Friday, August 09, 2002

Technology Solutions Team I'm in the process of re-organizing some of our support resources. I am the Director of Instructional Technology for the College of Arts & Sciences at UNC Charlotte. We have 22 departments in our college with varying levels of technology utilization (from Biology to Religious Studies). Over the past four years, some departments (those with a great deal of specialized technology) were given dedicated computer consultants. Other consultants have been hired to support multiple departments with lower levels of utilization. Now, the key motivation for hiring these individuals was an undeniable lack of responsiveness from the campus technology support organization. Last year we hired a new CIO, and she has begun a process of internal re-organization that is intended to improve the quality of service. This presents a rather unique opportunity for us at the college level. I have begun a process to bring these departmental consultants together into a Technology Solutions Team. Each team member will have two key areas of responsibility: To support the specialized technology needs of an assigned department (or departments). To develop specialized solutions (with other team members) for project-based clients (faculty, departments, etc.). Many of our team members come from an Information Technology background (programming, network administration), but others come from various disciplines such as business management, library science, technical writing, and instructional design (myself). I want to build a team that will provide meaningful development support to faculty in our college. I want to build solutions that are well documented and, where possible, re-usable. I want to share our processes and solutions with the community at large (both through our own site and collaborative environments such as MERLOT). Each team member is using UserLand's Radio and Manila to maintain a personal weblog as well as project-oriented weblogs. Is anyone aware of other efforts to provide this type of hybrid support/development environment? I will be training our team members in instructional design processes and hope to integrate our development efforts with prescriptive consultations for faculty. I would love to know what others are doing at their institutions to meet the ever-changing needs of their faculty in the use of technology. 11:29:02 AM    comment []

multitude of support needs How do other institutions handle the overlapping domains of support represented by help desks, software training units, and instructional design support teams? In my experience, the tendency is for each of these to present their services independently of the others. It is also my experience that the lines between these areas are blurring at an ever-increasing rate. 11:03:44 AM    comment []