Mission and Goals

The ET Partners program strives to provide UC Davis faculty members with the assistance needed to make the transition to incorporating technology into teaching efficient and comprehensible to all levels of learners.

Upon selection student partners are assessed on several levels to ensure high-quality performance. In addition to being familiar with technology, students also possess good interpersonal communication skills and commendable academic records. Although not required, students are encouraged to apply in their first or second year at Davis, in the hopes that the program can develop a stable student partner base.

Responsibilities

After being accepted into the program the student partners have a variety of responsibilities that are required of them for the duration of their participation with ET Partners. If they fail to complete these tasks it will put their employment with the program in jeopardy. Below is a list of some of the key responsibilities allotted to the student partners.

Students must:

• Attend and complete the training program to a level deemed satisfactory by the program manager
• Meet weekly with your assigned faculty partner during which time they will represent the ET Partners Program in a positive manner
• Meet weekly with the program administrator to review the progress of their partnership and receive guidance on questions that may come up
• Attend weekly scheduled group meetings comprised of the other student partners so collaboration and team work is possible
• Provide weekly documentation of their activities
• Maintain good academic standing

Student-Faculty Partnerships

After all applications have been evaluated and assessed, the program manager assigns each student partner to work with a faculty partner for the course of one quarter. Each student-faculty partnership will develop a plan for bringing appropriate uses of technology into the faculty members' teaching curriculum. During this partnership students will be expected to help their faculty member with the following.

• Learning how to use the appropriate technologies needed to accomplish their course-related technology project
• Become aware of the other technology resources and facilities available to them on campus for future use
• Developing the faculty members overall technological skill set
• Being available to help occasionally with production work as needed in order to complete the quarters teaching product

Program History

Education Technology Partners was conceived as a faculty development program to address the increasing need to incorporate educational technology into the classroom. Both research and experience has concluded that technology, when appropriately implemented, can serve as a highly effective supplementary teaching tool. In an attempt to bridge the gap between traditional technological methods and the more modern applications available, the idea of partnering a student techonology advisor with a faculty member was initiated. By facilitating these relationships, the program hopes to reach out to the remaining two-thirds of the UC Davis faculty who have not yet fully adopted technology into their teaching.

Borrowing its blue print from other institutions with similar programs, ET Partners was a logical step for UC Davis to increase faculty opportunity, knowledge, and experience of software and hardware applications that have proven to enhance educational outcomes and simplify course administration. After shaping the program to fit the UC Davis campus a proposal was developed for the pilot effort. Met with enthusiasm by those who allocate funding, ET Partners was approved initially for a three quarter trial period.

After an intense application period, twelve highly qualified undergraduate students were chosen in the fall of 2001 and the program was implemented. A ten-week training course ensued, with a dual emphasis to promote the technological applications relevant to instructional use, as well to focus on the communicative issues of how to best facilitate a learning atmosphere conducive to both the students and their faculty partners. With the help of both Mediaworks staff and outside experts, an immense amount of valuable material was covered during the first quarter. Another important goal of this training was to help to prepare students for the reversal of roles that would take place when they were paired with an instructor. In addition to their in-class training, students were provided with high-quality laptops complete with the appropriate software necessary to ensure the learning process could extend outside the classroom walls.

By January of 2002, the students were ready to be partnered with their first set of faculty participants. Carefully matched based on the scopes of the requested projects, as well as taking into account personal interests, the first batch of ET Partners proved successful in creating complementary work teams. The end result was the completion of a wide range of diverse projects, such as course web sites and PowerPoint presentations that demonstrated the faculty members newly acquired technical skills. Subsequent feedback at the completion of the projects proved positive from both ends of the partnership. Credited mainly to word of mouth of the satisfied faculty partners, enough publicity was generated to justify the partnering of a second batch of students and faculty the following quarter, which was met with similar enthusiasm and positive outcomes.

What started as a three-quarter trial program is now an accepted and established ongoing effort to make necessary technologies more accessible to faculty at UC Davis. ET Partners has proved an invaluable tool in improving the quality of education in the classrooms of its faculty participants. It is the hope of all those involved that the foundation for ET Partners that has been set will continue to be built upon and developed in future years.