Lecture Capture workshop

12 04 2013

Announcement from the CTLE about next week’s Faculty to Faculty workshop on lecture capture, featuring outgoing TAG co-chair Jeremy Sepinsky:

Join us for the following Faculty Advancement Series event. Please register (under “Faculty Advancement-Fac & Staf”) if you plan to attend. Lunch will be served.

Recording Your Lectures: Avenues, Applications, and Opportunities
Dr. Jeremy Sepinsky, Physics
Tuesday, April 16, 11:30 am – 1:00 pm in LSC 590

There are a lot of reasons why you might want to record the lectures you give in the classroom, from sick students to sick faculty, from lecture reviews to pre-recorded content. Jeremy will give us a demonstration of the lecture capture facilities available in the Loyola Science Center along with how he has been incorporating them into his class for the past two semesters. Afterwards, we hope for a lively discussion of the many possible uses of this technology as we move forward.


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Categories : Announcements, Technology Training

Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2012

11 04 2013

The 2012 report from the Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey, which tracks attitudes and practices of faculty members at American colleges and universities, just came out this week. It’s a little library-centric but touches on many issues related to teaching, research, and scholarly communication. It’s long (70+ pages) but a relatively quick read:

Download Report

If you don’t have time to skim the full report, here are some excerpts that may be of particular interest to TAG:

Teaching

  • Small but non-trivial shares of respondents use technology in their undergraduate teaching. But while most recognize the availability of resources to help them do so, many respondents do not draw upon resources beyond their own ideas or feel strongly motivated to seek out opportunities to use more technology in their teaching.

Conducting Research

  • Collaboration — The prevalence of collaborative research varies significantly by discipline. Virtually all of the scientists reported that they have collaborated with others at some point in their career, while only two-thirds of humanists had done so.
  • Data Preservation and Reuse — About four out of five respondents indicated that they build up some kind of collections of “scientific, qualitative, quantitative, or primary source research data.” But while scholars across disciplines build up collections of relevant research data—of whatever type may by appropriate for their field and research—in the course of their work, few turn to established solutions for preserving these materials aſter a given project ends (see Figure 37). Four out of five respondents strongly agreed that “I preserve these materials myself, using commercially or freely available soſtware or services.”
  • Digital Research — We asked faculty members if they would like to “more deeply” integrate digital research activities and methodologies into their work. About half strongly agreed that they did, while about 20% strongly disagreed. A relatively greater share of humanists (about a third) strongly disagreed with this statement than did scientists and social scientists (about one in ten)… Among those who indicated they were interested in more deeply integrating digital research activities and methodologies, more than three quarters of respondents indicated that each of the [types of support] listed—more time, more conceptual help in understanding how digital research activities and methodologies can be thoughtfully integrated into their research, or technical support for implementing digital research activities and methodologies—would be very important to them.
  • Digital Humanities — A far smaller share of humanists than of social scientists and scientists indicated that any of these digital methods were very important to their research. Even methods that are believed to be specifically applicable in the digital humanities, such as text mining or GIS mapping, are reported to be utilized by only a minority of humanists.

Disseminating Research

  • Publication — Respondents tend to value established scholarly dissemination methods, prioritizing audiences in their sub-discipline and discipline, and those of lay professionals, more so than undergraduates or the general public. Similarly, they continue to select journals in which to publish based on characteristics such as topical coverage, readership, and impact factor. Finally, respondents tend to value existing publisher services, such as peer review, branding, and copy-editing, while expressing less widespread agreement about the value of newer dissemination support services offered by libraries that are intended to maximize access and impact.
  • Journal Selection/Open Access — The fact that the journal “makes its articles freely available on the internet, so there is no cost to purchase and read” remains among the lowest priorities to scholars in selecting a publication venue; only about a third of respondents indicated this was a very important factor.
  • Faculty Web Pages — A third of respondents indicated that they receive support in the form of having a public web presence [“a public webpage that lists links to my recent scholarly outputs, provides information on my areas of research and teaching, and provides contact ifnormation for me”] managed for them.

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Categories : Announcements

TAG Meeting Notes 12/1/11

2 12 2011

[Updated 12/08/11 with links to additional information]

TAG met yesterday to catch up on all our initiatives. Here’s the latest:

  • The Learning Management System (LMS) Work Group has formed and will begin meetings this week.
  • The Mobile Apps work group met at the beginning of November. Meeting minutes are available (PDF). The meeting was mostly dedicated to getting everyone caught up on the existing mobile app and mobile website.  The minutes indicate that any new mobile development will occur within the existing University app (made by Straxis), but this point seemed undecided during the meeting itself. Kristen is seeking clarification from group leader Connie Wisdo on this question.

Sandy Pesavento (education) has withdrawn from the group due to time conflicts, but Andy Berger (physics) has volunteered to serve as a faculty representative along with Ben Bishop and Kristen Yarmey.

  • The Novel Pedagogy Group has received funding from the College of Arts and Sciences to design a mediated classroom that will accommodate the new pedagogies they are exploring. The group is working with Jim and OIT to mediate the room, which is intended to be a model of what the University could do should it prove effective.
  • Members of TAG met with IR in early November to discuss the results of last summer’s TechQual survey. Kristen will post the results and highlights of the discussion on this site under a separate title.  We’ve been asked not to share the results, but we did post a summary of the discussion.
  • IR invited TAG to provide feedback on a rough draft of a new Incidental Use Policy during last month’s IMAC meeting. Jeremy will post specifics about the policy on the TAG site under a separate title.
  • IR is in the process of hiring a new manager to coordinate the work of the Office of Instructional Technology.
  • Progress is being made on the Academic Technology Plan. Anne Marie interviewed several faculty members and administrators to get a sense of what the Plan should include.
  • Faculty directory. At our last meeting TAG discussed the faculty directory’s inability to list more than one department affiliation for a single faculty member. Anne Marie discussed this concern in a Banner meeting earlier this week.  There are several similar issues with Banner not being able to describe employee designations (e.g., emeritus, program director, department chair…).  It seems like the University needs to have a larger conversation about data storage and sharing – Banner wasn’t really designed to handle all of these designations. Anne Marie will look into how other universities handle data sharing.
  • Computerized testing. Teresa spoke with colleagues at Villanova University and found out that they use Par software to conduct secure, controlled online testing.  The downside to Par is that it doesn’t integrate with Villanova’s LMS (Blackboard). Jim will look into Par to see what options we might be able to provide for computerized testing on campus.
  • Security Awareness Training. The email announcement for IR’s security awareness training program went out early by accident. All faculty are encouraged to complete the training program – it’s  a series of short videos, totaling around 60 minutes.  The idea is to expand a general user’s knowledge and understanding of security issues.  See Jeremy’s post from 11/14/11 for details.
  • We talked briefly about the Oracle outage on 11/10 and the wireless outage on 11/16. IR has an incident policy now that indicates how and what information about outages should be disseminated.  During the Oracle outage, information was displayed on my.scranton showing alternate ways for users to access Angel and email. RoyalDrive was not included, but this has been fixed.  Jim is meeting with the rest of the IR team this week to figure out what happened during the 11/16 outage. His goal is for IR to be able to send out early notifications when something is happening.
  • The email transition is a go! The email team itself transitioned this week. Students will be transitioned at the end of December after exams. We discussed the best time to convert faculty, and the best option seems to be January.  We’ll transition in batches, by department. Notifications with more details will be sent out on paper and via email, but here’s essentially what will happen:
    1. You will get email notification in advance, and a final email notice the day of the transition. If your department’s migration is happening at a time that will not work for you, you should contact IR right away to reschedule.2. Your email account will move to Live @ EDU during the night.  Server email will be migrated automatically.

    3. When you log in to my.scranton the next day, you’ll see a new tab with instructions for accessing your new account through the web portal, and instructions for migrating local mail [with Transend Migrator].  You will also need to update your mobile devices and any other email clients (Gmail, MacMail) with new POP3 information.

    4. Your email address will be firstname.lastname@scranton.edu. You will still receive email sent to your existing email (lastnamef2@scranton.edu), but you can’t send out email from that address, so you will need to update it in email listservs, etc.

    5. Training will be available that week to help you get started.  We asked Jim if short screencapture tutorials could be made available as well.

    6. Calendars won’t be migrated until later in the spring.

    7. Office 2010 will be pushed out around the same time.


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Categories : Email, TAG Administrative