Jim Groom

General Description of Job/Objective:

Advance the University’s commitment to academic excellence by helping faculty integrate teaching and learning technologies into their pedagogy, research and other professional activity. Work closely with faculty, staying current with individual teaching and research practices and needs; aggressively pursue knowledge of teaching and learning technologies and best practices in their uses; develop information technologies into locally useful instructional and scholarly tools; and provide individual assistance including information technology exploration, consultation, troubleshooting, support, management and training. Contribute tactical and strategic perspective to the development of the University’s vision of effective use of technologies in teaching and learning.

Specific Duties and Responsibilities:

• Collaborate with faculty to assist with the integration of teaching and learning technologies into their pedagogy.
• Assist faculty in evaluating discipline-specific instructional software and with effective integration of new information technologies into their professional and research programs.
• Engage in individual and collaborative professional research and assist in scholarly, departmental and divisional avenues of exploring new technologies for the UMW campus community.
• Develop and provide for faculty professional development opportunities for basic skills in and instructional uses of information technologies. The scope of any single project of this type may be institution-wide, campus-wide, building-wide or one-on-one, and it may include workshops, online tutorials and/or demonstrations.
• Develop documentation of information technologies relevant to academic uses in the UMW community.
• Collaborate with other members of the Department of Information Technologies to ensure that the basic computing environment in academic settings functions effectively to enable appropriate teaching and learning activities. Such settings include computer labs and computer enhanced classrooms. Serve as a “customer-support manager” for solutions to problems in these settings as needed and appropriate.
• Assist in the training and of a cadre of student aides who can perform valuable tasks in supporting technologies as they are used in teaching and learning at UMW.
• Assist in providing technology training to staff and students.
• Collaborate to develop proposals for corporate, federal, state, and other funding related to the use of information technologies in the instructional program.
• If appropriately qualified and when academic department requests have been approved by the Director and the Vice President, participate in instructional roles related to specific academic background as requested by academic departments.