Texas State: Faculty to Faculty Testimonials
When I was at Texas State and we were launching our migration from Blackboard to Sakai, one of the things we realized very early on is that our social and political challenges were far more important than our technical ones. Unfortunately there is a widespread tendency among instructional technologists to think that their job is about technology when really, that’s beside the point. Instructional technology is about instruction!
To this end, we put instructors first and foremost in our minds. If you want to be devil’s advocate, you might ask “If you’re so smart, why don’t you put students first?” It’s because we know the students are in good hands with our faculty. If we can take care of the faculty, they will take care of the students. In an academic technology department, instructors are the reason we come to work every day.
Sadly (though for a number of good reasons), faculty don’t trust technologists all that much. Too often we’re giving them solutions in search of problems. At Texas State we were looking for ways to earn trust; we knew we weren’t going to be able to take it for granted.
Faculty do trust each other, and that insight was the source of one of my favorite things we did on the project: faculty to faculty video testimonials of our Sakai system.
We paid visits to some of our best champions and early adopters and let them do the talking for us. Follow this link to see the results.
What do you think?
Comments
This is fantastic, Zach. I love the testimonials and the emphasis on the non-technological issues. Hats off to you and everyone at Texas State!
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