I had the opportunity to visit our colleagues at Oregon Health and Sciences University in Portland recently.  We compared notes on how we use and support the institutions' course management systems, which happens to be Sakai for both of us.

OHSU's Academic Technology group fields basic technical issues (log in problems, etc.) via phone and email, as we do. All OHSU Acad Tech team members, including their leader, director Dr. Tom Boudrot, cover the helpline and inbox during the day, and all take turns carrying a pager so they can offer extended hours, 7 days a week. 

OHSU defers the heavy lifting on technical matters to a third party. This allows their team to focus on working with faculty members to build instructionally-sound courses.The scope of our technical support is much broader.

The fact that everyone on the OHSU team, including the hard-core technical guy is an experienced educator lends a decidedly different feel to their support model. The focus is more on using technology to support instructional design instead of system maintenance.

The common element between OHSU's Academic Technology group and our Academic Technology Services group is the emphasis on providing excellent customer service. Tom's comments on the importance of meeting their customers' needs could easily have come from one of our team meetings.

If you're interested in more about IT customer service, you'll want to view Gary Kidney's slides, "Understanding Users and Transforming IT to Deliver."   

Pictured above: Mountain stream just outside Portland, Oregon

A hot topic at the Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Symposium in July was the increasing need to develop taxonomies for educational content. As one speaker pointed out, the challenge of today's world is not a lack of information. It is everywhere, it is freely available and even the person who decries YouTube the loudest has used it to demonstrate something at least once. 

The true challenge is organizing the information into a meaningful, useful and identifiable form. This is where taxonomies become critical. Metadata can tag the information but who decides what the tags will be and which associations are appropriate? Educational taxonomies must go a step further and decide how the bit of content might be used to support learning.

The presenters at the Symposium offered this as an ongoing challenge rather than an issue with a solution. Read more about taxonomies for educational media and implications for the semantic web.

Most of the course sites in Sakai@MD Anderson are for instructor-led courses, like those offered by the School of Health Professions. A growing number, though, are self-paced online courses. The most common format so far is straightforward: a series of recorded presentations often with picture-in-picture of the speaker. The Breast Cancer Course, part of the Professional Oncology Education series is an example. You can take this course without the need to enroll. Other courses in the series require enrollment and some offer continuing  medical education credit for a modest fee.

The Tech.Edu blog is about learning technology and its role in MD Anderson's goal of Making Cancer History™. We'll explore topics of interest to our learning communities. Those communities include everyone involved in academic, professional and continuing education and training at MD Anderson. They also include the Sakai community and our colleagues in the University of Texas System. The team at Academic Technology Services will be the primary source of posts, but you can also look forward to guest posts from our fellow learning technology advocates. Welcome to our blog!