By Reynoldo Wallace
Prepared for
Dr. Karen Tracey
Central Connecticut State University
Information technology (IT) offers incredible potential for improving the academic experience. Educational technologies include not only the Internet, which provides access to different university websites, but also innovations in recording, collaborating, and responding technologies that offer enhanced environments for scholarly interaction and intellectual pursuit.
These technologies are valuable because for CTDLC they serve the larger educational goals. CTDLC provides learning system hosting, online tutor services, instructional design, and many other educational services. These applications of technologies create active learners who not only master the content of their chosen fields, but also develop techniques and modes of critical thought that will enable them to be informed and discerning citizens and contributors to their professions.
Students, administrators and faculty are immersed in information technology in their daily lives. They expect that their academic lives will be similarly rich in both faculties, students and administrators are end users of educational technology, and from it they gain vastly improved access to course materials and to one another. But crucially, the technology landscape now includes a rich mixture of new kinds of course materials: discipline-specific multi-media content, simulations, and applications, as well as tools for communication, collaboration, writing, and research. Educational technology holds the promise of creating more interactive classes, engaging students more deeply and more actively in the course content, and contributing to a student’s learning of complex concepts by adapting to the student’s level and progression of understanding.
The Instructional Development (ID) department at CTDLC has provided a broad range of services in support of undergraduate instruction. Course Design where the team performs a full needs analysis to make sure your learning objectives are met. They provide complete design and development of your online courses. Course Audit where the team provides course and assessment reviews for existing online courses. They will work with the course instructors to discuss current challenges, review course materials against learning objectives, and provide suggestions for possible improvement. For the schools that CTDLC assists or gives support to the ID team. Our ID team provides a variety of training services for their campus. We offer two online faculty-training opportunities: Teaching Online for the First Time (TOFT) and iTeach Essentials. TOFT is a two or four- week offering, which immerses instructors new to online learning within a fully online learning environment. The course presents best practices on how to design and facilitate online courses. iTeach Essentials is a 9 week, hands-on course where instructors work through both pedagogical as well as technical best practices of online teaching and classroom management. Along with Webinars and Workshops, they provide consulting services where we are prepared to help clients with the planning and development of online courses and programs, including policy decisions around the online classroom.
In our (LMS) Learning Management Systems department, we can see that there are a lot of applications of technology presented. This department is probably one of the most important departments at CTDLC. We provide learning system hosting, where our hosted service provides the necessary hardware and staffing for every client eLearning needs. We provide 365/24/7 monitoring of your applications. Since our inception, our mission has been to support online learning and its associated technologies. We have over a decade's experience in working with various learning platforms and helping institutions select, implement, and maintain the right solution for them. Because of our