the Siskiyous, Feather River College, and West Hills College- are located in semi-rural or rural areas. Four faculty from each college receive support and instruction on the use of technology-mediated instruction. The grant provides workshops and instructional support for 28 faculty. The grant also provides computer hardware and software for each of the participating faculty. In addition, the grant funds virtual faculty offices, one for each college. So far, three workshops have been given to the faculty. The first was a face-to-face, all-day workshop held at Hartnell College to orient the chosen faculty and the campus liaisons to the provisions of the grant and to their responsibilities as members of the grant team. At that meeting, it was requested that, as much as possible, the workshops utilize video conferencing so as to reduce travel time, particularly from the remote areas. The second workshop was a video conference workshop on “Strategies for Video Teleconferencing,” that included tips and techniques to make video conferencing more successful. The third workshop was on the legal and ethical issues involved in technology-mediated instruction, particularly in interactive video conferencing. Other conferences, workshops, and educational opportunities will be offered to the faculty as a part of this grant. A major part of the grant was to provide capital outlay to college sites to convert video conferencing into distance learning facilities. Each campus received $20,000 to upgrade their distance educational classrooms or facilities to facilitate the offering of distance education. The obstacles encountered administering this grant included the challenge of coordinating the activities of seven different community colleges, each of which has different schedules and different ways of handling faculty release time, substitution, etc. Another challenge has been that faculty liaison and even faculty participants have changed over the course of the grant cycle, so that there is the need for constant updating mailing lists and reorienting new campus coordinators to the provisions of the grant. The ultimate goal of the grant is for each of the four faculty participants on each campus to become a campus resource in the use and the design of technology-mediated instruction. Part of the provision of the grant is that each campus will develop courses to be offered via video teleconferencing to other campuses in a mutual exchange. Although it is not a provision of this grant, the need for developing policies and procedures and for understanding intellectual property rights and mechanisms for the sharing of courses is accentuated. Contact: |
||||||||||
|
||||||||||||
