Program Evaluation: Emory Center for Interactive Teaching

Sean Mann, GSU

Executive Summary Established in 1997, the Emory Center for Interactive Teaching is focused on providing support to Emory teachers interested in incorporating instructional technology in their curriculum. The center offers training onsite and offsite as well as online. Multiple courses and activities are offered each month. The center struggles generate awareness for the courses and activities. The center needs to expand its offerings to include more demand based trainings. Overall the center is very accessible, well-staffed, and adequately funded, allowing it attain the bulk of its goals. Methods I used a combination of methods to compile the data used in this evaluation. I started by visiting the center on multiple occasions to observe the everyday functionality. During these visits I began to approach and casually interview people while they were working at computers. I also had extensive talks with ECIT program coordinator. Because I have a prior relationship with the Economics and Film departments, I was able to send a survey to each departments faculty and grad students. And finally I used the good old fashion internet, which is both effective and efficient in collecting the basic information about the center. Center Context and Goals An interesting thing happened while I was working on my site evaluation of the Emory Center for Instructional Technology, it disappeared. Well, consumed anyhow. Quietly announced back in July, a new Center/Office/Initiative was formed to merge similar centers with overlapping missions existing separately under the IT and Library divisions. The Digital Scholarship Commons, Lewis H. Beck Center for Digital Collections and ECIT would gradually merge to become the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. This gradual transition became evident in October as some functions of the ECIT, while the center remains in the same location, began to take place in other locations. Because the new ECDS concentrates on a much wider range of goals and missions, I will concentrate my evaluation and report on the functions adopted from the original mission of ECIT and primarily executed by the existing ECIT staff. ECIT Mission and Goals Provide expertise and consultation for courseware development where teachers have access to technological and pedagogical resources to guide student inquiry, enhance reflective practice, and enable greater understanding of knowledge.

ECIT strives to:

Increase Emory faculty, researcher, and student awareness of the possibilities afforded by advanced technology in teaching, learning, and research. Assist Emory faculty and researchers in the development and testing of technologically enhanced teaching methodologies and materials Support the planning, creation and completion of digital academic assignments as part of learning.

Job Titles Director The director oversees the core initiatives of the center, while managing the center staff. The director also addresses budget issues and material needs for the center. Previous to the centers merger with ECDS, the director also taught many staff development courses. Instructional Technologist Primary course instructor; Creates and conducts ECIT workshops; provides onsite and offsite trainings by request. Coordinator Works with the Director and Instructional Technologist to schedule trainings and activities. Also serves in a budgeting and purchasing role.

Center Activities Training Trainings are offered by request and can be delivered at the center or within the necessary department. Trainings are usually conducted by the Instructional technologist but have been hosted by the director. Workshops Workshops cover preconceived instructional technology topics are offered only at the ECIT location. The workshops are instructed by the Director or Instructional Technologists and sometimes hosted by a guest lecturer. Web Talks Web Talks are offered online and conducted by guest lecturers or ECIT staff and cover a given topic of expertise. These talks allow for remote interaction by participants and a broader pool of lecturers.

Evaluation Overall the Emory Center for Interactive Teaching does a pretty good job of following its mission and meeting its goals. The amount of training courses and activities that it holds in a year is impressive. The expertise of the staff is apparent and readily accessible. The center itself contains all of the equipment,

software, and hardware that is needed to support technology enhanced teaching and learning. In these areas I think that the center is very successful. The center fails to measure up in a two areas, beginning with evangelism. A focus of the centers goals is to Increase Emory faculty, researcher, and student awareness of the possibilities afforded by advanced technology in teaching, learning, and research., But based on the information that I received from interviews and surveys, many students and faculty are not aware of the opportunities offered by ECIT. Of those aware very few have attended the group training courses or signed up for one-on-one training, believing that courses will not help or are not of their interest. Which leads to the second area of critique: if the courses that the center offers are not courses that the target participants are interested in than the mission of the center is undermined. The center offers many courses, and I believe that the scope of these courses have increased and improved since the ECDS merger, but there needs to be a better effort in offering courses with participant demand. Currently, the courses seem to be driven by trainer expertise and interest. All in all I think that ECIT does well in most areas. It has ample support and budget to expand the centers mission and reach set goals. But I think that the center needs to improve in have it advertises and plans its course offerings, activities and initiatives.

Appendix Survey Questions Sent to faculty and grad students with the departments of Economics and Film Studies 1. Are you aware that the Emory Center for Interactive Teaching is located in the Woodruff Library? 2. Do you know that the center offers courses and trainings covering instructional technology? 3. Have you ever attended a workshop or requested training with ECIT staff? 4. If so what area(s) did the training/workshop cover? 5. If not, why? 6. Are there course topics that you would like to see offered by ECIT?