Missouri University of Science and Technology is now affiliated with The TLT Group, a non-profit organization that specializes in helping universities and other organizations with implementing technology in teaching and learning environments. The TLT Group is currently affiliated with about 140 institutions and agencies around the world. Much of the content they have developed has been with collaboration with these institutions. It would be great if Missouri S&T, in pursuit of the goal of becoming a leading institution of the United States, could also become a significant contributor.
The TLT Group has a wealth of resources for educators and also for those of us in Educational Technology whose job it is to help educators. Here are just a few of the resources that are available to us as a subscribing institution:
Flashlight Online Program — This is a web-based survey application that allows you to administer survey questions that are developed collaboratively by you and your peers at other institutions. You can tailor surveys towards a particular audience and even include conditional questions based on certain responses. Dr. Steve Ehrmann, a member of the TLT Group briefly demonstrated the Flashlight Online survey tool to the EdTech group the other day and what we saw was pretty impressive and didn’t look that difficult to use. We will need some initial training on how to use the survey tool (and we’ll need some admin/user accounts for our campus). Hopefully, we can take care of the training and piloting of this tool during the Fall semester.
One of the more interesting aspects of Flashlight Online is the capability for creating matrix surveys. A matrix survey builds questions in a two dimensional array such that the question pools are arranged in columns and the respondent pools are arranged in rows.
Strategies for Faculty Support and Professional Development — This includes diverse strategies such as Brief Hybrid Workshops, TLT Case Studies, Student Technology Assistant Programs, Compassionate Pioneering, and Personalizing Pedagogies. Explore the link for more detailed descriptions of these strategies. Many of the resources are free, but some may require you to pay a fee or may require institutional access (i.e. we have to get the resource as an institution and not as an individual user–EdTech will work with The TLT Group to obtain these resources).
Articles on Planning: Vision & Strategies — A variety of online articles about how technology can be used to change (and hopefully improve) college-level education, among other things. Again, explore the link and see what captures your fancy.
For an example of just what TLT has to offer, here is a YouTube video from Dr. Steve Ehrmann, Vice President of The TLT Group, introducing Three Dimensions of Improvement. Dr. Steve Ehrmann will be the opening keynote speaker at our second annual TLT Conference scheduled for April 9 – 10, 2009 (we are looking for other presenters!).

Go to YouTube to see more videos about or produced by The TLT Group.