The Educational Technology and Methodology (ETM) focus area has two separate subfocus areas:

Technology

Methodology

Educational Technology and Methodology Focus

The focus of ETM is the embedding of educational technologies into our educational programs as they support the innovative curricular elements and assist in improving the educational methods and tools through which to address the foci of the human dimension. It is not the Coalition's objective to develop the technologies but to develop their creative use as we incorporate the innovative technologies to serve our educational purposes.

The technology subfocus can further be viewed as a combination of local issues which may assist in the curriculum development work, that which deals with program delivery, and that which deals with the broader technical information and communication exchange issues which are systems issues for the Coalition and beyond.

Understanding the Teaching/Learning Environment

Two things have become more apparent to many of the Gateway faculty as they participate in the program. While course content remains a critical issue in the undergraduate programs, there is a great deal of interplay between and among the methodology, the technology, evaluation, and the course content.

As the faculty better appreciate the student-centered concepts--how students learn and how students are affected by the course delivery--they can begin to change the Engineering College educational culture. The activities of the Human Potential Development (HPD) focus and the Evaluation and Quality Assurance (EQA) focus provide evidence of this interplay.

Technology available to the educational mission is pervasive. While it is changing and increasing in sophistication, much is available and being used today at many institutions; including Gateway institutions.

The generation and use of video modules, video conferencing, electronic mail, centralized servers to store and randomly access computer based information and data, the Internet, the World Wide Web (WWW), computer aided instruction (CAI), computer managed instruction (CMI), plus all of the CADD, spread sheet, symbolic math, matrix math, and engineering analysis software are in use at Gateway's various institutions.

One challenge to the Coalition is to take what is sometimes sporadic and individualistic in use and to channel these capabilities in such a manner that they serve a broader collective community in an organized manner leading to and sustaining systemic change.

Go to the Gateway Projects page

Through the Coalition's programs and the emphasis placed on assessing the objectives and outcomes of our various Gateway components, faculty have become increasingly aware that an improved teaching/learning environment can come about by reexamining how we engage our students and how we permit the students to engage the class.

To this end, Gateway faculty have been implementing a number of classroom technique changes including team learning and team projects. Learning and personality styles, team dynamics, and team composition can all affect team function.

Go to the Gateway Projects page

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