Leadership, learning, and tech...

At the University of Kentucky (and other higher education organizations), faculty have a great deal of leeway dealing with the selected tools and their implementation in their classroom, be that face to face or virtual. In this kind of scenario, leadership is not able to direct specific action. However, leadership at UK (from department head up to the President), can encourage faculty to explore and gain more competence and understanding with different technology tools. Leadership can work towards creating an environment that fosters faculty discussion about the challenges and successes they have had in their course. Leadership can also make technology tools available freely to faculty and students. UK faculty have free access to Canvas, Zoom as well as several Microsoft Office and Adobe products. In the end, it is up to each faculty to engage with the technology and technology pedagogy to best implement technological tools in their classroom.

Just because UK provides a robust LMS (Canvas) to faculty, doesn't mean it's always employed appropriately. An example I used previously was instructors posting hour long lectures into their online course. This is both a very traditional style of teaching and also assumes all students will respond to an hour long lecture in the same way. For a moment, we'll ignore  the issues with posting an hour long video and focus on what technology would allow us to do.

• Add captions to the video. That would be necessary to ensure compliance with basic accessibility issues.  
• Break the hour long lecture into four 15-minute long chunks (or even shorter). 
• Provide audio only and allow students to subscribe to either a video or audio podcast of lectures. 
• Instead of a straight on camera shot of the instructor, include notes, images, or other visuals that might help with explaining concepts. 
• Provide a text-based transcript of the lecture, allowing people to read the lecture, make notes, etc.