Summary

Welcome to the final annual report for the Duke Center for Instructional Technology. This year marked the beginning of a large point of transition and evolution for CIT, with new leadership and a new Duke strategic plan that sets a stage for our transformation beyond what the current Center for Instructional Technology does. This report provides updates on our key areas of focus: Teaching Innovation, Learning Technology, and Online Initiatives. A few highlights from 2016-17 include the following:

A new Associate Vice Provost for Digital Education and Innovation

We said goodbye to our friend and founder, Lynne O’Brien, and welcomed Matthew Rascoff to our team (see Duke Today article). We began laying the groundwork for a new strategic direction and plan across our organization.

Website redesign

CIT launched a new website design that made numerous improvements for users. The new website has an updated look and feel, responsive design for mobile devices, simplified navigation based on user feedback and revised faculty-focused content.

Expanded online offerings

While we continued our partnership with Coursera to deliver open online courses, we also launched Duke Extend, a new Duke-owned and operated online course platform based on the OpenEdX platform. We developed and launched several new online courses and projects in the new platform as well as on Sakai.

Expanded programs and events

We experimented with several new events and programs this year, including:

  • Teaching and Learning Days —  A new, two-day event on April 27 and 28, 2017 for faculty and academic staff. The event included a series of workshops and seminars on a range of teaching-related topics. 185 faculty and academic staff attended from across Duke.
  • PebblePad Bootcamp — 38 people registered for this three-day event in June 2017 that covered all the essentials needed to get started with PebblePad and ePortfolios.
  • A new faculty event, “What I wish I had known about teaching at Duke”, that featured seasoned Duke faculty engaging in discussions with new Duke faculty about teaching at Duke.
  • In addition to launching a new Active Learning Fellows program for 13 Duke faculty, we also planned a new series called the Course Design Institute, launching this August
  • Learning Technologies Workshop — A three-day event held in The Edge focused on the future of learning technologies. 45 attendees from 14 different organizations attended the first two days (held as an “unconference”). 30 Duke faculty, staff and administrators attended the Duke-only third day focused on the “Future State of Learning Technology at Duke.”

New strategic partnerships

As our work with online learning continues to grow, we built new strategic partnerships with several Duke schools and programs including:

  • The Fuqua School of Business, redesigning key modules for their Global Executive MBA program;
  • The Sanford School of Public Policy, including a US Civics “bootcamp” course, a math prep course and a series of climate change modules;
  • Duke Alumni, continuing to partner on small open courses designed for Duke alums; and
  • Duke Global Health Institute.

As part of our evolving strategy to serve as a resource and network hub for teaching and learning services at Duke, we also partnered with several other groups, centers and organizations including Duke Service-Learning, the Academic Resource Center, The Graduate School, the Thompson Writing Program, the Program in Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, and more.