Since its founding, Macaulay has provided Instructional Technology Fellows (ITF) to its seminars. When the ITF program started, the barriers to creating digital projects were high, and the fellows needed to spend significant amounts of time working on technical troubleshooting, along with pedagogical practices. As technologies have evolved and become more ubiquitous, the horizons of the group have expanded alongside them, especially incorporating more pedagogical training. We are now the Teaching and Learning Collaboratory, and are also implementing a new structure this year (beginning Fall 2021). We are referring to both this center and the graduate students who work there as the TLC/TLCs.
We understand that the change may sound jarring for some of our long-time faculty. I want to assure you that you can expect the same high level of support, but in a slightly different way. Instead of having TLC-faculty pairs (which created very different workloads for our fellows), we will now have a team to support you. Each team will be dedicated to a specific cluster of campuses, and led by a postdoctoral fellow.
Your postdoctoral fellow will be your main point of contact, but all workshop and project consultation requests should be made through this form.
Here is what you can expect:
- Help with in-class workshops, projects, and Common Event integration
- Consistent communication and responses to your requests
- Daily virtual office hours available you and your students
- Customized support for special projects
- A small team (one postdoc plus three TLCs) who will support you
- This is the biggest change for those of you who are longtime seminar faculty. Instead of having one person to meet your needs, you will have a team. The team will be engaging with each other to distribute and manage tasks, and will coordinate to make this feel easy for you.
Comments by Lisa Brundage