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LTAs – Replacements for the Missing “Professional Development”
3/10/2004
LTA = B
My "Plan B" for our Campus Facilities Inventory (CFI) may be an example of a more administrative or research-oriented LTA. For the CFI we've built a very nice online system with good user interfaces, to collect data. It's impressive, it's integrated, and it can be built upon for more functionality later. But if you look at it starkly, with the "high" technology maybe not working and a deadline looming - as I did earlier this week - what we're really doing right now is collecting (a) from each of 200-400 campuses, one person on each campus, (b) about 35 fields of data. It's a very important project and quite useful data, but d'esn't really, imperatively need the application of high tech.There's no reason we can't do that by creating a simple spreadsheet, sending a copy to each participant, and having them complete and return them by a deadline. Whereupon we simply collate all the data into one place and begin analysis. That's my LTA, Low Threshold Application, otherwise known around here right now as Plan B.
Now, I'd bet there are hundreds of working groups all over my campus that are collecting data that is at least structurally similar to what we are collecting. And I'd bet there are dozens, if not hundreds, of technical tools and procedures created by those groups to do so. Some are probably technologically state of the art; some are probably still sending our paper surveys and then having work-study students key in data. Too bad there isn't some place to go to share lessons-learned, or some professional development class in various data collection techniques that don't require high-level technology.
I'm not talking about a hands-on, computer laboratory class in how to use Access or FileMaker, or SPSS, we've got those. I'm talking about a "here's the problem" and "here's how others have solved it, using various tools and techniques" - what I think much of "professional development" is about. Maybe we're all smart enough and highly-educated enough to not need someone to fund, develop, and teach such a course, or even to collect the various solutions for sharing? Maybe we don't need related professional development? Maybe it's efficient for us all to invent our own wheels? Not really.
So, I urge people to check out the TLT Group's Low Threshold Applications collection, and its links to others, and to share their own LTAs. (Noting, also, that the hundreds of useful articles and resources available on the Syllabus Web site serves much the same purpose!) Maybe we can create an inter-institutional professional development LTA network instead of worrying about intra-institutional professional development programs that no one wants to fund, anyway.
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
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