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>> Today's presentation is the education and technology support centers.
My name is Dina Kurzweil and I'm an advisor technologist
at Concurrent Technologies Corporation.
I'm going to talk to you today about the education and technology support centers,
one of the services that CTC offers.
Education and technology support centers are actually established at universities
and within government organizations to support the faculty and instructors.
The centers provide support through creating a systematic process
for gathering information based on instructor needs.
So when you really think about it when you're hiring an instructor or a SME to work
with faculty or staff, they're coming in because they have an expert knowledge base.
Not because they actually understand teaching or know teaching very well.
What the education and technology support centers do is provide the staff
to the instructors to allow them to understand more about the teaching methods
and help them increase the actual abilities that they're able to provide to their learners.
The education and technology or what we actually shortened it to call it is ETI,
education and technology innovation, also helps with coordinating with leadership.
Because it's a function of an office,
it actually coordinates with leadership to provide these services to the staff,
the instructors, the faculty so that there's an arena available for the instructors to reach up
and the leadership of the organization actually come down and work with people.
It also integrates with other university services so when you think
about an ETI type organization, you're thinking about your CIO office,
you're thinking about your security office, you're thinking about your tenure
and leadership groups and the ETI type organizations can actually transverse all
of those locations and help coordinate within the interdepartmental units.
They also help with implementing communication and outreach strategies so that
when you're looking at both, what is provided to the learners
and how it's provided the staff that's actually integrated and integral
to the ETI organizations actually help promote the type of outreach to both the students
and the faculty and staff at the university or center like organization.
The main focus really is on learning goals and objectives, really looking at what type
of training is being done, how that training is being done, and how it can be improved
and conducting professional development activities to help the faculty understand,
what is the art of the possible, where can they take their ideas and what they're doing
and how they can improve upon those.
So when you look about how they actually work, you have the faculty
and what we've coined here is kind of the academic liaison.
And then within the center, you're going to have a technical integrator, design team,
media people and this academic liaison is normally somebody with the background
in instructional design so that they're actually able to help coordinate resources,
work with the faculty and then on up work with the school or the organization
to help everybody work together as a team.
The main service that we've been providing has been at the Uniformed Services University.
The Education and Technology Innovation Support Office was established in 2006
and really is there to support the teaching and student learning needs who are not located
on campuses and expand the reach of the program, as well as those who are on campuses.
But when you really think about a USUHS type environment,
this is the military's medical school.
Students actually go out into clerkships.
They actually leave campus to do those rotations so the ETI actually provides services
so that the faculty who are based in Bethesda, Maryland, can actually reach
out to the wider dispersement of students that maybe at clerkship sites.
A little bit more on the mission of ETI
and really what they do is basically what I've been talking about the whole component
of education and technology support group is really partnering with the faculty
and its really key because what you're trying to do is get the faculty to understand how
to incorporate new and innovative technologies into their learning as well as sound
and grounded instructional principles.
The ETI help faculty identify and find appropriate ways to engage the learners
in the courses and enable learners overall to take an active role in their learning.
Now this is of course all based on the actual course that the faculty are teaching
and what the content matter is, but one of the important things to think about is that a ETI
like organization helps the faculty see what is possible.
Again, the ETI team designs the instructional techniques and develops educational materials
for use face to face and partners with faculty members to design
and redesign their courses for distributive learning.
Also, one of the key components that I think is an innovative piece
for an ETI organization is the research component.
The instructional designers, the technical integrators are all involved
in a collaborative manner with the faculty to conduct grounded and systematic research based
on the implementation and techniques that are integrated within the programs.
One of the big pieces here about the ETI office at USUHS is that you're really looking
at that systematic process, that your coordinating with the research,
that you're integrating with the services and you're capitalizing on the existing tools.
Not everything needs a new tool, you can look at the current LMS and figure out a way
to capitalize on that tool that already exist so that you can promote higher learning going on
and it's one of the pieces that allows an ETI-like team, who's integrated
within the university environment to help look for those opportunities.
They understand the environment, they understand the political caveats and they're able to go in
and really think about what are the options available to them.
So, some of the services of the ETI at the Uniformed Services University, as I stated before,
really fill the full gamut of true educational background.
You've got instructional design, instructional development,
you have things like media development, research, grounded evaluation and assessment,
and that learning management integration piece, really understanding the art of the capable pots
that are available through that learning management system and being able
to provide the information with in those pots in that system.
So, a little background on the ETI here, any questions?