Research Project

I plan on doing my research project on the broad subject of using technology and the internet to help share lesson plans, teaching ideas, and philosophy among faculty. My vision is somehow creating a sort of online faculty lounge. One where ideas can be traded and shared about how to handle everything from in class lessons to ideas on how to deal with motivating students.

This idea grows out of a need we have at Jackson Community College to improve our adjuncts connection to the college and to give them opportunities for professional development. This idea wouldn’t be limited to sharing lesson plans and teaching philosophies. I would also like it if an adjunct could post information about a conference they went to or something they are learning in a class they are taking.

The simple thing would be to have people write up papers and throw them online. But it needs to be organized in some way and it needs to be overseen. Since time is money, that over sight needs to be limited to short spurts of time. It also needs to be user friendly and easy to access or our campus won’t go near it.

Wikis will be the first place I look and I need to get a better understanding of how they function and work. If wikis don’t seem like the way to go, I will then have to look for alternative methods and ways of making it come together.

From there I feel like I need to look at some of the underlying issues with something like this, such copyrights and can someone own a lesson plan. I think this is an important issue to bring up because I will take a photo or perhaps a set of discussion questions from online. I usually don’t cite them in my handouts to my students or I did at one point, but the questions have been changed and altered so much that I stopped. I also get a little tinge of anger when I spot one of my lesson plans or ideas left on the copier. I’ve even seen some of these in the hands of people I didn’t even know. It gets passed from one person to another. So I wonder about issues relating to this. I am not sure 100% how I feel putting the lessons I’ve worked hard on redid again and again and tweaked.

I would like to do some research and see how (or if) other colleges are doing this and in what ways. Some of the issues I’ve looked at may have been already worked through at the college level in some way.

My goal at the end is to have done the research and developed a good plan for implementing this. If I can come up with a way to make this work, I will then over the summer work on developing the basic outline and using the faculty around in the spring and summer as a test case and then launching it campus wide at the start of Fall 2007. So this project will be more then just research, it will be research with actual application.