Wheaton Vision 2005: Overview

Five years have passed since the Technology and Learning Subcommittee, responding to a request from the president, made a set of recommendations for "bold new technology initiatives that would...improve our educational program and put us on the cutting edge of small liberal arts colleges using technology to enhance learning." These recommendations, accepted by the President's Council and COCAT and subsequently endorsed by the faculty in 1996, have provided the blueprint by which Wheaton, and particularly the Library, Technology and Learning Committee (LTLC), has sought to integrate information technology into teaching and learning across the curriculum.

The 1995 report began by noting that, due to its size, its status as a residential college, and a number of wise decisions made earlier, Wheaton was "very well-positioned" to benefit from the so-called digital revolution. This has not changed. Our accomplishments over the past five years have established the College's ability to use technology in the classroom productively, efficiently and wisely. The Self Study submitted to the New England Association of Schools and Colleges in 1999 documented these accomplishments and earned the positive notice of the Visiting Team for reaccreditation. Even though we have maintained our advantageous position, however, it is clear to members of LTLC today that there are more and different "cutting edges" among the educational applications of technology and that we cannot be on all of them.

Other things have changed since 1995. At that time most students arrived at Wheaton without ever having communicated by e-mail or browsed the World Wide Web. It was reasonable to debate the wisdom of maintaining a Mac-only campus. Now e-mail is ubiquitous and the Web has emerged as the medium on which the College increasingly relies to work with all aspects of information technology and which potentially frees us from other platform choices. Then rooms in residence halls were not yet part of a campus network, but assuring student access to information technology by bundling computers into each student's tuition seemed like a good way of creating this network. This proved not to be feasible, but the campus network has become indispensable to communication and to the educational mission of the College. Administrations and foundations hoped to exploit imagined cost-saving potentials of the new technology, sustaining the fears of some that the technology revolution would reduce the role of classroom instructors in teaching. This assumption has not been realized in 2000; instead, the annual costs of sustaining our accomplishments and of continuing to develop appropriate applications of information technology to teaching and learning across the curriculum are a major concern.

At the heart of the 1995 report was the recommendation of a three-part program for the integration of information technology into the learning experience of our students. Component one, "Learning in a networked community," was to introduce new students to basic computer skills--word processing, e-mail, spread sheets, drop boxes--during the course of fall orientation and in the library component of the First-Year Seminar. The second component, "Communicating and Computing Across the Curriculum," stressed the importance of putting the basic skills--electronic discussion groups, web posting of course notes, a digital art history archive, or computer-based tutorials, for example--to work throughout the curriculum and particularly in introductory courses. Component three, "Creative Contributions to a Networked Community," proposed that students would become not only consumers of information technology in their learning but also able to use this technology to create and articulate their own perceptions and understanding, and it considered upper-level courses and the networked campus as the ideal contexts for the development of this level of competency.

The report also recognized that the success of this recommended program depended on widespread faculty participation and urged that two-day faculty workshops be offered each spring and that computer-based course enrichment projects continue to be supported through stipends paid to faculty developing these projects. Thanks largely to our success in securing foundation grants, we have been able to follow those recommendations.

Stipends for faculty-designed projects to transform or enrich courses through the use of technology have, in fact, been the heart of the Committee's curricular development efforts, and we believe that they should continue to be so. Each project has included an assessment component which has helped us to understand what has worked and how our approaches to used IT might be improved. We have learned that the most successful projects have changed or reshaped pedagogical practices and noticeably affected thereby the ways we teach and our students learn. We are now, therefore, in a position to use our experience to support IT applications which will help the academic departments and the College both identify and achieve strategic academic goals in more focused ways, and we believe that this effort should be the central component of the next phase of our work.

Given that the applications of most individual course-based projects--PowerPoint lectures, web syllabi, and course listservs, for example--are now standard fare for many students and have become a part of the pedagogical background in many courses, the Committee believes that it should begin to phase out stipends for single-course applications in favor of projects which seek to affect larger segments of the curriculum, across departments or disciplines (see the recommendations below). The Academic Computing Center and stipend support for faculty mentors will continue to provide support to faculty making these kinds of applications for the first time, and faculty who have already been supported in single-course projects will now be encouraged to collaborate on projects that are components of larger scale departmental or interdepartmental proposals.

In general, the Committee believes that the three-component approach to shaping and enriching student learning through information technology and the corollary commitment to faculty and curricular development through workshops and stipends remain appropriate to our overall goals, and we reaffirm these approaches as providing the best structure for our continued plans. We believe that our primary goals should continue to be using technology to improve the learning experiences of our students and preparing them to live, learn and work in a world which will need liberal arts graduates with specifically developed skills in and knowledge of information technology.

But we also realize that we must develop new approaches to new problems and opportunities. Most importantly, we need in the next five years to move beyond the practice of supporting all technology proposals and projects equally, and to use our resources more selectively to shape our teaching and learning practices and to reflect and support institutional priorities for the curriculum. This means insuring that the curriculum review carefully assesses the current role of technology across the curriculum and its potential, and articulates goals for this role as a part of all curricular changes. It may mean targeting specific parts of the curriculum for special development with information technology. The result should be a greater coherence between our goals for developing instructional technology and institutional goals and priorities in general.

We also need to support faculty in applying technology to the goals of their own research and the collaborative research they undertake with students, and to apply technological tools which can simplify and improve academic administrative functions--in the Advising and Filene Centers, for example. And we should do more to recognize and promote our educational achievements with information technology and the corresponding intellectual property that is developed as a part of our efforts.

Wheaton Vision 2005: Recommendations

It is clear that our greatest successes with the original plan have come in the second component and that we have accomplished fewer of our goals within the first and third components. Our vision and recommendations for the next five years therefore focus more aggressively on these two areas. They also respond to other changes in the environment, particularly the emergence of the Web as a powerful tool for information access and retrieval and for facilitating productively interactive electronic learning environments. And finally they seek ways to focus our continued development of instructional uses of IT on the achievement of strategic academic goals.
Our planning assumes that the characterization of basic technological skills and concepts called "information technology fluency" and the articulation of broader intellectual perspectives known as "information literacy" together define learning goals in technology appropriate to our curriculum and for our students. "IT fluency" requires that we go beyond simply enabling our students to make rote use of specific hardware and software applications in their learning so as to focus on understanding the underlying concepts of information technology and applying problem-solving and critical thinking skills in its application to learning.

"Information literacy" applies to critical thinking more broadly. It recognizes that increasingly "information comes to individuals in unfiltered formats, raising questions about its authenticity, validity, and reliability." It defines a set of abilities which enable individuals to "recognize when information is needed and [to] have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information." Both standards have sharpened our understanding of our goals, particularly with respect to the third component. We suggest, in fact, adapting these standards as appropriate to the task of measuring our students' achievements in using information technology in their learning across the three components of their experience.

While we do not consider these tools or skills as ends in themselves, they can and should help shape the way we teach and the way students meet larger curricular goals; they can and should be acquired and developed, like other skills of literacy and numeracy, within the context of traditional liberal arts learning. Consequently, we believe the most important of these for all our students are those which focus on learning to use technology wisely and critically as a research tool, alongside the conventional research tools of a print and laboratory culture.

In our planning for the next five years, we set the following goals for the Committee and the College:

1. Articulating Educational Goals for Wheaton Students

LTLC will help to initiate and then participate in campus-wide discussions which rearticulate, update and clarify our goals for our students with respect to information technology.
How can we best prepare our students to work and live in a global society where "information fluency" and "information literacy" are seen as necessary attributes of perceptive and productive members of that society, as essential to the roles they will play as users, consumers, evaluators and creators of information technology? What specific IT skills, competencies and critical perspectives should we expect them to acquire in the process of their undergraduate education? To what extent should they acquire these through their curricular experience, and to what extent through "extra-curricular" learning experiences at Wheaton? Which parts of their educational experience, formal or informal, can be most positively affected by developments in information technology? These questions, which we have begun to address in a preliminary way above, will inevitably be a part of the curriculum review now underway and it will be important for LTLC to provide leadership in formulating and addressing them further.

• The first step will be to work with the Educational Policy Committee Study Group on Experiential Learning and Technology (convened by Tim Barker and including Kathy Ebert-Zawasky) to further develop these questions and then to provide answers which insure that our institutional goals and expectations with respect to the role of information technology in the educational experience of our students are realized as an integral part of curriculum revisions. LTLC bears the primary responsibility for this outcome.
• There will also be a need, over the next couple of years as the curriculum review proceeds, to relate changes in the curriculum to changing priorities for the development and integration of information technology. Up to now, our emphasis as been on "integration across the curriculum," but we must anticipate the need to shape this development more selectively to reflect and support institutional priorities and goals. The Committee will need to have a clear sense of those priorities and goals and of how its work can best support them. We are not sure how best to insure this outcome and need to develop, presumably with the Educational Policy Committee, the means for doing so.
• The Committee must now begin to work more closely with Department Chairs to determine how the College can best encourage and enable departments to develop appropriate technology goals for their curricula. This commitment, in fact, comprises the most important dimension of the Committee's plans for the next five years.

What questions should departments be asking to help them formulate these goals? (e.g., How have the network and information technology changed their discipline? How have they changed the way in which it is/can be taught? What does an "information literate" student need to know or be able to do in this discipline? What might "creative contributions to a networked community" consist of in this discipline?) The Committee, with support from the Provost's Office, must take the lead in this endeavor and must develop its own plan for how to undertake it. The goal must be, however, to help departments take more responsibility for using appropriate information technology in their curricula, in the design of individual courses, and in their teaching.

2. Structuring a Technology-Rich Education for Our Students

Insuring that the College can meet its IT learning goals for its students will require continued efforts and new initiatives from the Committee in several areas, the most important of which will be through constructive liaisons with academic departments.

• At the departmental level, once departmental or discipline-centered goals are established for the curricular integration of technology in majors, minors and other curricular programs, the Committee must, along with the Library, Academic Computing and IT&S, continue to work closely with departments to provide motivation, expertise and support in turning goals into plans and then implementing these plans.
  
• We believe departments (or disciplinary areas) should identify one of their members (in some cases this person might already be a LTLC member) to act as a liaison with the Library, Academic Computing, IT&S and the Committee in the implementation of plans which realize their goals. This departmental "tech person" might also be responsible for maintaining a departmental web sites and function as part of a "user group" which would advise the Committee and help coordinate department-based development across the campus.
  
• As indicated above (p. 2), we believe that resources for curricular applications should now be primarily devoted to initiatives that involve more than one course, more than one instructor, or more than one department. Consequently, the Committee needs to develop new guidelines for faculty and departments seeking stipended support for curricular development and should expect to do so as part of the efforts to work more closely with departments described above. More importantly, the College needs to seek and develop new funding sources from appropriate foundations for this initiative.
  
• A departmental model of curricular integration presupposes that students have acquired a foundation of basic technology skills in introductory courses and elsewhere in the "learning environment" of the College. To insure that new students acquire these skills and are able to make the best use of the rich environment in which they find themselves, we must continue to develop appropriate learning opportunities:
  • as a part of Orientation,
  • through Academic Computing Center programs for first-year students
  • and through the First-Year Seminar, particularly the "Library Component."

And we must continue to insure that introductory courses across the curriculum offer a wide range of opportunities for students to acquire and apply these skills.

• In addition to continuing these efforts, we encourage the further development of the Certification Program offered by Academic Computing for the first time in January, 2000. This program demonstrated a viable market demand and the ability of Academic Computing to meet that demand successfully. We also encourage the development of other ways to provide students with the opportunity to develop the specific technology skills which will enhance their ability to learn at Wheaton.
• As Academic Computing proceeds to acquire the software for one or more web-based course management systems, the Committee will need to do more to encourage and support the utilization of these tools across the curriculum. Software which makes appropriate aspects of on-line learning more user friendly, for both faculty adapting it to the course they teach and the students in those courses, can, we believe, help us to realize the goals of the original technology plan to improve teaching and learning. We will need to introduce faculty to this potential through workshops and other means and to stipend departmental projects which move their courses onto the web.
• Moving ahead with the steps above also requires that the College continue to upgrade classrooms and the rest of learning environment, particularly in the Academic Computing Center and the Library, but also in residence halls and elsewhere. The Committee will continue to provide useful advice to the technology administrators who must articulate needs and formulate plans for improving the learning environment and the infrastructure which supports it.
• We anticipate a continuing need to educate faculty and staff in basic computing skills and knowledge. While the means for delivering IT education to College employees will continue to be primarily through programs offered by Academic Computing and IT&S, we propose that, particularly with faculty, we develop, and support with stipends, the use of faculty mentors who are able provide their colleagues with this training.
• Finally, the Committee will continue to work closely with Academic Computing, the Library and IT&S to strengthen and develop the user services and programs which they provide, with the goal of enabling all campus users to become more self-sufficient.

3. Supporting Intellectual Life and Learning Outside the Classroom

For the past five years the Committee has focused primarily on faculty and curricular development. But information technology has become such a ubiquitous component of our professional lives that it is clear we need also to shape its impact on and uses in others aspects of our work and intellectual life, that all these functions are inextricably more and more interconnected. Specifically:

• We need to determine just how the College might provide further support for technology applications in faculty and student research (including student/faculty collaborative research of the type now underwritten as Mars Fellowships and student internships). What research activities are currently supported by the College's investment and expertise in technology? How might these efforts be improved? What new kinds and levels of support will be needed in the next five years, and how might these be met?
• Similarly, how might the College improve support to faculty (or students) who wish to disseminate the results of their technology-related and technology-supported work, through on-line or paper publication and/or through participation in conferences and professional meetings? We encourage such dissemination, but we could do more through College sponsored facilities and services to help it happen, and the Committee is the best-positioned group to determine just what those should be.
• At the same time, the explosion in electronic resources has raised crucial ethical and legal issues about the protection and use of intellectual property, both what is created here for use here and elsewhere, and what is created elsewhere that we expect to use in our own teaching and learning. The Committee, and the College, need to address these issues aggressively, not only raising the consciousness of community members, but also clarifying and following more rigorously the laws which govern the use of intellectual property and providing support to faculty and students who need to resolve these issues in their work.

If faculty are to use print and on-line resources and software in their teaching, we must create the institutional resources which make it easy to do so without violating copyright laws. If faculty, or staff, or students are going to create materials which can be used elsewhere, we must be prepared to help them preserve their (or the College's) interest in these materials,with appropriate legal advice, policies, and procedures. And we must create a policy on the ownership interests of faculty and staff and of the College with respect to intellectual property created by Wheaton employees. The Committee must play an important role in shaping the College's response to all of these issues.

4. Supporting Academic Administrative Functions

There are also new advantages in applying technology to some of the more administrative functions of our professional lives, and here too the Committee will have a role in helping determine how and where to make these applications. We recommend the following for the immediate future:

• The College should proceed as expeditiously as possible to acquire and implement the software neccesary to provide web access to advising and academic program information to faculty advisors. While not directly related to the curriculum, this addition would have a positive impact on both the quality of student experience and faculty work loads.
• The appointment of Ed Cantor as the Filene Center's "Associate Director for Experiential and Career Learning Technologies" provides new opportunities to develop the Center's ability to use technology in its everyday operations and in the fulfillment of its mission. This has significant potential for shaping the learning experience of our students and the Committee is well positioned to collaborate with the Filene Center in its planning and development. We will encourage the Center, through Ed, to work closely with LTLC in developing appropriate IT goals for its work, creating and recognizing ways for students to validate their off-campus learning experiences with technology, and generally improving the Center's ability to conduct its business on line.

Committee Members: Kirk Anderson, Chair
Shawn Bates, '00
Tom Brooks
David Caldwell
Peter Deekle
Jen Durette, '00
Kathy Ebert-Zawasky
Herb Ellison
Nancy Evans
Margaret Gardner
Bruce Owens
Tommy Ratliff
Abdul Shibli