April 2018 archive

A reorganization worth writing about

Since my arrival at Wellesley about seven and a half years ago, we have reorganized several times. My approach to this is fairly simple: we are here to provide the best possible services and if the way we are organized is coming in the way of achieving that goal, change it. One of the patterns that will be evident at LTS over the years is a serious commitment to increasing the resources for certain groups, projects and activities that support the academic enterprise while managing the administrative departments through business process improvements which in turn reduces the staffing required to support them. We have been pretty good about achieving these so far.

When we decided to move to Workday, it was clear that the Enterprise Solutions group, which consisted of staff who supported all administrative systems such as Banner, Luminis Portal, Oracle, and the Reporting environment , needed to change. The reason is that Workday paradigm is drastically different. When we moved from Luminis to Drupal for portal, it was a great opportunity to rethink staffing because Luminis required a fair amount staffing support. We began the process about four years ago and this past February we announced a major reorg and we no longer have an Enterprise Solutions group!

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Blended Learning Symposium

A two day symposium titled “Shifting (the) Boundaries: Blended Learning, Digital Humanities and the Liberal Arts” was held on April 5th and 6th, sponsored by the Mellon-funded Blended Learning Initiative at the College. Evelina Guzauskyte from the Spanish Department and David O’Steen  from Library and Technology Services co-directed the initiative which is in its fourth year. They did a superb job putting together the program, which was well attended by not just the faculty, students and staff from Wellesley, but members from several other nearby institutions.

The faculty and students from Wellesley who spoke at the symposium were illustrating a range of ways in which they have blended technology into their courses. The most striking thing for me was that in all the presentations technology itself took the backseat and the discussions were about how it improved or enhanced pedagogy. And the passion that the faculty exhibited by devoting a lot of their time to experiment with blended methodologies to improve student learning was evident in all presentations. They could have easily turned away from it all and gone about advancing their scholarly activities! (more…)