Instructional technology outreach and metrics: building a bridge

At Williams College, self-selected faculty take full advantage of the Instructional Technology (ITech) training, resources, and services while other faculty remain under-informed and underserved. The mission of ITech is to provide leadership, encouragement, and support for faculty utilizing technology to achieve academic objectives; create and maintain environments for media development, presentation, and the exploration of new technologies; and to evaluate emerging instructional technologies and facilitate their implementation. Incidental statistics relating to resource use are collected and reported. However, there is no system of metrics directly tied to the ITech mission. This situation does not seem to be unique to Williams College. Discussions at a National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education sponsored conference on Instructional Technology in 2008 revealed that Instructional Technologists at many institutions were grappling with the same issue [1]. How do you set meaningful goals for measuring leadership, encouragement, and support of faculty without a system for measuring efforts in these areas? What would such a system look like? The author collected six years of data on his own interactions with faculty at Williams College as a way to measure his own progress toward meeting the duties and responsibilities of a Williams College Instructional Technology Specialist. This paper explores the process of developing a system of metrics tied to faculty outreach and the resulting challenges and rewards that come from implementing such a system.