Encouraging use of new technologies among business faculty

One of the outcomes of the March 5 brown bag seminar “The Reluctant Technologist” was the idea for a Technology Initiatives Task Force within the College of Business at Benedictine University.

A few of the issues identified at the seminar as obstacles to faculty adoption of new technologies were time, trust, teaching, and training. To clarify some of the issues: Time…who has extra time to explore something new, with no guarantee of success? Trust…what about the faculty member who tries something new and does not meet with success? Teaching…how does a faculty member identify a new technology or a new application appropriate to his/her discipline? Training…just-in-time and directly applicable to a course.

The objective of the task force would be to address these. We have done a bit of brainstorming and hope to organize our thoughts in the next couple of weeks. We would like to kick off our work with a brown bag lunch during April or May in which we would like to pose these questions to interested faculty:

• What kind of help would you like from us?
• Should we help with instructional technology, social media, and/or Office software?

We have identified at least two strategies:

• Technology tips of the week to include something of general interest, something related to instructional technology, and something related to the use of social media.
• Periodic brown-bag seminars where we might do some show-and-tell and/or have a question-and-answer session.