UMUC-Verizon Virtual Resource Site -- Module 1: Technologies

This section provides a guide to the technologies frequently used in Web-enabled teaching and learning activities.

To make it easier for teachers to understand how these technologies work, we have divided them into three categories: easy, moderate, and hard. These categories reflect the level of technical skill or system power needed to use the technologies as instructional media or networked applications. Although some faculty are very interested in learning new software programs and technologies, many others find that the time and energy this requires can be serious impediments to incorporating technology into their teaching. Our scale is developed with the second type of faculty in mind. The assumption is that faculty can make the best use of their limited time by focusing on how to use new electronic tools as instructional media in courses while relying on the expertise and assistance of technical support staff to help implement their pedagogical aims.

"Easy" technologies may be understood as applications that make use of commonly available tools and for which training is provided on most campuses. "Moderate" technologies are somewhat more sophisticated but could be learned with some effort by faculty motivated to do so. "Hard" technologies are those that require specialized software, equipment, or high-level programming expertise. Faculty members wishing to adopt easy, moderate, or hard technologies are encouraged to work at all times with computer programmers, graphic artists, media production personnel, and others who have the technical expertise, equipment, and software to help them create dynamic and effective learning tools. We believe the examples of teaching/learning activities described in Module 1 call attention to some outstanding successes of this collaboration.

The rating icons which denote a technology's level of complexity and accompany all technology descriptions match the three-level categories in the chart below.