Instructional Technology at the UWI, Cave Hill

I met with my counterpart, a fellow educational technologist, Pat yesterday. Pat heads up the Learning Resource Center. In terms of instructional technology support, she is the one on campus to go to. This campus has 8,000 students and 200 to 250 full-time faculty. This department does no computer repair or support. Pat has her hands full this semester as the UWI decided two weeks before the semester began to fully launch Moodle and give up on BlackBoard. For those not used to the edutech lingo, these are two Learning Management Systems that allow professors to provide course materials to their students in an on-line and secure environment. Anyway, this campus is going with using Moodle Rooms for hosting. The UWI system comprises four campus, one in Jamaica, in Trinidad & Tobago, the Open Campus and this one in Barbados. All other UWI campuses are already using Moodle.

At Vassar, I am missing out on this semester's launch of using Moodle. Vassar went about it in a little bit different fashion than here at the UWI. There were faculty beta testers of Moodle last year. Vassar has used BlackBoard for years, so rather than rock the boat too hard, Vassar is keeping all courses this year in both BlackBoard and in Moodle. Lot's of work and resources, it sounds to me. I like the UWI's approach better.

Notice above that I just mentioned Pat. There is no GIS specialist on campus, no scientific software specialist, no visual arts technologies specialist. But she doesn't maintain a computer facility!