Willamette University is a small liberal arts institution comprised of a residential undergraduate college of liberal arts and graduate schools of business, education and law. Face-to-face meetings between faculty and students in small classes take pride of place at many small institutions such as Willamette. However, students now arrive at our doors enmeshed in the online world and in various constellations of both synchronous and asynchronous social networking. Although the face-to-face classroom represents a social network of students and instructor, communication tends to be one-way and instructor-driven. Participants communicate sequentially in linear form within the same physical space and the same period of time.
At a time when students will sit side-by-side on a bench and text message each other and can access information from around the world 24/7, institutions such as Willamette need to address questions such as: Can technology and online course components complement and improve the educational experience and learning in a residential college setting where the face-to-face experience is valued most highly? And if so, how?
Several groups composed of faculty, librarians and technologists have received funding from the university's president to study how online applications might provide solutions to problems such as motivation, retention, efficiently organizing and using information, and critical thinking about real and complex problems. Parallel consideration has been given to the feasibility of incorporating online components into a curriculum, including issues such as pedagogical appropriateness and the difficulties involved in learning and teaching others to use the necessary applications.
During the same time, Willamette implemented a new university-wide learning environment based on Sakai. Although Sakai provides tools that were previously unavailable (in Blackboard Basic), a major outcome of the move was to prime the pump of creative thinking about the possibilities of incorporating online components. Because there was an emphasis on training and support, we experienced a cascade of adoptions. Faculty members who had never done anything online began to post materials, those who previously posted materials began asynchronous discussion forums and synchronous chats, the experimenters moved into blogs and wikis.
This presentation aims to provide a summary overview of the efforts made to modernize the pedagogical tools available at a small liberal arts institution without losing the university's identity as a "face-to-face" institution. It describes the challenges, failures, and successes experienced by the group and shares lessons for other individuals from similar institutions to learn from.
