Increasing Faculty Participation in Sakai and OSP

Session 059

Darren Cambridge, Phil Long, and faculty members involved in OSP TBA

Thursday
8:30 am-9:45 am
Room: Rm404

Session Abstract

Faculty have been instrumental in setting the the Open Source Portfolio's priorities and in developing its functional requirements so that the resulting system serves their needs in the classroom. This session will examine the case for faculty involvement in Sakai and OSP, barriers to meaningful participation, and strategies for engaging interests of faculty members.

Presentation Materials

The presentation is attached. Type T to view the outline view, which includes references to the texts Darren mentioned.

	Name	Size	Creator (Last Modifier)	Creation Date	Last Mod Date	Comment
	facultyinsakai.zip	44 kB	Darren Cambridge	Dec 08, 2005	Dec 08, 2005	Darren and Phil's Presentation - type T to see the references in the outline view

Additional Information

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Phil and Darren will add our notes on what you've said here. If you get here before us, please feel free to start things off with your own comments.

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Audience Notes (add your own ...)

Darren:
It's crucial nvolving faculty in the development of educational software, as their use of tools often entails workarounds outside the design of the tool; capturing these practices is important. We should have these key users involved in design decisions. In order to understand how people use software, we need to look at multiple levels, which requires a deep knowledge on how tools work in practice. FOlks in IT-specific roles don't always have access to that kind of expertise

Faculty have a strong discipline specific lens on the whole world which is difficult to capture;
they are also strongly influenced by other faculty, so recommendataions from
influential discipline members are important in increasing faculty involvement.

SoTA: the scholarship of teaching and learning treats teaching as scholarship - i.e., knowledge
of teaching is scholarly. We need to change the culture of institutions so that this kind of activity counts.

There are lessons from SoTL which we can apply to geting faculty ivolved. For example, OSP had significant input from faculty in the functional requirements group. This helped to figure out the vision for teaching and assessments and translate into requirements. The idea is to blend institutional requirements with what the software should do in order to do its job.

We need to make open source a process that mirrors the process of scholarly communication - more openness in communication.

We need to recognize that different contributions to software require different
(technical) competence levels - faculty could contribute to user interface design, templates ...

Phil:

Involving faculty directly in development may not be helpful, but not involving
them at all may lead to just another ineffective tool. We need to find the right way to involve faculty.