From the Edge

"It's been quite a ride"

By Margaret Byrne
Director, Center for Learning Technologies

Shortly there will be an announcement that I shall be resigning as director of the Center for Learning Technologies. The first image that runs through my mind as I say this is Toad's Wild Ride. It has certainly been that! When I came to Old Dominion in November 1999, I was brought here in part to help with the videostreaming project. My background in project management and prototyping of innovative technologies in a learning environment at UC-Davis was perceived as a help.

Videostreaming, the brainchild of former President James Koch, was conceived not as a unique technology with unique characteristics and requirements, but rather as a piggyback to the already successful TELETECHNET program. Above all this represented unique challenges - and ones where, as an institution, we simply could not take advantage of the lessons learned by sister institutions also engaged in videostreaming.

The center's time and resources were devoted to that project until most of the conceptual, workflow, procedures and basic elements of the program had been built and we could transition it to Distance Learning for ongoing management and maintenance. I personally spent more than 50 hours a week just on videostreaming, and we put in many 14-hour days for the first six months of the project.

In spring 2001 the center shifted from Distance Learning to Academic Affairs. The result was a series of projects with the military, including the Engineering Management Project - an ambitious effort to put an entire graduate program in an anytime-anywhere mode in approximately one year's time. Where rule of thumb (and granting agencies that research this kind of work) tells us that an average cost to transition an existing course is about $50,000 and takes a minimum of six months, Old Dominion insisted on the same thing for a quarter of the cost and in less than half the time!

Another equally ambitious project involved the General Engineering Technology undergraduate degree program for Navy College. Yet another project involves the four-year curriculum for the Army's ROTC program. This project intends to overhaul the entire four-year program, transitioning it from an instructor-centered approach to an active learning, cadet-centered strategy focused heavily on attracting and retaining scholar-athlete-leaders. The goal is to build critical thinkers with the moral and personal courage to be future leaders. This is a unique opportunity primarily because the Army has had the vision to see learning from a learning systems perspective.

While the center was playing a major role in these projects, we were also asked to play a significant role in the roll-out of a course management product - Blackboard. There have been a few bumps, but I am pleased to report that I have had myriad comments on how painless the experience has been both for the technical side and the faculty/user side.

There is a fairly simple lesson here. If you believe that this is a partnership and that technology exists to serve learning, then all the decisions you tend to make are based on helping faculty to make the decisions they know to be best for their teaching approach. Above all this means you never, never, never let technology dictate teaching practice.

Although it is difficult to interpret just what all the statistics mean, Blackboard is registering literally thousands of transactions a day. Our intention was to roll out fewer than 100 faculty in the spring. However, more than 150 faculty are now using Blackboard - not because they have to, but because it represents some advantages for their style of teaching. This would not have been possible without the help of the vice president for administration and finance and the Office of Computing and Communications Services.

The center can report similar success with the online testing initiative and with the online evaluation tools that we developed as members of the Flashlight Consortium. Blackboard, online testing and mid-semester online evaluation, as well as the development of a flexible, student-centered set of instructional models, were successful in large measure due to the vision of the former provost.

Yes, it's been quite a ride.

When I look back, I'll remember the loyal staff of the center who were there night after night, weekend after weekend, trying to push that quality up just a bit higher. I'll probably also remember the overly ambitious leadership - and fortunately, I'll probably forget the endless meetings and the myriad frustrations. But I'll certainly remember the many, many faculty on this campus who consistently and quietly fought for students first. And after all, that is what education is supposed to be about.

Thank you for the time I've had here at Old Dominion.