Services for Faculty

A Growing Partnership for Teaching and Learning

Reference Librarians, Instructional Technologists, and the Learning Commons are working together to better support teaching and learning at Allegheny College.

This group provides planning tools and coordinated assistance to the faculty as they prepare their courses, conduct academic research, and support students through all phases of course assignments from research to final presentation.

If you would like assistance with one of your assignments contact any member of this group to get the ball rolling.

Faculty Resources

Faculty have the opportunity to tap into many resources for teaching and learning. Below are a few offices and organizations that assist faculty research, develop and implement instructional projects.

Associate Dean of the College

Learning Commons

Pelletier Library

Academic Support Committee

Educational Technology Resources

Course Management Software (CMS)

Web CT at Allegheny CollegeWebCT is Allegheny's course management software system. It is a web-based course tool that can be used to meet a variety of instructional goals.

The most common use at Allegheny is to increase interactions among students and instructor. Tools such as asynchronous discussion board, student presentations, and live chat are used to facilitate these interactions. Faculty also use WebCT as a repository for links and other course information they prefer to be password protected. A growing number of faculty take advantage of the quiz and survey tool to assess student knowledge.

The most effective uses of WebCT occur when faculty use the technology to answer an instructional need.

Below are a few examples of needs met by WebCT...

There are more tools that can be implemented based on your teaching style and course objectives. Faculty can preview WebCT and get a feel for the more common tools and how students might use the tools as part of a course by entering a sample course.

If you would like to learn more about WebCT, contact an instructional technologist by calling the Help Desk at 2755.

WebCT course requests can be made online. Please give as much advanced notice as possible.

Faculty Lab

The Faculty Lab is located in Murray Hall room 114. In this lab, Faculty have access to hardware and software necessary for the creation of advanced instructional technology projects.

This lab provides a more private environment for faculty to work on projects that require scanning, multimedia production, burning CD ROMs and what have you in close proximity to the Office of Educational Technology Staff. A small library of reference materials is maintained for use in the lab.

The lab is open weekdays 8:00am - 5:00pm.

view software available on Faculty Lab work stations

Instructional Technology Workshops

Workshops are offered to faculty interested in learning ways to incorporate technology in their teaching. Topics range from practical technical skills like optimizing images for a web page to technology based teaching methods like just in time teaching or using online discussion boards to foster inclass discusions.

Faculty are encouraged to suggest topics of interest using the online form or by contacting their instructional technologist.

Upcoming Faculty Workshops

Faculty can now register online for...

Questions or suggestions regarding instructional technology workshops should be directed to the Manager of Training.

Workshop Materials and Resources

As part of the documentation of the workshops presented by OET materials, resources and recaps from recent workshops are available online. Visit http://training.allegheny.edu/workshops/news/ for more.

Audio files from select workshops are also available for download. Visit http://training.allegheny.edu/workshops/podcasts/ to listen.

Multimedia Resources

Digital Video Resources

Digitized Historic Video by Google Google has digitized historic video from the National Archives. Clips currently available on video.google.com include video from NASA, the Department of the Interior, and United Newsreel Motion Pictures.

Resources

Faculty have access to many multimedia technologies including:

Get a Project Started

Faculty interested in starting projects that include multimedia can contact their instructional technologist for individual consultation and assistance with the project.

Social Software

The web allows for users to connect to others with similar interests and engage in conversations, exchange ideas, and develop communities of users. Social Software currently available on the world wide web includes such technologies as weblogs, wikis, and rss. Computing Services is following and experimenting with these emerging technologies to position Allegheny in a place to use the technologies appropriately for teaching, learning and conducting College business.

  • Blogs on Teaching and Learning - Learn More
    Interested in teaching and learning? You might consider subscribing to these blogs whose authors are interested in this topic as well.
  • Educational Podcasts - Learn More
    Podcasts are being used by more faculty to deliver content for their courses. The instructional Technologists of OET have collected a few podcasts from around the web as examples of how podcasts can serve as a content delivery method for face to face courses.
  • Social Bookmarking - Learn More
    Social bookmarking is a growing phenomenon of the web where users can save, categorize, and share bookmarks online. There are many options for social bookmarking including delicious and furl(popular general use bookmarking services), Connotea (focuses on the academic community), and Bloglines(provides additional services including RSS aggregation).
  • Tools and Resources - Learn More
    There are many third party tools that allows one to take advantage of social software. This list is but a starting point for finding the social software that fits with your goals. Some of the tools listed are ways to find content, others help you collect content, and others still help you produce content.
  • Topical Blogs - Learn More
    The blogs listed here focus on a particular topic related to one of the disciplines taught at Allegheny.