Yale Bulletin and Calendar

October 6, 2000

Volume 29, Number 5

Letter from the Provost:
Support for Teaching with Technology at Yale

In conjunction with the announcement of the new University Alliance for Life-Long Learning, which will greatly expand Yale's use of new technologies in the arts and sciences for both teaching and learning, Provost Alison F. Richard sent the following letter to members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) outlining other initiatives in instructional technology in those areas that are already underway.

Guided by the thoughtful recommendations of faculty advisory committees in recent years, the University has invested heavily in infrastructure and support for information technology in order to serve the needs of faculty and students. These investments continue, encompassing teaching, learning, and research. The purpose of this memorandum is to report to you on recent progress and future plans in the broad area of instructional technology.

The foundation of our support for instructional technology is a broad and reliable infrastructure that enables faculty to design, develop and deliver instructional materials and to communicate with students using electronic methods. The campus network now supports more than 15,000 connections and 16,000 email accounts. Faculty posted more than 1,000 course syllabi online during the last academic year and in more than 400 courses used the classes.yale.edu course web tool to distribute materials to students and receive coursework from them. Last year over 6,200 students and instructors registered to use classes.yale.edu. Over 30 of the 100 classrooms scheduled by the FAS Registrar now provide built-in data and media projection facilities, another 30 offer access via portable equipment, and we are moving rapidly to upgrade additional classrooms in response to faculty requests. Several media service centers across campus offer an array of digital media support, including the conversion of materials into digital format. The new Video Production Studio enables Yale faculty to appear with increasing frequency on network television. The professional schools have access to the same software tools and services and have greatly expanded their classroom media and technology facilities.

Faculty advisory committees have emphasized the importance of such broad-based programs and we continue to expand these services. At the same time, recent committees have recommended that Yale complement this effort with a new set of services targeted at more ambitious and innovative projects. In the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, three initiatives take up this challenge: the Lumpkin Instructional Innovations Grants, the Center for Media Initiatives and related media centers, and the new Alliance of Yale, Oxford, Princeton and Stanford which will provide educational programming for alumni of our schools.

Begun as a joint experiment between the University Library and Information Technology Services (ITS) and now supported by the Lumpkin Family Foundation and University funds, the Lumpkin Instructional Innovation Grants program provides 5 to 10 grants each year to instructors who wish to rethink or develop new approaches to teaching and learning using instructional technology. Recent grants have supported such projects as creation of a virtual concert hall for students in music, a student -controlled simulation of simple ecological systems, and electronic publishing of ancient texts, maps and images. The program is supported by staff in ITS Academic Media & Technology who help grant recipients design and develop their projects, and also disseminate advances across the campus through updates to classes.yale.edu and other campus-wide tools and techniques.

The Center for Media Initiatives (CMI) creates a "platform for innovation" at the highest levels of media and technology design and production. At present it provides funding for three to five faculty projects a year with full support by staff media specialists. The CMI Faculty Media Laboratory is available to instructors throughout the University, and now supports more than a dozen instructional projects. A faculty Project Advisory Board is in place and actively recruiting a full-time director, after which it will develop application and peer-review processes for selecting CMI projects.

The CMI is part of a growing engagement with the use of electronic media for teaching, learning and research at Yale. Other Yale entities also exploring the new media include: the School of Medicine's ITS-Med Web Design and Development (which includes the former Center for Advanced Media Instruction), the Center for Language Study, the Digital Media Center for the Arts, the Music and Technology Center, and IT support groups located in several of the professional schools.

The newly announced Alliance with Oxford, Princeton and Stanford provides an unprecedented opportunity for Yale to work with a few peers to explore and develop our capabilities in instructional media and technology. The Alliance complements the role of the CMI, providing an external focus on serving alumni, but using the production facilities on the member campuses (such as the CMI and related media centers at Yale). Already, Yale has held a small technical conference with the Alliance schools to establish contacts and begin to share tools and techniques. In addition to serving Yale alumni in new ways educationally, the Alliance has the potential to inform and stretch our on-campus media and technology facilities, knowledge and practices.

The Alliance, CMI and the Lumpkin Program work closely with other media and technology units at Yale to identify successful instructional techniques and the best practices, and to generalize and disseminate them across the campus. ITS Academic Media & Technology will foster this communication by bringing together instructors who are actively developing new projects, and the staff who provide technical and creative support.

We have much to learn about the effectiveness of the new tools and techniques becoming available to us as teachers. Much remains to be accomplished, moreover, to ensure that the tools which prove useful are widely available on campus. I doubt that all projects in these programs will be successful, and we will be challenged even to decide what it means to be successful. I welcome your engagement as teachers in addition to your advice about the appropriate use of IT resources as we explore this territory together.

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Letter from the Provost: Support for Teaching with Technology at Yale

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