Questions such as these are under consideration as the CST embarks on a major review of its programs and purposes. Through this special issue of CORE, the CST Advisory Board seeks to inform you of the review process and to solicit your participation in it. The review is structured around five working groups as described below, and the Advisory Board is seeking members of the York community to join these groups. After reading through this special issue, please send or bring in your ideas and comments regarding the review, and let us know of your interest in joining a working group. Also watch for an announcement about the February Open Forum.
Vice-President Academic Sheila Embleton appointed Professor Ron Sheese as Interim Academic Director of the CST in July 2001 with the direction to "oversee a review of activities in the CST with a view to forward visioning of the CST." The primary impetus for the review was the burgeoning interest in the use of electronic technologies in teaching and learning, an interest, however, that is not uniformly embraced by community members. Those eager to explore the possibilities of electronic technology for enhancing their teaching readily discover that considerable support services are necessary to realize those possibilities. Numerous units, at various levels in the university hierarchy, have been created to address that need. Simultaneously, many community members have expressed a fear that technology itself will become the purpose of these units, supplanting considerations of educational and pedagogical purpose. But enthusiasts, skeptics and those in between all seem to agree that at York the technological support of teaching should not be separate from the pedagogical support of teaching. As the CST is the university's primary means of providing pedagogical support, this agreement leads naturally to the question of how the CST should be involved in technological support.
Many Canadian universities are re-examining their equivalent of a CST in light of the rapidly growing demand for technological support of teaching and teachers. Most of these reviews are guided by the same desire to ground such technology support in good educational theory and practice; for example, by providing support that asks instructors what instructional goals they are seeking to address, that suggests which technologies are and are not appropriate to those goals, and that facilitates effective use of the appropriate ones. Why, however, do York and other universities believe that finding a solid educational ground for technological support of teaching requires a review of the whole of their teaching support activities? The answer lies in the desire to take advantage of the strong interest in technology as a means to involving more instructors in a reevaluation of their teaching goals, but to do so without permitting technology issues to sweep aside other important teaching support programs. Only by gaining a clear sense of the CST's purpose and constituencies can a means be found to integrate technology support within a sensible and coherent program of teaching support.
The CST Review will, therefore, consider how to organize support for teaching; but more specifically, it will consider how to organize York's technological support units and the CST into a well-integrated and effective system of teaching support. And the CST Review will consider how to establish priorities among its various teaching support functions. Consistent with the goal of "forward visioning", however, the CST Review will also consider new ways of conceptualizing the work of supporting teaching. The CST Advisory Board has created five working groups to conduct the initial stage of the review process, each of these with responsibility for a different aspect of the task. Based on the work of the five groups, the Advisory Board will prepare reports for circulation to the York community throughout the year. Open forums to discuss the reports are planned beginning with one on February 26. Based on these forums and other feedback received, the Advisory Board will revise and coordinate the various reports in order to submit a final CST Review Report to Professor Rod Webb, Associate Vice-President Academic and to the York Senate through the Senate Committee on Teaching and Learning.
The CST Advisory Board wishes the review process to be open to all members of the community and encourages you to participate in it. Comments on the review as described here and as it develops are welcome any time, and expressions of interest in joining a review working group are particularly welcome now.