December 10th, 2008 Accordiacs meeting --- flip chart notes

Steve's Notes

Accomplishments

• Central repository for info
• Brought people together re image tools and services
• Brought people together who have mutual interests/concerns
• Involving an academic department in collaborative projects, e.g., in the SOD project, was useful as the department saw the larger picture
• Completed SOD, and the findings formed input for the DOS project
• Provided clarity for some services
• Forum to publicize services

Gaps

• Find low cost/free opportunities
• Expand communication & outreach strategies ==> particularly faculty
• Showcase innovations & services in other ways, e.g., through teaching and learning spaces
• Better techniques for needs assessment
• Departmental academic administrators don't deal with educational technology/academic computing on a daily basis, and hence don't know about ACCORD
• Focus on current service efficiencies & collaborate better outside of meetings
• Communication model IT-Partners?
• Share methods, tools, processes better
• Share info on outside solutions
• Library of results of experiments/tools/solutions
• "Sub-committees" that could work on comparing different technologies, e.g., blogs and wikis

Group 1 Notes

What can ACCORD do for me?

• Help me assess faculty needs and demands both in general (make and keep list) and by topic
• Develop next level of image strategy and services
• Central repository of information on tools, both internal and external
• Sessions with faculty on how specific tools and technologies might be used in courses
• Coordinate and provide structure for strategic thinging and planning across systems and groups
• Provide more alignment

What can I do for ACCORD?

• Work with faculty to bring assessment and need information to ACCORD
• Presentations and information sharing on specific tools and faculty ideas for using those tools in teaching (e.g. voice recognition)
• Help faculty document best practices and share with group and other faculty
  • Case studies
  • Feed into a repository
  • Bite size chunks of information (low barrier for participation)

What should ACCORD spend time on in 2009?

• Define problems, brainstorm solutions, and implement in the area of knowledge management and a shared repository of information
  • Best practices
  • Experiences and ideas
  • Technologies and services (internal and external)
  • Try to reduce duplication and effort
  • Improve efficiency
  • Develop information resource for faculty and support providers looking to try new things
  • Help faculty translate solutions across domains
• Develop needs assessment strategy for faculty use of educational technology, plan an implementation
  • Few faculty can map teaching challenges and issues to technology needs
  • New needs may be driven by a new undergraduate curriculum
  • What infrastructure is needed (i.e. not just innovation support)
• Develop best practices for projects and to inform project coordination across the innovation, service, and infrastructure divides
• Inventory, catalog, and perhaps aggregate various databases with information on research projects, experiments, UROP projects, and so on

Group 2 Notes

What can ACCORD do for me?

• Patrons come for advice on content and technology -> where should they go?
• Keep me aware of new developments
• Form central themes across the Libraries, IS&T, and DUE
• Identify synergistic efforts
• Knowing what's going on - to help direct people
• Redundant services?
• More ways to let the faculty community know about what we're doing
• Alignment and integration of services from offices a department deals with: "one stop" concept, e.g., currently a department deals with the following individually for different aspects concerning courses/subjects:
  • Registrar
  • Stellar
  • Educational technology usage in the course curriculum
  • OCW
    Caveat: This should not create an "extra layer" as that would slow down the process.
• Provide departments with a better understanding of teaching and learning related processes affecting faculty
  • Provide data
  • For example, the process of publication of content and ways to collect them
• Software that supports research should be looked at as that impacts the teaching & learning process, e.g., the Libraries support software used by faculty for research purposes:
  • Is there a way to "centralize" information about such software?
  • Is there a way to "centralize" infrastructural support?
• Authentication and Authorization:
  The scenario is changing as more and more new systems are coming on board — how can this information be shared?

What can I do for ACCORD?

• Be part of the sharing in a more formal way, and share beyond just the Accordiacs meetings
• Share ideas and thoughts at Accordiacs meetings on experiments being tried out or on experiments being proposed and invite participation
• Identify group projects that are tangible, that Accordiacs can work on
• Showcase instances of successful educational technology applications that have benefitted faculty. Is it possible to do the showcasing in physical spaces?
• Have conversations around MIT priority initiatives, such as the student systems project.
• Help Accordiacs understand departmental academic
• Share OCW's strong service model and strong faculty relationships
• Bring my ability to participate in projects
• OCW has done considerable data collection and analysis on the 2000 odd subjects taught at MIT — how do we make that available to others?
• The Libraries have an internal communication infrastructure — use that as a vehicle for sharing
  • Utilize the teaching and training facilities run by the Libraries
  • There are other people in the Libraries that we can involve
• Structure the role of an Accordiac into individual job descriptions and create accountability through including this work in performance reviews
• Bring CET and sponsor concerns and opportunities to Accordiacs
• Bring in solutions and partnerships from outside MIT

What should ACCORD spend time on in 2009?

• Carefully select projects so that they bring tangible value to Accordiacs and to delivering on ACCORD's mission
• Identify other possible partnerships and expand to include other departments, academic and otherwise as appropriate.
• Communicate, communicate, communicate:
  • Beyond occasional meetings
  • Create a more formal presentation schedule, e.g., an annual calendar
• Evaluate impact of what we are doing
• Communicate publicly like ITAG does
• Identify other areas and initiate collaborative projects of the Image Tools kind
• Share concrete evidence through case studies of projects undertaken, e.g. the image tools work or the Stellar-OCW-Dspace project
• Do more outreach — we need better communication about what the group has done
• Develop an evaluation framework and model for assessing the impact of ACCORD
• Showcase work done by the Accordiacs and through joint projects, e.g., the University of Michigan has a program called "Faculty Explores" — this may not be the correct name
• Identify "15" faculty members at the beginning of the year to understand what they've heard about what ACCORD does, and then ask them that question again at the end of the year.

Group 3 Notes

What can ACCORD do to help me?

• Help me reach faculty (faculty don't know about my service)
• Make sure this info gets to faculty without me having to be filter
• Educate me about list of services so I can be more effective w/faculty
• Help me deal with "between the crack" cases, e.g. I have to install some special software that involves telephony, network, Athena.
• A place to go that is definitive about what exists ==> Authoritative (vs. comprehensive), e.g. video services, where to get software
• Help me meet my faculty needs beyond "one-offs" ==> Who can help? Approve?
• Provide mechanism to do collaborative evaluation of tools and communicate

What can I do to help ACCORD?

• Help ACCORD understand 3rd party UNIX software
• Help spread word about accessibility, i.e. importance of , available tools, etc.
• Help ACCORD understand what Sloan faculty are saying
• Share my experience, area of expertise, tell a mini use-case, e.g. maybe do 6-minute mini presentation
• Those of us who have been around a long time can help others figure out how to get things done
• I am willing to facilitate small groups in meeting or special project

What should ACCORD spend time on in 2009?

• Find effective way to communicate with faculty (2-way) XXX
• Repository of things people have tried, with annotations and comments XXX
• "Video podcasting tools" project a la image tools XX
• Update everything done in past year, things change so fast - don't let things get out of date (e.g. image tools documentation) XXX
• Find ways to educate others about what we do (at meetings, between meetings) XXX
• Is there a way to connect ACCORD with IT Partners to solve short-term problems (we are all in IT Partners) X