EnlightenEd

The Intersection of Digital Transformation and Faculty Adoption

by | Nov 11, 2020

The Intersection of Digital Transformation and Faculty Adoption

This is the second in a series of posts discussing critical aspects of the Educause report “Top 10 IT Issues 2020: The Drive to Digital Transformation Begins.”

In our last blog post, we discussed the data integration challenges that colleges and universities face in 2020 – most notably, the need for adaptability within a student-centered ecosystem. Today, we turn our focus to another aspect of the integration puzzle – the fact that faculty adoption of new tools is just as much a factor in an institution’s ability to adapt and thrive as the tools themselves.

This issue has been thrust into a glaring spotlight in recent months, with frustratingly inconsistent adoption of tools for virtual learning, varying from professor to professor. While some are comfortable using the new platforms and tools their institution has provided or recommended, others struggle to get them to work correctly or to utilize all the features – and some opt out of using them altogether.

Unfortunately, this creates an environment that is the exact opposite of student-centric – and certainly not the seamless digital experience set forth as the gold standard in the above-mentioned Educause report.

It’s one thing when inconsistent faculty adoption of an app or tool affects only a small part of a student’s college experience – it’s quite another when it impacts their daily class experience, and causes ongoing frustration all semester long.

Of course no one is blaming faculty for this inconsistent use of the tools available – the entire world of higher ed has been thrown into uncharted territory these past several months, and everyone is scrambling to figure out the best ways forward.

But precisely therein lies the solution – what if there was a simple and affordable way to rapidly experiment with different tools to find those best ways forward, quickly integrating those new tools with your institution’s other apps and databases for trial usage by faculty, and then just as quickly removing them to try another one, if the first just isn’t gaining traction with professors?

What if you were able to retain this flexibility into the future, so that you could always test new tools for faculty adoption before settling on the perfect fit – and what if doing so didn’t require using up all your institution’s IT resources for weeks at a time?

That’s exactly what the N2N Illuminate platform can do for you.

Illuminate removes barriers to institutional adaptability by making it easy to try out any new app or tool, securely integrating it into your existing IT ecosystem.

When it’s that quick and easy to test out a new tool, it becomes just as easy to find exactly the right fit for your institution’s faculty – the tool that they are all willing and able to utilize and that they can use to provide a consistent, seamless learning experience for your students on a daily basis.

No more frustration for faculty…no more frustration for students…and no more frustration for administration.

If you’d like to learn more about how N2N Illuminate can help your institution navigate our current challenges and prepare for those to come, contact us today for a free demo.

 


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