I have the unique challenge/opportunity of working in an environment where the difference between Information Technology and Instructional Technology is not well understood. I was hired as the Director of Instructional Technology for the College of Arts & Sciences, but I spend most of my time coordinating the efforts of the Information Technology support staff. It does, however, provide a rather unique opportunity. Like most large campuses, we struggle with duplication of services. Duplication itself is not necessarily wrong, but in many cases the overlap is not logical or necessary. We have a new CIO who is very interested in consolidating support resources. In support of that motive, I have put together a plan to migrate the type of support we provide at the college/departmental level. I would like to reduce the unnecessary duplication of services and begin to provide support for the development of technology-based solutions. The folks who currently support the departments have an array of talents, so we have quite a team. The most significant challenges are:
- Convincing departments that it is truly in their best interest to rely upon a centralized help desk rather than the local (friendly) support staff they've come to know and love
- Convincing the centralized help desk that they should handle the increased load (every other unit on campus is moving in the opposite direction--supporting themselves)
- Training the departmental support staff in project management and instructional design methodologies
We are also working on integrating students into the mix. They will be junior members of the development team, building solutions and putting together a portfolio that any graduate would kill for. We will carefully choose student experts from art/design, programming, technical writing, etc., and cross-train them in basic team skills while we utilize their specialized talents within a structured workflow that will (hopefully) produce well-documented, professional products.
Oh, we're also examining the various learning object repositories (Merlot, etc.) to see if we can work the solutions we develop into an openly shared collection.
Time to get to work...
7:12:03 AM 
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