Faculty on the Web - A Pilot Project

Many of our faculty want to maintain a presence on the web, but have neither the time nor the desire to spend hours and hours becoming web designers. They want to take advantage of what the web can offer them and their students, but they don't want to surrender control of their content and have to depend on colleagues to keep their site updated. Additionally, we have a large faculty and staff (total 3,000), and a relatively small technology support and training staff. The idea was to try to figure out a way to allow faculty to have a presence on the web that was easy to use and maintain, and did not require a lot of training and support.

To solve this problem, forward-thinking educational technology staff (I can't take credit, since I joined the project in mid-stream), some enthusiastic techies, brave teachers, and some funding from SBC (the telephone company), City College of San Francisco is piloting the use of Macromedia's "Contribute" along with templates created in Dreamweaver, to help faculty create a web presence without having to become web designers.

This is our plan. Fifteen pilot participants will attend five hours of training to learn to use "Contribute" to create an instructional website from templates provided by the college. Pilot participants will create their instructional website during the Fall, 2004 semester. They will meet deadlines and share ideas in a WebCT discussion group. They also agree to find and mentor four additional faculty in Spring, 2005. The Technology Learning Center (the college's faculty training center) will train the mentees, but our pilot faculty will be responsible for answering questions and making sure the mentees get their pages up and running. For this, our original pilot faculty receive a copy of the software, and five hours of non-instructional pay. The generosity of SBC is allowing us to offer this financial stipend to our fifteen original project volunteers.

Our template was created by CCSF student, Natalia Kutygina, using images from the Diego Rivera mural, "Pan-American Unity", which is housed at our school. The template includes editable and non-editable areas, so that faculty can easily update the content of their pages without the fear of "wrecking" the pages. We will provide templates for a main page, a course page, a generic page, to which teachers may add a syllabus, course announcements, or anything else they wish to put on their site, as well as a "calendar" template provided by Macromedia.

The project is still in its infancy, but it is already obvious that although "Contribute" will be popular with many faculty, it is not for everyone. At our first session, an orientation, those few who had previously created web sites using HTML or a web editor, felt constrained by the non-editable templates.

But, others, some who never dreamed they could create a web site were very happy to see the demonstration of the software, saying that the technology for updating web pages had finally gotten to the point where they thought they would be comfortable using it. We are also fielding calls from colleagues of our participants who want to get their own pages up right now.

We are limiting use to a pilot group right now because their is a certain amount of back-end work that needs to be done to ensure that the process is easy for the user. We have one Help Desk staff member who has spent quite a bit of time (on top of his regular duties) figuring out the administrative aspects of Contribute, and helping to make seamless the use of the template and the application for the user. Without excellent technical support, our project could not succeed.

Our first faculty training took place on August 16, and many of our faculty already have pages in place and are using them with their classes. It seems that the ease of use plus the flexibility of the templates will allow faculty to do what they need to do while at the same time freeing them from the time comittment needed in the past to create a useful, up-to-date, and attractive web presence for use with their classes.

Take a look at their pages and faculty testimonials about the template and their experiences using Contribute. Here are some examples of what faculty are saying:

".. .I have found the website useful in a way I hadn't expected: on the 1st day of classes, I had lots of students wanting to get waitlisted. I gave out handouts only to those registered - and verbally went over the main points of attendance, grading, etc. And I was able to tell the 20+ waiting that all the info was on my website if they didn't catch everything ... "

"... I have found what I was really looking for!"

"...So far I have found Contribute to be easy to
use, easy to figure out, I like Contribute a lot!"

Stay tuned! Please feel free to contact me for updates on the project. Read what Macromedia says about Contribute in the Classroom.

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Carol Reitan
City College of San Francisco