Why TLT Roundtables are coming back: CRISIS...LURCH...TLTR2!

Early 1990s:
CRISIS LURCH CRISIS LURCH CRISIS LURCH

Late 1990s, early 2000s:
CRISIS TLTR CRISIS TLTR CRISIS TLTR

Late 2000s, early 2010s:
CRISIS LURCH CRISIS LURCH CRISIS LURCH

Early 2010s, mid 2010s:
CRISIS TLTR2 CRISIS TLTR2 CRISIS TLTR2

REPLACE LURCHES WITH TLTR2!

As many of you know, over 500 colleges and universities formed Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtables (TLTRs) in the late 1990s. They served as an effective and flexible response to the CRISIS LURCH CRISIS pattern of "planning" for improvement in teaching and learning with technology.

We're hearing frequently from folks who are reviving and reconfiguring their institutions' TLTRs in response to current pressures and fragmentation. A new version of the CRISIS LURCH CRISIS conditions.

These TLTR2s are both similar in their structure and different from their predecessors in the current conditions they face.

Similar in that TLTRs

• Build on the enormous human resources of colleagues without burning those colleagues out.
• Are aligned with the current organizational structure without being part of it or in conflict with it.
• Advise academic decision makers
• Facilitate readjustment, reorganization - help create a new stable structure
• Very low cost: require little or no change to total operation budget or staff assignments.
• (Re)Build consensus about the ways technology can contribute to the institution's educational mission.
• Deal collaboratively with rapid, unavoidable, attractive, frightening change.

Different conditions

• The stakes are even higher than they were ten years ago.
• Retrenchment in academic support services - IT, faculty development; scarcity of training for faculty to use new teaching resources with confidence; scarcity of training for students to use new resources for learning.
• Ubiquity of handheld devices with rapidly increasing capabilities and unpredictable educational implications (remember when FaceBook was solely for social interaction among undergraduates and others were unwelcome?);
• Proliferation of educationally valuable services, tools, Web 2.0 options which are not owned or controlled by the college or university.
• Dissatisfaction with widely used, expensive, Learning Management Systems.
• Availability and respectability of open source resources.
• Pressure to teach more students online (partially or entirely), when the meaning of "online" is likely to change next year or next week.
• “Necessity is the mother of self-deception” - belief that increasing course enrollment must be accomplished by expanding online and hybrid courses AND that will be accomplished without increasing faculty AND that will be accompanied by significant net increases in tuition revenue. [This is happening when MANY other institutions are attempting the same thing, thus increasing the competition for students!]

These differences reveal that we are facing an even greater discontinuity than we did in the 1990s. More options, less money, more pressure to cut costs and improve student performance TMI/TMO/TLT/TL$. We need to resurrect and re-adopt a valuable, effective paradigm: People working together on common problems across institutional boundaries can adapt to changes more thoughtfully and disseminate reasoned and reasonable improvements more effectively.

Is the CRISIS LURCH CRISIS pattern happening at your institution?
Are any of the similar or different conditions relevant to your institution?
How could you NOT want a TLTR at your institution?