02/16/04
by John Alexander and Judith Reagan
For a version of this document in Word format click here.
Any program that supports a world-class faculty will have multiple measures of success. This is true for the Teaching + Technology Initiative (TTI). Although it is focused on helping faculty integrate technology in innovative ways into undergraduate courses, it has had significant impacts on many aspects of the careers of its Fellows, and consequently on the University as well. In many cases, the TTI Fellowship served as a catalyst in the careers of the Fellows, leading them to things they would never have explored or discovered otherwise.
Although we believe that the TTI program gave valued support to these Fellows in their burgeoning careers, the program itself did not "make" these Fellows who they are (and are becoming). Rather, by providing faculty with what they say they need most, release time and targeted, flexible support, this program attracts such high caliber Fellows as these.
Noteworthy successes include:
-- Brooks Pate (1996) won the MacArthur Genius Award in 2001. "In getting course materials ready for the TTI program I found out all of the great tricks you could make the software perform. I adopted it as my basic research tool and was able to pull off some calculations I would never have tried otherwise. That work was the basis for the award."
"The project is still going strong. The department upgraded my teaching facility this year with 20 new computers and software upgrades. They continue to be very supportive."
--Ben Ray (1995) was featured in a cover story in the Chronicle of Higher Education (May 18, 2001) for his innovative approaches to teaching. Mr. Ray has also won four grants from external sources including the NEH (worth $222K).
Mr. Ray wrote, "Truly, it's all thanks to TTI -- that's what got me started -- as it turns out, in a whopping big way."
--Glen Bull (1996). "TTI has led to many good outcomes, and I'm happy to detail some of these. Essentially what has happened since TTI is that we've secured seven million dollars in additional funding. TTI was an important component of this process. It supplies seed funding for exploration of ideas. Following my TTI grant, we got another planning grant which in turn led to a two million dollar award from the Department of Education to look at the integration of technology and teacher preparation, in the Curry School and nationally. Another grant has funded a national summit that has taken place in each of the past five years, examining topics related to technology in teaching. Core teacher education associations in science, math, and technology have participated in these summits."
--Charles Grisham (1996) has attracted over a million dollars in external grant funds from the NSF to further his TTI project.
Other successes are listed below. In many cases, the Fellows are quoted, describing the impacts that TTI has had on their careers.
Summary Numbers.
Fellows to date: 64
(Note: Breakdowns total to more than 64 due to appointments in more than one school and interdisciplinary projects.)
Architecture School 6
College of Arts & Sciences 47
Curry School of Education 3
Darden Graduate Business School 1
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences 8
School of Nursing 1
Humanities 31
Social Sciences 24
Sciences 12
Note: Former TTI Fellows will be listed in bold (followed by the Fellowship year in parenthesis). In the spring of 2003, we solicited comments from the former Fellows about these impacts. This report summarizes those data.
Aziz Sachedina (1999): "Multimedia presentation about a foreign culture has never been so effective as after introducing the technology in the classroom. The use of technology to convey the images and the sounds of the people who are part of the global community and yet remote has made teaching courses as abstract as Spiritual Dimensions of Islamic Art and Architecture possible in the classroom setting. More importantly, it has allowed an unprecedented interaction between materials, students and instructor through the newly developed technique of engaging the students in the real life experience of the peoples and cultures around the world."
David Germano (2001):"The students at the end [of the course] were easily six times the number usually asking about study abroad programs in Asia, indicating how much more they had experienced it as an immersion in a culture, a place, a people, not just some abstract ideas."
"The learning environment with its focus on rich visual data, active construction of creative products for student work, and the collaborative team environment were all huge successes. It was the by far the best experience I have had of bringing these materials into the classroom teaching environment, and thus marked a personal thresholdÉ"
Charlotte Patterson (1997). "As expected, the project took far more time than the release time I was granted, but it allowed me to realize some "teaching dreams" that I had, and the results were gratifying. The changes to my course have been very substantial, and entirely for the better. This is clearly reflected in higher course ratings from students, as well as in their informal comments and in my own feelings about the course. Briefly, the ability to integrate multimedia elements (e.g., full color pictures, charts, video clips, etc.) has enriched and deepened the lectures, and allowed for improved presentation of a wider range of material. I have also found that, over time, the integration of all these elements into PowerPoint presentations has allowed for the possibility of rapid updating, as new material becomes available."
Peter Waldman (2002) created a web accessible database that would let him input and organize over a thousand images so that he, his TAs and his students could use them during and outside of class. Secondly, he needed his students to be able to interact with, analyze and manipulate the "as built" drawings of the Historic Lawn. Finally, he needed to allow his students to research 10 cases where they could compare the blueprints of an ancient precedent to the Lawn, the Lawn itself and a modern structure that was inspired by the Lawn. Each of the cases should allow the students to compare and contrast the blueprints and to use them in their own analysis and papers. Not only were the students deeply engaged by the interactive material, but also Mr. Waldman was pleased to be offered a book contract to publish a book and accompanying CD based on this work. Mr. Waldman immediately invited his TAs to co-author the work with him.
Phyllis Leffler (2000):"Every year, students code the Oral History archives into the database we created. It provides a tool for them to learn about Oral History as a source for historical investigation. It teaches them ways to break down information into organizational components. It illustrates how to be an effective analyst from an historical perspective."
David Luebke (2001): "Between the TTI and the University Teaching Fellowship, which overlapped in time and topic in my case, I have also broadened my repertoire of teaching "tricks and techniques", and become more adventurous about my teaching. For example, when I taught Introduction to Computer Graphics (one of my main teaching responsibilities) last semester, I experimented with a pair-programming approach that grouped students and had them work in pairs (literally two students and one keyboard) on the project. This approach is known -- though not terribly common -- in the software engineering workplace, but I doubt I would have ever considered injecting such an unusual and possibly controversial technique into my teaching before the TTI and UTF awards. (Incidentally, the student response was almost uniformly positive. I learned a great deal about designing pair-programming assignments over the course of the semester. I'll certainly continue to experiment with this format in the future).
Charles Grisham (1996): "I am now experimenting with in-class use of tablet PCs for quizzing and interactive work with students in large classes. In my biochemistry class (130 students), I use a tablet with a special program I had written for it. The program allows me to select questions from a list I have created, and then display the question on the other computer that is linked to the projector (via wireless connection). With the question thus displayed, I allow the students to discuss the question among themselves, and then I choose a student from a list that is taken from the Toolkit database, and ask that student to answer the question. The tablet PC and program allow me to instantly grade the student with a few stylus clicks, and the results are stored in a database that eventually goes into my grade book. Even though the class is large, this program lets me interact with the students in a very intimate and casual way, and does all the electronic work in the background to keep track of the grading." After piloting the use of this technique for the first time in class, Mr. Grisham asked the class if they would like to continue to use this technique. The response was overwhelmingly positive. The students were definitely engaged.
Michael Fowler (2002) has used his interactive modules to good effect with his students, who have enthusiastically responded to these instructive and interactive learning objects.
Michael Levenson (1995) notes that his course is offered with "rich web resources and good presentational technologies." Mr. Levenson has accomplished his original goal for his TTI Fellowship of making his lecture class an effective and instructional "theatre."
John Dobbins (1996): The Fellowship gave him the combination of "mental flexibility and an openness that has allowed [him] to devise new teaching methods, usually involving new technology."
He cites a recent experiment: "I
admire the way in which students in architecture and in studio art see each
other's work and participate in public crits. How to achieve this in the humanities?
THE DOCUMENT CAMERA! For my Thursday undergraduate seminar the students send
me via e-mail their weekly essay by 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday. I strip off their
names and send all essays to the whole class. In the seminar I use the document
camera to go through parts of the essays and mark them up. Never before had
students seen papers being graded, especially other students' papers. The
next step was easy. I had the students prepare to use the document camera
themselves."
"The assignment was to read the
anonymous essays and to pick from them two passages that merited praise and
two that required change and improvement.
No vicious comments allowed. Each
seminar member used the document camera and everyone did a professional job.
Critiquing the work of others sharpens one's skills and seeing students closely
reading other students' work appeared to be a good experience for the group
as a whole."
Ed Ayers (1997) was recently named by the Carnegie Foundation as the U.S.
Professor of the Year at doctoral and research universities. One aspect of his teaching that was cited
by the selection committee is that he has tapped the power of emerging technologies
in teaching. His TTI project
(with co-Fellow, William Thomas) added
student scholarship to the Valley of the Shadow archive.
Improving Student Learning.
Mr. Grisham, cited above, has also observed the improved learning of his students. In his initial quizzes using his 3D and interactive modules in his Biochemistry class, he compared quiz scores on the first quiz of the course. In the past years of teaching the class, he knew to expect an average quiz score of 5 of 10 points. But after allowing the students to interact with the rich, well designed visual materials, the average for the class jumped to 8.
Jeff Holt (2000) tested outcomes in three sections of his introductory Calculus class during his TTI year. Based solely on SAT scores of the students (Students with higher SAT scores tended to drop out of the section which required more work using these new approaches.) one would predict that the students with the lower SAT scores taking the more challenging approach to the material would have done more poorly, overall. The opposite was true. The weaker students, using the additional learning aids of the online problem sets, outperformed the stronger students who were using the more conventional lecture based approach.
Re-using Materials in Other Courses.
Materials and approaches developed for a specific TTI course are used in many other courses as well. Here are some examples:
Marion Roberts (1996) has used her Salisbury archive in a USEM that focused on this archive as well as in graduate seminars.
Jeff Holt (2000) notes that additional math professors now use the online tool he used in his TTI project, with 800 students using it in the spring of '03.
Natalie Kononenko (2000) has expanded her rich website of digital materials so that she uses it now in all her courses.
Karen Ryan (1997) notes that one of her colleagues uses the materials she developed during her Fellowship in teaching one of his courses.
Larry Richards (1995) says that he now uses technology extensively and effectively in all his courses. In addition, the materials he developed during his Fellowship are being used now by another team of instructors who have taken over teaching that course since 2000.
Winning External Funding.
Alf Weaver (2002), though his TTI Fellowship was only completed last year, has already secured two external grants totaling $280K.
Jeff Holt (2000) has secured two grants from the NSF.
Larry Richards (1995) has won a $100K grant from the NSF.
Kirk Martini (1995) has secured a grant from the NSF to develop a software tool to allow students to interact with structures in an engineering environment that is both highly precise and intuitive.
The Mellon Foundation has expanded the work of a number of TTI Fellows:
--Alan Howard's (1997) students, "past and present, are completing an interesting project, creating a cd_rom of electronic resources from UVA in American Literature to be distributed via USIS to schools and universities in 2nd and 3rd world countries who have some minimal computing ability but almost no infrastructure for using the internet."
--David Germano (2001) has used funds to expand his course materials and to establish the first learning community in the Digital Library.
--Marion Roberts' (1996) Salisbury collection is being moved into the Digital Library as part of its permanent collection.
--Steve Plog (2002) has funding to develop a digital research archive for the Chaco Canyon region of the Pueblo Southwest. The funding will provide support through 2006.
Other external sources of funding have been won:
--Natalie Kononenko (2000) won a grant from the Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies.
--Jorg Liebeherr (1995) has external support from Litton-Fibercom and Virginia's CIT.
Winning Internal Grants.
Sarah Farrell (1997): "Since my fellowship year, I continued to receive grants for technology related work including a Faculty Senate grant, a Summer USEM award, and a couple or three Alumni Association Innovative Teaching Projects. I think the TTI also contributed greatly to the development of my University Seminar, for which I received the first USEM All-University Teaching Award. It is called, "Be the Spider, not the Fly: Evaluating Health Care Resources on the Internet."
"So, after all that, I was in the pool of candidates eligible for the first University Shaughnessy Fellowships, for which I received a semester research sabbatical for my technology intervention program. I was then accepted into the NIMH/NINR mentored scientist award program and have been named Director of Technology for the Rural Nursing Health Center grant. I also am in the fourth year supervising our School TTSP program, which has been very successful."
In sum, the 64 Fellows have won at least 16 other internal sources of support (not counting USEMs and research sabbaticals). 10 have been IATH Fellows. Four have been University Teaching Fellows (or its predecessor, the Lilly Teaching Fellows.) Three of the eight faculty who have held the NEH Distinguished Teaching Professorships have been former TTI Fellows.
Integrating Research and Teaching More Closely.
--Cristina Della Coletta (2000) was recently able to produce an article for publication more quickly than she would have thought possible because of the rich archive of materials she had assembled for her course.
--Phyllis Leffler (2000) is fusing the work of students who have built and enhanced the database on the Oral History of UVa to create a digital resource that can be used by researchers.
--Dave Luebke (2001) comments, "The TTI has made me much more serious about integrating my teaching and research. I was already good about bringing my research into my teaching, e.g. illustrating algorithms in classes that I taught by using examples from my research. But I now also look for opportunities to advance my research through my teaching efforts, seeking out courses to teach and new assignments, projects, and formats for existing courses that help focus student interest on problems that also interest me in my capacity as a researcher. The result, I think, has been a more lively and connected experience for the students; for me, I have been able to identify and attract top undergraduates to participate in my research projects."
Jorg Liebeherr (1995) has also used the TTI experience to "creatively combine my research interests with my teaching interests." He further notes that his TTI exploration "stimulated interest in multimedia research."
Enhancing Graduate Students' Professional Development.
Alan Howard's (1997) American Studies Program graduates are moving into an emerging field generally referred to as "Humanities Computing." The programs most recent graduates are working as web designers, webmasters and content specialists in places like The World Wildlife Fund, the Museum of Jewish History, The Center for Digital History here at UVA, and the Admissions Office at George Washington University.
Glen Bull's (1996) work has achieved national recognition for its many successes in training future teachers and in integrating technology skills and instructional design skills into their portfolios.
Steve Plog (2002) and Dick Sundberg (2003) are currently supervising students who won grants from Microsoft's "Professorate of the Future" program.
Beyond these programs, there have been a significant number of collaborators on TTI projects (whether as paid wage laborers, trainees, or as undergraduate students who were taking the course) who have been helped in their careers by the skills they mastered in doing this work.
Ed Ayers and William Thomas had students who attributed the digital materials they had created in their course with the jobs they secured immediately after graduation.
David Luebke had students in his course use the digital movies created there to help them enter "top programs in the country (USC film school, the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon, Savannah College of Art and Design, etc.)."
Serving the University.
A significant number of TTI Fellows have assumed roles serving the University--before, during and after their Fellowship year. It is noteworthy, for example, that of the 16 at-large members of the current University Committee on Information Technology, 11 are former TTI Fellows (2 of the remaining members are Grad Students who are currently serving as TTSPs). In addition, the Faculty Senate's representative on UCIT is also a former Fellow.
--Departmental Chairs. Robert Hueckstedt, Larry Goedde, Kandioura DramŽ, Bill Sherman, Peter Waldman, Roland Simon, David Sapir, Michael Gorman, Michael Levenson, Michael Fowler, Karen Ryan.
--Deans. Ed Ayers, Karen Ryan, Jeff Holt, Bill Sherman, Rachel Most, Steve Plog, Dick Sundberg
--University Level Chairs. Charles Grisham(UCIT), Ed Ayers(Faculty Senate), Kirk Martini(ACAC), Bob Ribando(ACAC), Janet Horne(ACAC)
--Chief Technical Officers: Charles Grisham, Earl Mark, Sarah Farrell
--Program Director, Principal, etc.: Ed Ayers(Virginia Center for Digital History) Lou Bloomfield(Hereford College), Alan Howard(American Studies), Phyllis Leffler (Center for Public History),Wallace Reed (GIS Center), William Thomas (Virginia Center for Digital History) , John Unsworth (IATH)
Supporting Publications and Presentations.
Bob Ribando (1995) has "added close to 20 papers and presentations to my c.v. based on the TTI stuff." In addition, Mr. Ribando has both a book and a CD published by McGraw-Hill.
Charles Grisham (1996) also notes, "A CD-Rom based on my TTI project was published in 1999 by Harcourt (now Thomson Learning) and our E-book and 3D virtual lab both are becoming published products with Thomson."
Charlotte Patterson (1997). "Since completion of my TTI project, there have been some offshoots. After finding out how well the video clips work in my course, I wanted to make them available to other instructors (and to their students). Under the auspices of a 1998-1999 University of Virginia Faculty Senate Initiative on Excellent Teaching small grant to develop multimedia resources for this class, I attempted to shoot my own video sequences of new material that I wanted to use in class. We used several of these video sequences one year, and found that video (especially sound) quality was not high enough to satisfy student expectations. I then turned to professional video, which required that a publishing company be involved in order to pay the substantial royalties involved. Eventually, in 2000, my Multimedia Courseware for Child Development (a 2 CD set, with video clips and relevant pedagogical material) was published by McGraw-Hill. It was the first product of its kind for the large Introductory Child Development classes that are taught at colleges and universities around the country. When it appeared, it was written up in the Chronicle on Higher Education. Today, only three years later, almost every major publisher of textbooks for this course offers a product like it. Thus, students who enroll in the course today are likely to have an experience that is considerably enriched by these new materials. I am grateful that UVa's TTI program allowed me the time and resources to participate in these developments."
Ben Ray (1995) has had two journal publications and presentations at several academic conferences based on this work.
Jorg Liebeherr (1995) has a journal article and a licensed system in process to become a commercial product.
Ed Ayers and Charles Grisham have written a featured article in the Nov/Dec '03 issue of Educause.
Michael Levenson (1995) notes that he has "assembled a group of 50 scholars of Victorian London. We meet annually and rely on technology to publish proceedings of our yearly conference."
Compelling Web Publications.
Bob Ribando, gets visitors to his website from 60 different countries each month. In addition, roughly 1 Gigabyte of information based on the TTI work is downloaded monthly. Finally, Google provides an easy measure of the visibility of these web materials, where his site comes up as #1 for heat transfer spreadsheets and in the top five for heat transfer software.
Michael Fowler's (2002) applets and flash enabled demonstrations consistently come up first in google searches.
Kirk Martini's (2002) dynamically collects and analyzes data on all traffic on his website by IP number. Thus, he can tell which universities have visited his site.
All of these Fellows and many others regularly give permission for faculty at other colleges and universities to use their materials in their colleague's courses.
The program itself was investigated as a model and emulated by Oxford University and by Cornell.
Collaborating with Colleagues from Other Universities.
Dick Sundberg (2003) is actively involved in hosting a site where computational chemistry data will be visualized. So far, every computational chemist that he has approached has readily given permission for him to use their published data to visualize the highly volatile transition states of the molecules that are being analyzed.
Brian Balogh (1996), in addition to his active collaboration with Piedmont Virginia Community College has outlined a grant proposal that would make UVa the center of a Digital History Roundtable with some of the leading historians in his field.
Natalie Kononenko (2000) has colleagues at other Universities who use her web site in their teaching. "It has been used for everything from folklore (my field), to history (appearance of traditional house, clothes, etc.), to language teaching (motion verb practice in conjunction with negotiating the 3-D house)."
National and International Conferences.
Fellows and the TTI program itself have been featured in presentations a numerous National and International Conferences.
Here are just a few noteworthy examples:
--Bob Ribando will serve on a panel at the "ASME International Mechanical Engineering Conference and Exposition this November based on my TTI work."
--Tom Bloom will present features of his TTI course at the "USIT Creative Teaching Forum that convenes at the National Conference of the United States Institute of Theatre Technology."
--John Dobbins participated in a "panel on teaching the ancient city at the national meetings of the Archaeological Institute of America."
--John Alexander was invited to be a keynote speaker on the TTI program at two international conferences at Oxford University.
--UVa hosted the international conference of the NMC Consortium in 2000 that featured TTI project work.
--UVa hosted the international conference of the AHC/ALLC in 1999 that featured TTI project work.
--UVa has been invited to present "Best Practices" presentations on TTI projects every year since 1996 at the annual national meeting of the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative.
Citations in Publications.
The publications and web documents of TTI Fellows are frequently cited in national and international publications. For example:
Ben Ray, has collected the various reviews of his Salem Witchcraft Archives in the following url:
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/salem/press.html
In addition, he was featured Saturday 11/8/03 in a [New Delhi] Hindustan Times article on his Salem Witch Trials Web site, headlined:
"LIFE IN CYBERIA/ THE WICKED WITCH OF THE WEB STRIKES AGAIN"
By Sanjay Trehan of the [New Delhi] Hindustan Times.
Mr. Ray was also featured in the cover story in the Chronicle of Higher Education, May 18, 2001, "Toward the Bookless Campus."
Another reference to UVa's leadership in this area came from
Stanley Katz, "In Information Technology, Don't Mistake a Tool for a Goal.
" Chronicle
of Higher Education. June 15, 2001.
Mr. Luebke's TTI supported course "generated some positive publicity for the department and university; we had a big public showing of student projects (videos showcasing computer-generated imagery) in Scott Stadium, and made headlines in both university and community newspapers. Other headlines have followed, for example when one of the student projects won a local film festival, or covering another of the students on their graduation."
Brian Balogh (1996) and Phyllis Leffler (2000) have used an active collaboration with students under their direction to create a collaborative website used in another course--The View from Here:
http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~hius316/
In addition, Mr. Balogh has offered his Viewing America site for a course being taught at Piedmont Virginia Community College.
Mr. Balogh is actively seeking grant funds for UVa to host "digital history roundtables" that will support a political history course to be designed by leading post-WWII historians and taught at their home institutions: UVa, Penn, Columbia, Harvard and San Diego State. The roundtables will encourage active collaboration by these professors who will share modules of digital materials, which will be used by their colleagues in their respective courses.
Alf Weaver (2002) has just agreed to collaborate in a project with UVa Telemedicine and Virginia Tech on work that grew from his TTI project.
Will Thomas' Virginia Center for Digital History is, of course, a magnet for such collaborations.
Larry Richards (1995) has co-authored a proposal with five other schools based on his TTI work. He is currently working on several other grant proposals that derive from his Fellowship.
Dick Sundberg's current TTI project is planned to enable computational chemists to populate his site with their published research results. This project therefore has implications for other themes developed in this report, such as the active and creative interaction between research and teaching.
An early metaphor that described the TTI program was that it discovered the impediments to innovation in teaching and removed them. The program has done much more than this as it has made a variety of contributions to improving the infrastructure that the faculty depends on for these types of innovative approaches to teaching.
Scalable Tools.
User Collection Tool. Programming by Jack Kelly, Digital Media Lab.
Design History: Based on designs of evolving prototypes by the Instructional Technology GroupÑmost notably by Jeff Hollier.
Projects used: Currently used by seven faculty.
Purpose: Allows faculty to access, mark up and publish instructional and research materials stored in a database through a web interface.
QuillDriver. Programming by Ed Garrett, Digital Media Lab. Video and Audio Archive programming by Travis McCauley and Jack Kelly.
Design History: Based on design and prototyping of David Germano and Michael Tuite.
Projects used: David Germano, David Gies and internal library projects.
Purpose: Allows the control of all aspects of digital video instructional projects that require text to be tied to the video.
Prototype Tools.
Many of the TTI programs have depended on a prototyped tool. Here are some of the more noteworthy of those prototypes:
e-class. Design and programming by Bryan Wright, Physics Dept.
Project used: Bloomfield (Currently being considered by a number of A&S faculty.
Purpose: Supports paperless administration of large lecture classes. All homework, tests, papers and quizzes are submitted, distributed to TAs and Graders, and archived online.
e-folio. Design and programming by Yitna Firdyiwek, Instructional Technology Group.
Projects used: Germano, Figgins and as many as 12 other faculty per semester. Rated a top priority by the ACAC two years ago as a complement to the Toolkit.
Purpose: Supports the portfolio method of teaching where student work and group work is supported through a web interface.
sourcecat. Design and programming by Anne Ingram (in consultation with Yitna Firdyiwek and Jeff Hollier), Instructional Technology Group.
Projects used: Leffler, Kononenko, Hueckstedt, DramŽ.
Purpose: Supports uses of video, audio, images and text in classes and allows students to access metadata outside of class.
digicol. Design and programming by Jeff Hollier, Instructional Technology Group.
Project used: Waldman
Purpose: Supports faculty needs to mark up and arrange data to conform to their understanding of the material. Allows a dynamic database interface that can be rearranged on demand.
easy pieces. Design and programming by Will Rourk, Digital Media Lab.
Project used: Waldman
Purpose: Supports the visual display of layered information (in this case, blueprints of Lawn buildings) so that students can investigate and interact with complex visual information.
case comparison. Design and programming by Will Rourk, Digital Media Lab.
Project used: Waldman
Purpose: Supports the visual display of layered information (in this case, blueprints of Architectural cases compared with the Lawn) so that students can investigate and interact with complex visual information.
Investigating and Adopting Strategic Tools.
Several TTI projects have depended on the adoption of tools that had been created elsewhere, sometimes at other Universities.
WebWorks. Used by Jeff Holt for its extensive archive of problem sets, WebWorks features the ability to create individual variation for the students who are working on the problem sets online.
Mallard. Used by Tomoko Marshall and separately by the Spanish Department, Mallard supports the drills necessary for the mastery of foreign language skills.
Evolving New Approaches to Infrastructure.
David Luebke's project involved the negotiation of an educational site license for Maya and Renderman, two software packages that set the standard in the field of digital video. Mr. Luebke agreed to have those software packages loaded in the Digital Media Lab, where his students could use them, but also where they could be more fully used by other students as well.
A significant outcome of the TTI program was the realization that UVa needed to create a way of providing discipline specific, local support for the easiest to use tools. It also needed to boost the base level skills of the faculty so they could take full advantage of the institution's evolving infrastructure. The result was the Teaching + Technology Support Partners (TTSP) program. Currently in its fourth year, this program awards funds competitively to create TAships in departments. A graduate student position is in place for three years, helping to establish a new culture within the department of comfort with and ability to use these new tools and approaches. There are currently 10 departments with TAs in this highly successful development of the TTI program. (The funds for this program were identified by reducing the number of TTI Fellows from 12 to 4 annually)
TTI has had a positive impact on undergraduate education in supporting faculty in the development of scores of courses that employ technology to deepen and enrich learning. Undergraduates who come here with strong technological skills can expand them. Students who come with less exposure to technology can develop those capabilities.
The TTI program has produced faculty capable of articulating their needs and desires for infrastructure development to the Library, ITC, and the University administration. That conversation will be ongoing and sometimes arduous. We should continue to develop a cadre of faculty who can take an active and effective role in this essential process.
Faculty desire for participation in the program remains strong. In a typical year, there are double the number of applicants as there are fellowships.
In the words of former fellow, Glen Bull , "TTI has had many good outcomes, but we haven't yet won the war so that everyone can now go home. TTI helps fill the gap between exemplars in the uses of technology such as Ed Ayers and Jerry McGann [the first two IATH Fellows] and regular faculty. UVa is positioned as a national leader, so it's important that we continue to support faculty in the development of teaching with technology, not leave them behind."