April 5 Change Management Group Assignment

This is where each of the four groups should post its response to the class activity assigned at the end of the Change Management class on April 5.

Scenario: You are one of four new faculty members that have just been hired one week ago by a College of Information (COI). Yesterday, the university Provost directed the Dean of the COI to revamp and significantly expand the school’s extant distance learning program to include all of the face-to-face courses now offered in the new undergraduate program. All fourteen faculty (10 continuing faculty and 4 new faculty) will participate in the redesign and implementation. What is more, all fourteen faculty members will participate in teaching the 5-credit hour distance Information Science course required of all new distance IS students. Per the instructions of the Provost, this revised instructional program must be implemented within 30 days, at the beginning of the new semester.

The Provost has become enamored with full-featured Web conferencing systems (Webcons) as a means for alleviating the distancing effect inherent in distance education and as a strategy for positioning the new distance program as one of the most modern. She is committed to technology that will enable remote guest lectures, open question-and-answer sessions, small-group work, and collaborative writing--all of which can be conducted live, with participants able to see and hear each other. The planned full-featured Webcon will include live audio and video. You happen to know that Webcons now on the market are able to smoothly integrate live video and audio to create a higher-order virtual learning environment that approximates its face-to-face counterpart, in addition to permitting synchronous and asynchronous communication and having many of the functions of course management systems.

Typical barriers to widespread Webcon implementation include funding and human resource issues.

Though you are a new Ph.D., your interview, your background in multimedia and knowledge of Internet technologies, in addition to your considerable experience in project management and teaching at-a-distance, both as a T.A. and as an adjunct instructor, make you the most qualified faculty member (new or old) to successfully lead and expedite this project. Rather than starting your new faculty job a few months from now, as you had negotiated, the Dean has asked you to relocate immediately in order to take charge.

Assignment (30 minutes):
Using the frame that your group was assigned, develop a management plan. In doing so, answer the following questions.

1) What factors would you consider?

2) Specifically list as many barriers to this change as you can.

3) Identify relevant strategies that you would use to combat/accommodate each barrier and effectively manage these changes and this project?

Reference

Foreman, J., and Jenkins, R. (2005, April/May). Full–featured Web conferencing systems. Innovate: Journal of Online Education, 1(4).
http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=45