Week 5 part 1 - DSC interview

Face-to-Face Interview with Ms. Theresa Butori, Ph.D. Director of The Center For Excellence In Teaching And Learning, Dalton State College. February 13, 2020

Name of technology coordinator being interviewed – Ms. Theresa Butori

What is your title? I am the Director of The Center For Excellence In Teaching And Learning at Dalton State College

What type of degree is required for your position? The position required at least a Master’s in Education.

Where do you obtain your degree? University of Illinois, Chicago.

What are your job responsibilities? I am responsible for all faculty requests concerning Georgia View (D2L), all live course streaming needs, like when a satellite campus needs a live course streamed to their campus from here (Dalton State Main campus), Administrative projects, and I teach Instructional Design courses for our students majoring in Education.

What are some typical daily activities associated with your duties? Well, we answered some of those with my responsibilities, but I do have grading work and I have to check with OCIS on the status of any fault reports I have outstanding. The live streaming is crucial, especially for evening classes when OCIS personnel have left for the day. I use Collaborate Ultra for the live streaming. When Collaborate goes down, things can get interesting. We have used Face Time and Facebook Messenger to get those classes through when Ultra was not working – it is not pretty.

Do you have a budget that you control? How do you make decisions on selecting resources for your stakeholders? I do not have a budget that I control. All of the technology is controlled by OCIS, and all of the technology budget is theirs as well. Their expenditures are based on staff requests, student and classroom needs, maintenance of equipment, and, of course, costs. The resource selection is based on priority and driven by staff requests. The priority is given to the staff requests that need equipment to address larger classrooms/more students.   

Have you had an opportunity to impact technology implementation throughout your school? Would you describe a specific example? I am trying. I want to move away from the Office 365 platform and move to Google All In. I think that the Google tools offer a better/easier means of collaboration than Office 365 does, and it is also easier to use – in my opinion. I also want to implement Adobe DC Pro for all staff so they can edit PDF files.

Do you have a technology committee? How are technology decisions made?

Yes, there is a committee made up of 7 or 8 teachers and administrators. Their decisions are made based on budget and prioritized requests. There is a standing percentage that stays in reserve for maintenance of software agreements and hardware replacement.

What is the best part of your job? Oh – I get to be the detective. I gather information from teachers and staff and try to find the best solutions to problems. I like meeting with people, because it is peculiar that they do not report problems, but if I go visit, then there is always something that does not work right, could work better, or they did not know how (to do).

What do you find to be the most challenging part of your job? Miscommunication is very challenging. I think I explain something very well, but I find out that I was misunderstood. That works both ways too. Sometimes I think that staff tries to see if I can figure out problems with less than all the information. But, I like being the detective, so that is okay. I like finding and fixing the problems. I also like designing solutions that make teaching and learning easier and better when and where I can. It is not easy. Sometimes it is impossible with what we have or it takes too long to get what we need. So need deficiencies are a real challenge.