Who's Steering the Boat—and Where?

• Dr. Neal Abraham, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty, DePauw University
• Dr. William Plater, Executive Vice Chancellor and Dean of Faculties, IUPUI
• Dr. Rebecca Nickoli, Executive Director of Educational Systems, Ivy Tech State College
• Susan Scott, IHETS Director of E-Learning, will serve as moderator.

Most technology decisions are fundamentally academic decisions, but we seldom hear from academic leaders at either technology or e-learning conferences. To launch the day's opportunities for professional exchange, a panel of academic officers will discuss directions and processes of charting new courses for their own institutions and for higher education as a broader community. Their conversation will provide perspectives from several “masters and commanders” whose greatest successes come not from giving orders but from listening, articulating a vision, and fostering capacity among all hands to move in a common direction.

In the context of the three stages of technology deployment—duplication, application, and transformation—all three panelists provide academic leadership for institutions well along in the transformation stage.

Over the past dozen years, IUPUI has developed numerous high-visibility projects from redefining the library and associating a center for teaching and learning there to working with the Flashlight Project and the Pew Program in Course Redesign to development of OnCourse to national leadership in assessment and e-portfolio initiatives. These distinct initiatives represent a coherent pattern of innovation that has moved IUPUI to the forefront of major urban universities and can lead others to consider anew their own institutional directions. Dr. William Plater, Executive Vice Chancellor and Dean of Faculties, will share the vision for a consensus still evolving in a large public university.

More recently, with the help of a major grant from the Lilly Endowment, Inc., DePauw University 's 361* Initiative has garnered national recognition. Beyond the direct benefits of a supportive faculty development program and a creative set of student internship opportunities, DePauw is thoughtfully reframing liberal arts education for the 21 st century, and its holistic approach can also help inspire other kinds of institutions to think freshly about how technology is developed to support institutional mission and values. Dr. Neal Abraham, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty, will discuss the understandings that have led through application to transformation.

Over the past decade, Ivy Tech State College has moved toward common technology applications to strengthen its regional centers within the statewide system. A long-term vision has guided the College in applying technology both to coordinate system support services from the SIS to the award-winning Virtual Library and to strengthen the regions academically as they work out the transition from technical to community college. Without that groundwork, and the ability of technology to support Vincennes University 's partnership, it might never have been feasible to think about a Community College of Indiana . Dr. Rebecca Nickoli, Executive Director of Educational Systems for the Ivy Tech system, will contribute the insights that have emerged throughout the institution stemming from this evolution.