The two major listings for faculty teaching and learning centers are maintained at Dalhousie University (http://www.dal.ca/~oidt/ids.html) and the University of Kansas (http://www.ku.edu/~cte/resources/websites.html).
The centers in these listings have a variety of names and exhibit somewhat different emphases from institution to institution. Names vary from the Faculty Center, to the Center for Teaching and Learning, to the Center for Academic Excellence, to the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology, to the Center for Education and Information Technology, to the Center for Teaching Excellence--with many other variations and permutations. What they all have in common is the effort to assist faculty members to improve their instruction.
I was curious about how the various centers at various universities would assist instructors to use online instructional resources so I did a non-random check of some of the US institutions; the selection was non-random because, whenever I could, I deliberately picked institutions that I knew had some strengths in educational technology and/or distance education and would, therefore (I thought) be likely to be up to date about the growth of online instructional repositories and the facilitation of their use.
The results were extremely surprising, even shocking. I sampled 14 institutions from the Dalhousie US listing and found NONE that made any mention of online instructional resources. That's a sample of 26% of the US institutions on the Dalhousie list of 53 US institutions. I did a similar sampling of 14 institutions from the larger UKansas list and found only one center that made any reference to online instructional resources. (That was the Univ. of Delaware Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center who, in their Toolkit for Teaching and Technology, included a deeply embedded link to MERLOT under Resources/Organizations and Conferences--
http://www.udel.edu/learn/technology/.)
I was so amazed by the lack of references to online instructional repositories in my sampling from the two lists that I returned to the longer UKansas listing and conducted a second search of 14 additional centers. Again, just as in the first search from the Dalhousie listing, I could not find a single reference to online instructional resources at any of the centers. The search summary number is then 1 hit in 42 attempts, or a hit rate of 2%. I should emphasize that I looked beyond the top pages in all of these web sites, trying to locate any mention of online learning resources/objects and any linkage to well-known repositories such as MERLOT, SCOUT, or MIT's OCW.
I'm not sure how to interpret these surprising findings because I know that some of the institutions that I examined from these lists do provide instructional support that would include the use of learning objects from online repositories. However, it seems that compartmentalized educational technology/instructional design support has not yet made its way to the more general activities of the campus teaching and learning center (even though some of the centers that I checked explicitly identify themselves as emphasizing "technology-enhanced learning").
Apparently, the use of online instructional repositories is still considered too specialized and too technical to include in general efforts to assist the teaching body to enhance instruction. Many of the centers listed by Dalhousie and the University of Kansas included extensive references to print, film, and video resources; those inclusions of old media resources make the omission of new online instructional resources even more telling.
My expectation is that eventually all faculty teaching and learning centers will include ample coverage about how faculty can locate and make use of online instructional resources. Let's hope that eventuality comes sooner rather than later. The site profile provided in November of the Mt. Royal Academic Centre becomes even more significant as a model of what is needed in other institutions (http://www.mtroyal.ab.ca/adc/).
9:44:14 AM 
|
