March, 2007

The Edutech Report - March, 2007 - Full Issue PDF
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Working With the Faculty
By Thomas Warger
The faculty is undeniably the prime constituency of campus IT, and not just because it has the preponderance of political power. Information technology is too expensive and all-pervasive to warrant existing except as necessary for the core purposes of the institution—instruction and scholarship. For this reason, working with the faculty is the key to IT success, beyond the need to work with other constituents. Administrators and staff administer colleges and universities but follow a charter generally derived from the faculty.

News Briefs
More Resources from the Sloan Consortium; EDUCAUSE Announces 2007 Annual Program Plan

Quotes of the Month
cyberlearning and collaboration; three e-learning trends

Managing the Reasons for User Resistance to Change
By Tim Klaus, Texas A&M - University–Corpus Christi
Whenever large IT-enabled change occurs, such as when a new ERP system is rolled out, many users tend to resist the change. On one hand, user resistance can positively affect an implementation as it may indicate potential flaws in the implementation. On the other hand, user resistance has been a root cause of why many implementations completely fail or do not reach the projected benefits. This article describes the principal types of resistance and describes specific strategies that CIOs and other institutional leaders can use in dealing with this resistance.

Edutech Responds
integrated system; data-tending duties; inter-institutional collaboration