Mandate

The Learning Technologies Group provides expertise in learning technologies in support of the Academic Plan, with particular emphasis on distributed learning initiatives. The Group adapts and integrates diverse technologies to enhance teaching and increase the ways in which students can access the curricula of Red River College

They achieve their mandate by

• Recommending best practices for blended and distributed learning design
• Providing design support for courses and learning objects intended for online delivery
• Establishing a suite of technology solutions for distributed learning initiatives
• Researching and piloting emerging learning technologies for college use
• Promoting SOTL within the college and as a contribution to an external community of teaching excellence
• Creating course design templates, learning objects and training guides for use by instructors and departments
• Administering and integrating major learning management systems in cooperation with ITS
• Producing and delivering high quality video, audio and rich media for educational use
• Promoting the use the college web site and SharePoint technology in support of courses
• Coordinating their services in conjunction with the Quality Assurance standards of the PC&D.

Vision

Educational Technology becomes a standard operating procedure for any program development and delivery whether academic or non-academic. In the same way as ITS now touches all areas of the college, so educational technology will be a regular part of the day-to-day operations for teaching, administration and human resource support.

In order to fulfill this vision we will

• Pioneer, publicize and refine the processes for integrating educational technology into course development
• Promote the use of a blended online component for all “traditional” class-based programs
• Commission development of course materials to be delivered on portable devices
• Develop new video production models for the delivery of learning activities
• Prioritize the production of diagnostic, remedial and student support tools for online use
• Enhance faculty ownership of timing, production, updates and delivery of their educational technologies through better training
• Simplify and distribute more widely the support tasks required for educational technologies
• Develop a content management system which will support easy faculty updates and reformatting of learning materials to a variety of devices
• Provide the leadership in scholarship to monitor and evaluate emerging learning technologies