Understanding Dreamweaver: Skill-based Training in a Pedagogical Context

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Understanding Dreamweaver: Skill-based Training in a Pedagogical Context

1/3/2006

Ed Schwartz
Manager of the Faculty Development Institute and Director of the New Media Center
Virginia Tech

Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., with more than 500 non-teaching scientific investigators on faculty, aims to become one of the nation's top 30 research universities. This number is slated to grow to several thousand over the next few years. For more than a decade, the university has successfully leveraged information technology to compete more effectively for research funding, weather campus budget cuts, and rethink its teaching strategies. The Faculty Development Institute (FDI), launched in 1993, provides faculty with direct access to state-of-the-art technology and the training to use it.

Macromedia (recently acquired by Adobe) Dreamweaver plays a key role in this skills development incentive program, which is ongoing and campus wide.

Unlike many other institutions, we do not have a production shop on campus to accommodate our classroom instructors. Instead of designing individual websites or adapting content for use with a course management system, we train faculty to do the work themselves.

Our professional development program, though voluntary, has a 96 percent faculty buy-in rate. The huge carrot we offer each of our 1,500 faculty members is a new laptop or desktop computer every four years in exchange for participation in an extensive training program. Each replacement computer contains the latest version of several software programs, including Dreamweaver. FDI offers some 120 two-hour workshops per semester for faculty, staff and graduate students to choose from, and a peer-to-peer mentoring program for ongoing informal support. There is no charge for faculty to participate in the program, nor are there charges back to their academic departments. Participants can choose from a large cafeteria of courses that integrate skill-based training with pedagogical and research needs.

In the early days of the program, FDI judiciously targeted instructors who were most open to changing their teaching methods. By the third year, people who initially resisted the project were more inclined to come on board. It helped that faculty members volunteered to come into training sessions and share their best practices with colleagues.

As the web evolved, we quickly moved from teaching rudimentary HTML skills, to teaching web creation, to adopting Dreamweaver as the campus standard. Studio components such as Dreamweaver and Flash were designed so that non-technical content experts could create their own websites. The current version of Dreamweaver, with its CSS templates, addresses the accessibility issue, which is becoming increasingly critical for public institutions such as ours. As a state university, we will need to comply with accessibility policies set by the federal government. We are already training that first wave of interested faculty in the proper use of these templates.