The Overlooked Educators

Ionad Bairre recently ran a Teaching and Learning session for Technical Officers here in UCC. Technical officers are the folks who make the labs not blow up, demonstrate equipment, design and set up practicals and generally flit around making sure the lecturers grand vision for the course actually runs in the practical labs.

Professional Development strategies in teaching and learning often focus on the Lecturers and course leaders, and forget about everyone else. Often, it is the 'everyone else' Technical officers, postgraduate teaching assistants and so on, who front the bulk of the most effective teaching time in practically focused courses. If you are finding the lecturers a hard sell for technology assisted learning, try these people. Not surprisingly, they are very technically minded, capable, and pragmatic - all a great help for using Technology Assisted Learning tools.

The other overlooked group are the administrators. Often lecturers use their VLE's in name only. They toss an eMail or a memory stick in the direction of a departmental administrator or assistant with a general direction to 'put that up on blackboard'. Again, if you want to improve how your VLE is used, there is another overlooked community to try and reach.