Ten Reasons Why

NIGHMARES

* copyright and ownership
* ownership in the sense of trying to include a collaborative approach, resulting in "shared effort" ownership issues
* image database copyright
* copyright issues with tenure
* various ranges of technology expertise among participants
* part of the reasons people don't know what a learning object is is because experts are still fighting over the definition
* LOVCOP (sp?) -- virtual community of learning object theorists
* faculty development retention
* software compatibility -- getting things to work together
* why should I invest so much of myself in this?
* how to present this to a tenure committee
* perceived "waste of money"
* scope/scalability of
* technology infrastructure stability issues, when the technology fails. (The example given was WebCT, though there were some mumblings about Blackboard as well ;-)
* people who present the technology don't have a vision of what it is to be an educator ... technology people who aren't educators (Colleen: by nature, they're very kinesthetic)
* lack of interest; luddites
* lack of context for using it effectively
* release time for faculty for LO dev but also for professional development
* computer literacy level; faculty need for support to use high end tool
* expectation that LOs must be for higher ed
* "less work to do things the way I've done them before"

[Comment: this is a very faculty intensive session and a lot of the "nightmare" comments center around frequent faculty complaints about not having enough time to use technology effectively]

* faculty's lack of a desire to learn and improve their technology
* lack of incentives
* need to also remove the disincentives
* suspicion of technology
* lack of research base to demonstrate success
* people get turned onto MERLOT, but don't continue to use it. Lots of excuses....
response: boils down to having a culture on campus that supports it, from the administration down
* faculty don't want to incorporate other people's content
* my response: actually faculty always incorporate other content (e.g. textbooks); it's just a new way to incorporate other content (e.g. aggregating granular content)

DREAMS (SUCCESSES)

* mini-grant program to support faculty

* U. System of Georgia ... online courses are developed collaboratively by a team (faculty, ID person, project coordinator)....courses are then adoptable by institutions that want to use them .... expecting faculty members to do it all isn't scalable

[Comment: wow! what a great approach!]

* librarians as resources
* scaffolding to provide just-in-time training
* State of North Carolina -- train the trainer workshop to train people on MERLOT....faculty had a peer-to-peer teacher training project (Western Carolina University).
* tenure guidelines were re-written.
* intellectual property as detrimental -- very good comments that I didn't capture becuase I was busy trying to get my
* train the trainer mdoel with release time, modeling best practices in professional development
* Marco Polo -- learning object site
* my comment: following up on intellectual property, I plugged Creative Commons.
* Article in Educause Review on new millenial students [haven't seen it, will need to check it out]
* course management systems as an example of what faculty have embraced....
* try to sell instructional support staff more on MERLOT