I
envision a time very soon when nearly every course at California
State University Long Beach will have appropriate technological
components of some kind. For that to happen, ACS must achieve
the following goals:
ACS must work even more closely with faculty, since only the faculty
can determine what technology is appropriate to a particular course.
We have made progress in this area by working closely with the
Faculty Center for Professional Development, the Beachboard Users
Group, and committees of the Academic Senate. But much remains
to be done. ACS must reach out further to faculty and enlist their
help in monitoring and refining our services, and in creating
new services in an ever changing environment. And together, we
all must do a better of job of assessing the effectiveness of
these services.
ACS must continue to work closely with other departments to build
a solid infrastructure of hardware, software, and support. For
example, we have built out our open access lab in the Horn Center
to where there are now over two hundred up to date workstations
with high speed internet connections. But all the labs on campus
combined could never meet today’s demand for computing by
our students. Therefore, ACS is working with network services
to make our campus a zone of ubiquitous wireless computing, so
that all students can use their laptops to connect to the internet
from any spot on campus. Additionally, ACS is working with Audio-Visual
Services and the University Library to better integrate the university’s
support structure.
ACS must continue to strengthen the university’s Learning
Management System, Beachboard. A learning management system, or
LMS, can be described simply as a set of tools for assembling,
integrating, managing, and disseminating online learning materials.
The LMS integrates academic technologies to make them easier to
use. Among the tools of an LMS are email, online discussion forums
and chatrooms, file transfer services, electronic gradebooks,
and software to allow faculty to provide students with a central
access point for course materials. Beachboard – powered
by Blackboard software – has proven to be a popular service
at CSULB, and the number of courses using Beachboard has grown
to over 1200. Still, not all of the tools provided within Beachboard
are of equal quality. ACS’s goal is to improve all the tools
in the LMS until we reach the point where they are so powerful
and easy to use that faculty can fully concentrate on pedagogical
matters, rather than on technology, and students can concentrate
on learning.
Please help by sending your ideas! You can send them directly
to me at emcbride@csulb.edu.
