Faculty Development: Impact of Technology on Academic Advising

Advising Matters website

Work is underway on the development of the Advising Matters web site. The site will have both faculty and student panels and be a central electronic location for all advising related materials. Links will include: a statement on academic advising, bulletin board, interactive discussion forum, calendar, catalogs, athletic eligibility, FERPA, IAI, transfer guides, four year plans, major checklists, downloadable forms, and FAQ's. The target date for implementation is September 30, 2002

Faculty Projects

Each year Title III supports release time for faculty to provide time for development of technology for teaching and learning. Rafael Iglesias, John Kloos, Al Martin, and Tom Wangler began their year in Spring 2002. A brief summary of their progress follows.

Rafael has developed a web site to support both faculty and students in the Study Abroad in Spain program this summer. While in Spain Rafael will add to his collection of hundreds of photos taken last year. He'll use these photos as he continues to develop WebCT courses for several of his classes. In cooperation with faculty colleagues, Rafael has nearly completed development of a departmental web site.

John has been learning Photo Shop, image scanning, the Mavica Camera and PowerPoint with the goal of creating enhancements for RELS 285 Religion in America. The next step brings the syllabus to the web. The new version, to be offered Fall 2002, will focus on Religion in Chicago - a theme John is developing on paper for a new encyclopedia of the Midwest and for January's session of the American Historical Association annual meeting. To that end, John has collected electronic links to make available to students who will in turn bring new links to seminar and web. Along with a student assistant, who helped in photo scanning & editing, John has also been building a repository of images for upgrading other courses, including HUMN 230 The Baptism of Europe.

Al is especially interested in putting music, along with lecture notes, on-line or on CD for HUMN 240 Converging Hemispheres. Students will study the evolution of church music before, during, and after the Reformation period. They will hear and learn to appreciate the structure and changes in the music over time, and what the music means. Al has also been learning PowerPoint, and is researching ways of using the Internet in his courses.

Tom has been developing the Survivor's Guide to DERIVE in Calculus III. This is a collection of "how to's" and "must know's" regarding the DERIVE software, which Tom will be field-testing in the fall. He is very excited about being able to give the students specific information about how to use DERIVE in a multivariable calculus context (not just single variable as is the case in calc I and calc II). Tom has also compiled a list of web sites that are related to Fourier Analysis and/or wavelets. He has already used some of these sites in his differential equations class, and he will use them the next time he teaches Fourier Analysis and Boundary Value Problems. The sites are useful for in class demos, ideas for class projects, and reference materials. Tom's work will have immediate impact on the calculus and differential equations courses and eventually on the upper level Fourier Analysis course as well.

Summer Technology Workshops

Twenty-two faculty attended weeklong technology workshops in May. The first three days of the workshops were devoted to presentations on copyright, accessibility, imaging, Excel, PowerPoint, Dreamweaver, and WebCT. During the final two days of the workshops participants developed materials for their fall courses. After the workshops are repeated in August thirty-three faculty from fourteen different program areas will have completed training and developed material for use in their courses.

Participant comments included:

"This was extraordinarily useful! A good start in several directions. Great balance between demo and hands-on."

"The best thing about this well run workshop is to have a concentrated experience learning what other faculty members are doing "technology" and otherwise. Definitely worth my time!"