Welcome to a New Academic Year: Leveraging Technology for a Successful Semester
Welcome to a new academic year at NC State! As you prepare for the start of the fall 2019 semester, are you thinking about how using technology in your teaching endeavors can help with student success? Pondering how to provide a lecture to your students while attending an important research conference this fall? Ready to rethink your class meetings to consider a range of technology options that might lead you to a blended learning course or perhaps a fully online offering? Look no further!
DELTA (Distance Education and Learning Technology Applications) is here to help you leverage technology to support teaching in both face-to-face and online course environments. We offer a variety of services for faculty that include one-on-one instructional consultations and hands-on workshops that help you use technology effectively in any type of environment. DELTA also has program planning and test proctoring services that support the creation and delivery of fully online courses. A very popular service is our faculty help desk (LearnTech) that provides staff to assist you nearly every day of the week, including Sundays.
We are the team that hosts, supports and provides training for the enterprise academic technologies in use at NC State University, including Moodle (our learning management system), Zoom (our web conferencing software), Top Hat (our classroom response software), Mediasite (our content capture system), as well as other supplemental tools that can be found within WolfWare such as Turnitin and the Google Course Kit. We offer assistance with developing online and distance education academic programs, such as degrees and certificates, and offer more than 100 teaching and learning with technology workshops each year.
We can discuss a range of teaching and learning technology options with you; from placing a few course materials online for your students, to helping you reimagine your face-to-face class in a way that allows you to blend both online and face to face teaching techniques in your course, to guiding you through the steps of creating a course entirely online. We can brainstorm ideas with you on how multiple content delivery modes can enhance your course, and help you devise a plan for instructional continuity if classes are canceled due to adverse weather or if you need to deliver your course while remotely located during a conference.
We also have instructional design and multimedia staff who can help you provide your content to students in new and engaging ways. If you are interested in exploring new and emerging technologies in your course, for example, augmented or virtual reality, gamification or content delivery through phone apps, then you may want to apply for one of our DELTA grants next spring. We have a proven track record of transforming education through media-rich environments like virtual reality, animation, gamification and more. We also have a history of success in working with large courses on redesigns that help reduce DWF (drop, withdraw, or fail) rates while ensuring the academic integrity of the course.
We love to work with faculty and are genuinely interested in helping you support the success of your students. Please reach out to us if we can be of any assistance to you in leveraging technology for student success.
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Donna Petherbridge is DELTA’s associate vice provost for Academic Technology Innovation.
