Page 15 - Campus Technology, October 2017

IT RELATIONS dian schaffhauser Getting 100 Percent LMS
Buy-in From Faculty
These two institutions faced the same goal — convincing all their instructors to use the learning management system. Here’s what’s working.
WHEN THE UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS SYSTEM
entered into a contract with Blackboard last year, any system institution that wanted to participate could do so to leverage its buying power. More importantly, however, for one year any of the universities and colleges in the system could access the full range of products from the company and get help with training, deployment and consulting.
This was an opportunity 6,600-student University of Arkansas Fort Smith (UAFS) didn’t want to miss. Newly appointed Associate Provost for Academic Affairs Margaret Tanner was assigned the job of exploiting the new agreement. Particular interests: Blackboard’s Outcomes Assessment, Analytics for Learn and Collaborate, “things we never had before,” she said. To make those tools “operational to the full extent” for the campus as a whole, however, required every class to have its data in Blackboard. Thus was born the “100 percent” faculty buy-in assignment.
Meanwhile, Goodwin College, a Connecticut-based not-for-profit private school with 3,750 students, was on its own mission to achieve 100 percent LMS buy-in among its 89 full-time and 225 adjunct instructors — but for different reasons. There, Lisa Manley, the new director of Online Studies and the
15
CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | October 2017
Imtmphoto / Shutterstock.com