Serendipity35

These centers at colleges have many different names - Teaching & Learning Center (TLC), Teaching Support Center (TSC), Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) etc. - but  "what's in a name" - or a letter?

My university is exploring starting one of these centers (tentatively to be a Teaching Excellence Center - TEC). We already have a Technology Support Center and an Instructional Resource Center and a Master Teacher Group. So what would be the mission of the new Center?

In looking at examples of centers at other colleges, I have noticed that in many of them, the "T" has more often come to mean "technology" rather than "teaching." 

No doubt there is more and more overlap with those two things these days. But what needs to be clear is that if  the focus is how to use tools, then don't call it a teaching center.

For me, a teaching center would focus on pedagogy (and andragogy). How to use the quiz tool or gradebook in the LMS is not about assessment.  How to create stronger quizzes and sharing effective grading policies is pedagogy.

About 15 years ago, my department initiated a Teaching, Learning and Technology Group at the university. I was the manager of instructional technology then and we did instructional design (primarily for online courses) and worked with faculty to use the LMS, create audio and video files and use "tools." But when we planned our training sessions during the semester, we always included sessions that were on topics like authentic assessment, learning styles, Bloom's Taxonomy and Webb's Depth of Knowledge and other teaching topics. I was at first surprised at the interest in these sessions at a college level. I had come from the K-12 world where everyone had some education courses in the undergrad and grad curriculum and pedagogy was a standard part of professional development. It pleasantly surprised me when a professor said, "I never took an education course, so I find this all very interesting. I try to imitate good teachers I had, and avoid being like the bad ones."

Our TLT group tried to be both things - tech and teaching. But with all the focus on the tools lately and much of out Technology Support Center's staff time taken with supporting tools, the teaching can easily be forgotten. This is probably more true at a school like NJIT which is a science and technology university,  I spent 5 years at a community college and the scale tipped more to teaching than technology there. 

Having and utilizing a Master Teacher group, your writing center and tutoring staffs, and librarians is one way to increase the teaching content over the tools. Of course, it would be great to see a center being able to combine the tools with the teaching, so that the session on building effective quizzes also showed faculty how to do that well in the LMS, if that's what they are using.