Faculty development

My organization, the North Carolina Educational Computing Service (NCECS), is a regional computer center currently serving forty institutions of higher education in North Carolina. We have been heavily involved in faculty training since our network began in 1967. After about two years of network operation, we realized that computer usage in disciplines other than computer science was very limited. We saw a need for efforts by the central staff to develop computer use in the physical sciences, the social sciences, business administration, etc. I would like to spend my time today not on technical training but on NCECS activities to promote computer use in a variety of disciplines—an area we call “curriculum development.”

We received a grant from the National Science Foundation 2-1/2 years ago to support a statewide program of cooperative curriculum development. The program has included collection and development of curriculum materials, introducing the materials to faculties and students across the state through workshops, documentation, and supporting the materials by both technical and information services. One of the first things we did was to create a position of Curriculum Development Manager on the central staff, and to obtain someone who was primarily an educator (with broad interests in computer applications) rather than a computer scientist. The program described below has been managed by Dr. Joe Denk, Curriculum Development Manager for NCECS, and the following description was derived from his reports.