National Institute forFrequently Asked Questions
- How can those at liberal arts colleges and universities get involved with NITLE? How will they benefit from their involvement?
- How NITLE can assist faculty members at campuses in the NITLE Network?
- Whom should faculty contact if they are interested in getting involved?
- How can my college join NITLE?
- What colleges, universities, and organizations participate with NITLE?
- How are technological needs different at liberal arts institutions compared to other higher ed campuses?
- Why was Southwestern University chosen as NITLE’s new headquarters?
- What changes are anticipated now that NITLE is headquartered at Southwestern?
How can those at liberal arts colleges and universities get involved with NITLE? How will they benefit from their involvement?
Faculty, staff, and students from the liberal arts community can participate in NITLE’s events, which are designed with the needs of small, liberal arts institutions in mind. NITLE events include conferences such as the NITLE Summit, NITLE Instructional Leaders Conference, and NITLE Camp; a variety of workshops that campuses can request for onsite or virtual delivery; and a wide variety of online programs.
NITLE also offers opportunities to directly explore and experiment with digital technologies via its Labs. For example, institutions in the NITLE Network have access to a multipoint interactive videoconferencing environment with which they can experiment to enhance the classroom experience or to connect with students studying abroad or alumni. In addition, NITLE offers consulting services for strategic planning and technology integration.
NITLE is continually developing new approaches to help liberal arts colleges explore and implement digital technologies. These developments are influenced and strengthened by input from the colleges and universities in the NITLE Network. In that vein, those within the Network can get involved by contributing their insights about the issues that small, liberal arts colleges face when considering the place of technology in liberal education. By aggregating insight from across the NITLE Network, NITLE provides the liberal arts community with a national forum for discussing the integration of technology into teaching and learning, issues of technology infrastructure, and the implications for liberal education of emerging technologies.
How NITLE can assist faculty members at campuses in the NITLE Network?
NITLE directly assists faculty members through its programming. These programs address a range of issues of interest to faculty: digital teaching, emerging technologies, geospatial technologies, quantitative analysis, the sciences, and languages and cultural studies. Faculty members within the NITLE Network are invited to participate in a survey of faculty focused on their needs and interests regarding the incorporation of technology into teaching.
Whom should faculty contact if they are interested in getting involved?
Faculty members interested in getting involved with NITLE should contact their campus’s liaison to NITLE. NITLE staff members may also be contacted directly.
How can my college join NITLE?
To talk to us about joining the NITLE Network, please contact Michael Nanfito. Michael will be happy to talk to you about the benefits of participation and to work with you to bring your college on board. For more information, please read these details about joining NITLE.
What colleges, universities, and organizations participate with NITLE?
Many of the nation’s leading liberal arts colleges and universities are part of the NITLE Network. NITLE also counts a number of consortial organizations such as the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, Associated Colleges of the South, Great Lakes Colleges Association, and the Appalachian College Association as participants.
How are technological needs different at liberal arts institutions compared to other higher ed campuses?
Mission and scale are both differentiating factors for liberal arts institutions when it comes to technological needs.
Mission affects the shape of liberal arts institutions’ technological needs. Liberal arts institutions have strong teaching missions and high-touch cultures. The technologies that succeed on liberal arts campuses tend to be those that enhance and extend face-to-face interaction, not those that replace it. Close interaction between faculty and students is privileged on these campuses; therefore, technology must reinforce rather than distract from that relationship.
In terms of curriculum, liberal arts institutions tend towards integration over separation and specialization. Rather than placing technology into separate courses of the “introduction to computing” or “information resources” variety, these institutions tend to see an understanding of technology in its functions and implications as an integrated component of student learning. For this model to succeed, faculty members must have support in helping students utilize technologies effectively.
Regarding scale, liberal arts institutions are generally smaller than other four-year institutions Liberal arts colleges may have the same basic needs as larger institutions when it comes to providing technology infrastructure to support students and faculty (e.g., wireless access, basic bandwidth, help desk, running a website, administrative computing for enrollment management, etc.), but their smaller size often prevents them from taking advantage of certain economies of scale that benefit larger institutions. Cross-institutional collaboration can help liberal arts institutions benefit from economies of scale, and such collaborations — especially amongst libraries — have been a key strategy necessitated by issues of size.
Why was Southwestern University chosen as NITLE’s new headquarters?
By moving its headquarters to Southwestern University, NITLE will be able to deepen its connection to the liberal arts community and in so doing have a greater impact on undergraduate education. As a leading liberal arts institution, Southwestern University played a strong role in NITLE’s early development, serving as host of the Associated Colleges of the South Technology Center (ACSTC), one of NITLE’s early regional centers. It has also hosted NITLE staff members since the merger of the ACSTC with NITLE in 2006. President Jake Schrum has said that Southwestern’s goal in bringing NITLE’s headquarters to campus “is to make NITLE the most relevant and important entity in the country when it comes to technology and the liberal arts.”
What changes are anticipated now that NITLE is headquartered at Southwestern?
Since taking the helm at NITLE, Dr. Joey King has been meeting with as many of NITLE’s participants as possible in order to gather feedback on NITLE’s activities. Under his leadership, NITLE has instituted a national advisory board comprised of leaders from within the NITLE Network and beyond. NITLE has also introduced a simplified fee structure for participating in its programming and ramped up its efforts to gather on-going feedback from the community to shape its programming agenda. NITLE’s goal is to become the most relevant organization for small, liberal arts colleges with questions about the role technology plays in liberal education. As it seeks to help liberal arts colleges explore and implement digital technologies, NITLE will continue to evolve and respond to changes in the environment in order to meet these colleges’ most pressing needs and to leverage opportunity for them.