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Case Study
Focus on Institutional Culture Drives Faculty Technology Adoption at Genesee CC
10/8/2008
Too often, institutions spend precious resources implementing a learning management system and associated collaboration, teaching and learning tools, only to find that a relatively small percentage of faculty use the tools to any significant degree. At Genesee Community College (GCC), we have achieved high faculty usage of online learning tools by focusing on institutional culture.
About 60 percent of Genesee full-time faculty use significant Blackboard online teaching tools in various combinations, for online courses, hybrid courses, or as online components to on-campus, face-to-face courses. The remaining 40 percent use minimal tools (posting syllabi, for example). Based on interactions with colleagues at other institutions, we believe our focus on institutional culture has made the difference for our students.
Genesee Community College, with enrollment around 5,500, is located in a rural, agricultural area between Buffalo, NY and Rochester. When I came to the college in 1990, I found a culture that actively supported technology. This culture was all-encompassing, from the faculty to the academic officers to the president. At that time, I was brought in as dean and given the task of starting a distance learning program. Today, about 13 percent of our FTE is generated from online courses, and more than 80 percent of our on-campus courses have an active online component.
We've created this culture of incorporating technology slowly and deliberately, always with the goal of supporting our primary mission. By keeping our focus on being learning-centered, rather than on the technology, we've made the adoption of technology tools more palatable to faculty. At GCC, our distance learning courses and online teaching tools are a baseline piece of our overall curriculum; we do not view them as a separate entity. In fact, the majority of the faculty who teach distance learning courses are full-time faculty who also teach in the classroom.
We have been successful in creating this pervasive, institutional culture of adopting technology by concentrating on three key strategies:
- We seek faculty who are tech-savvy and have already had their "paradigm shifted."
- We use leading-edge (not necessarily "bleeding edge") technology to make faculty implementation as easy as possible.
- We provide ample and frequent training opportunities and reliable, friendly support.
Luddites Need Not Apply
We make it clear to prospective faculty that technology is a part of our culture and not an optional tool. Faculty position announcements state up front that experience with distance learning technologies is preferred. In fact, we were among the first institutions in the State University of New York (SUNY) system to include distance learning in our standard faculty job descriptions.
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