LTAs – Replacements for the Missing “Professional Development”

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LTAs – Replacements for the Missing “Professional Development”

3/10/2004

By Terry Calhoun

Remember back in the early days of IT's transformation of higher education? Every IT department was offering classes in "how to" this and that-how to use word processing software, how to use database or spreadsheet software, how to use a Web browser, how to use e-mail, and so forth. But we couldn't get the faculty (or the higher level administrators and managers) into those classes. Some combination of innate stubbornness and a fear of being seen as inadequate kept those classes full of secretaries and administrative assistants. Some universities and colleges hit upon the technique of sending trainers into faculty and managers' offices for not-as-visible, one-on-one sessions, which worked a little better.

Probably most IT managers feel they still lack adequate resources and cooperation with regard to IT training, or what in more general terms could be called professional development with regard to IT tools. But guess what: "professional development" relating to IT, as poor as it often is, is light years ahead of professional development with regard to the other parts of the work life and responsibilities of institutional staff. One initiative to substitute for some of the missing professional development on campus (and of course it d'es more than that) is the collection and sharing of Low Threshold Applications (LTAs).

Here at SCUP, we found ourselves recently facing some unexpected and untimely technical issues with our annual survey of campus space, the Campus Facilities Inventory (CFI). We've built a data collection tool that provides the various campus space planners with password-protected access to provide online information about the amount of campus space devoted to various functional categories. This year, we are building several new features, some aimed at providing last year's users with editorial access to their previous data-but we ran into glitches.

I don't understand the glitches. Not because I am incapable of understanding them, but because I don't have the time to, plus it is someone else's job to do so - a very capable someone else. But I do understand the sever time constraints we are under to get the data collected soon. As I awoke one morning early this week a solution came to me. It was a Low Threshold Application solution, an LTA. Though it turns out we didn't have to use it this time, I'll share that potential solution here along with some great resources for LTAs.

What's an LTA?

Coincidental to our database issues with the Campus Facilities Inventory, Steve Gilbert, of the TLT Group, was scheduled to drop by my office later that morning for a meeting and lunch. The TLT Group is an independent nonprofit organization probably best known for Teachin. Steve, who has been active in teaching, learning, and technology issues for a quarter-century, was formerly with Educom as early as 1983, then with AAHE (the American Association for Higher Education), from which the TLT Group was "spun out" a few years ago.

Steve defines an LTA as "a teaching/learning application of information technology that is reliable, accessible, easy to learn, non-intimidating and (incrementally) inexpensive." The TLT Group has a portion of its Web site devoted to LTAs.