Toward a Mature Full-cycle Professional Development and Support Model for Educational Technology in Higher Education

Over the past five years, the Academic Technology Services department at Northeastern University has grown from three staff members maintaining a few core educational technology tools to a six-person team maintaining a comprehensive global learning management environment and operating under a full-cycle faculty professional development and support model. The result is increased adoption of our teaching and learning environment, which supports customized, lifelong, and experiential learning. In this session, members of the team will talk through a number of service management processes and faculty professional development programs responsible for increased adoption of educational technology tools. Specific topics covered will include best practices for the vetting of tools, adoption, support, training, consultation, measurement, outreach, and governance processes in higher education.

Attendees of the session will additionally learn about organizational and process changes at Northeastern that have facilitated progress toward a mature full-cycle professional development and support model. The presentation will highlight key steps to developing a robust but flexible educational technology portfolio that meets the needs of faculty teaching in a variety of online, on-ground, and hybrid contexts. Particular focus will be placed on seeking and integrating faculty and student input into educational technology service management and policy.

We will talk through the importance of creating structured outreach opportunities such as our annual TEXPO: Technology and Teaching Conference, which provides faculty the opportunity to represent the technology that they use to other faculty. We will also talk about our Learning Management Environment Steering Committee, which is comprised of faculty from each college and representatives from Academic Technology Services, and which identifies opportunities and provides recommendations to the CIO regarding the tools and functionality of University-wide learning technologies as well as related policy.

These outreach and technology governance aspects of our model ensure that we are considering our faculty’s and students’ needs early and often throughout the entire cycle of technology adoption. Faculty professional development opportunities are not confined to attending a training—faculty are encouraged to seek out their own educational technologies, participate in educational technology governance, and develop their knowledge of technologies by representing the tool to other faculty.

Interactive portions of the presentation will support attendees as they assess the strengths and opportunities for growth of their own institution’s professional development and support models. In addition to the slides in the presentation that will map out our model, we will provide templates for various steps in the professional development and support model. These templates will guide interactive discussion portions of the presentation and will provide a departure point for participants to develop their own professional development and support models.

After attending this presentation, attendees will be able to:

• Define and explain the benefits of a full cycle professional development and support model for educational technology in higher education

• Understand the role of professional development and support in building a customized teaching and learning environment

• Explain and evaluate methods for measuring the adoption and success of educational technology

• Cite a use case and provide benchmarks which will help attendees advocate for increased training and professional development resources at their own institution

• Identify levers in their own environments for increasing tool adoption

• Evaluate their own institution’s approach to technology governance and identify opportunities for strengthening stakeholder involvement