Introduction

The gap between early adopters of technology and the mainstream faculty population has been described as so wide as to constitute a veritable chasm. But with support agencies understaffed, how can participation rates be increased? What kinds of strategies should be utilized to reach mainstream faculty who appear to have fundamentally different interests and needs than early adopter groups?

One approach is to leverage the work of several universities to train and support faculty in their use of technology. This session will describe a four-institution project aimed at collaborative development of faculty development resources. Working together, a workshop curriculum was designed, guides to effective practices were developed, best practice strategies in faculty development were examined, and new services were initiated to enable each campus to cross the chasm. Perspectives and experiences at three of the institutions will be shared.

Summary

Idaho’s four-year institutions each have faculty who have pioneered effective and innovative uses of technology in their instruction. Each institution has established goals to foster additional appropriate use of technology to increase the impact and benefit to student learning and faculty productivity. Each institution has struggled to increase the participation rate of faculty using new teaching technologies and to engage the large mainstream of faculty who have yet to explore the benefit of these technologies.

The gap between early adopters of technology and the mainstream population has been described as so wide as to constitute a veritable chasm. Current support approaches have helped the early adopters (10-15% of faculty) but only very rarely have these strategies crossed the chasm into the mainstream. This collaborative project seeks to implement new strategies to support a new generation of adopters.

Reviewing the literature related to faculty adoption of technology and our own experiences lead us to the following assumptions concerning the mainstream faculty population:

• Mainstream faculty have significantly different characteristics and interests from their early adopter colleagues.
• Mainstream faculty do not share an interest in technology and such a focus often serves as a barrier to experimentation.
• Mainstream faculty are more risk aversive in this area than early adopters.
• Mainstream faculty have less access to resources than early adopters.
• Mainstream faculty require more training and experience with technology.
• Mainstream faculty require significantly more technical support.
• Mainstream faculty require more assurance that a given technology will work, and that adequate help will be available.

We also assumed that mainstream faculty need qualitatively different strategies to foster and encourage adoption than their earlier adopter colleagues, including:

• Mainstream faculty require well proven technology applications that offer risk free value.
• Must perceive some subjective cost benefit in which the benefits of technology exceed the costs associated with learning and accessing technology
• The principle benefit for mainstream faculty must be measured in teaching outcomes; value becomes a function of assured teaching improvement coupled with the assurance that the technology is reliable and workable.
• An important factor in deciding to adopt technology is the opportunity to communicate with other adopters.
• The most important common interest around which early adopters and mainstream faculty might communicate is their shared interest in the discipline and teaching.

In order to address these assumptions about the characteristics and strategies needed to foster technology use among mainstream faculty, the four public four-year institutions in the state sought to collaborate and share efforts towards these goals through the use of a statewide Technology Incentive Grant. The grant awarded to the Provosts of each institution provided seed money to begin to work together to attract, train and support mainstream faculty in the appropriate use of technology.

The institutions decided on the following objective and initial activities:

Collaborative Objective: Increase the participation rate among mainstream faculty in new media technology use by:

• the development of alternative support and adoption strategies
• the cooperative development and delivery of faculty training materials
• the creation of facilities designed to support mainstream faculty work and practice with new media tools
• the creation of mechanisms to connect early adopters with mainstream faculty for mentoring and advice.

The Initial Strategies included:

• Provide training which emphasizes the solution to teaching problems or achieving improved outcomes.
• Provide access to:
  • appropriate hardware and software for courseware development
  • instructional design consultation
  • adequate technical support
  • practice opportunities
• Provide a mechanism for mainstream faculty to learn from and connect with early adopter mentors.