Theme V: Incorporating Technology With Teaching
Support for Faculty Development

·  The Academic Information Technologies Staff

Web designer Jim Cai, our faculty support and development specialist, came to us from Lehigh University. Mr. Cai is a gifted programmer who has already made an important contribution to AIT through his redesign of the unit's website. He is also conducting advanced training for WebCourse faculty and has more than a dozen faculty clients.

Multimedia Specialist Sylvie Richards came to us from Columbia University after a distinguished career in modern languages and literature on the faculty of several universities. Her strength is her ability to communicate with faculty. She is also an expert in the Blackboard system, the platform which now serves as the springboard for our technology-to-teach efforts.

·  Library Services for Faculty and Students Teaching & Learning at a Distance

The Library website represents one-stop-shopping for access to 9,000-plus digital journals and reference resources, instructions for proxy server access, links to online tutorials in research and writing, and a list of all Brooklyn College Web-based courses on which students can click and link. In the fall semester 1999 librarians restructured the site to give easy access to the Research Resources and Help with Research sections.

Full-Text Electronic Information Resources
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/library/electronic_resources/subjects.htm

Requiring a student who is learning online to travel to a physical library would be the antithesis of distance learning. Students engaged in Web-based education need corollary Web-based information resources. The Library supports a broad range of Web-delivered full-text journals and reference resources (accessible by title and subject) to support the research requirements that faculty who are teaching online make of their students. There are more than 9,000 e-titles.

Reference Help via E-Mail
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/library/electronic_resources/edesk.htm

To complement the its digital collections, from its website the Library offers reference service via e-mail. Student Access to Faculty Course Sites and Caucus Discussion Groups
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/library/electronic_resources/courses.htm

Students are often uncertain about how to locate faculty course sites, and how to enter and participate in Caucus threaded discussions. These areas of the Library website allow them to retrieve course sites by their instructors’ names and step them through the process of joining a Caucus discussion.