Technology Across The Curriculum - History and Structure of The Program

History and Structure of The Program

The Technology Across the Curriculum (TAC) program began in 1998 with funding from the governor and legislature of Virginia, along with additional funding from GMU itself. After a series of consultations with faculty members about the technology skills that students need to succeed in majors and with local businesses and corporations about the skills they expect from graduates (in addition to discussions with students and with technology leaders), the creators of the program, Anne Scrivener Agee and Dee Ann Holisky, developed a series of IT goals that reflect the skills required by students to flourish in college and upon graduation. The goals, revised in fall 2001, are described in detail here. Thy are broken down into "essential" skills that all students should have (and that might be integrated into lower-division courses) and the "advanced" skills that might be relevant only to particular majors or to upper-level courses. Those skills in brief are:

1. Students will be able to engage in electronic collaboration.
2. Students will be able to use and create structured electronic documents.
3. Students will be able to do technology-enhanced presentations.
4. Students will be able to use electronic tools for research and evaluation.
5. Students will be able to use databases to manage information.
6. Students will be able to use spreadsheets to manage information.
7. Students will be able to use electronic tools for analyzing quantitative and qualitative data.
8. Students will be able to use graphical and multimedia representation technologies.
9. Students will be familiar with major legal, ethical, privacy and security issues in information technology.
10. Students will have a working knowledge of hardware and software.

Having articulated those goals, the TAC Program solicited faculty course and program development proposals that would incorporate one or more of the goals into particular course assignments, so that students would develop the skills associated with the various goals.

You can find a history of the TAC-funded proposals on the TAC Project Summary Page. Over most of its history, the TAC program has funded proposals from faculty members modifying individual courses or a small group of courses to incorporate several of the skills listed among the TAC IT Goals. The program has also funded department-wide proposals, in which a department decides on a series of courses that will advance student technology skills in a deliberative way, as the student progresses through the program or major. Individual proposals often involved a one-year funding cycle, in which a faculty member (or a few faculty members) would design a new assignment that incorporated student technology skills, implement it during one or two semesters, and write a report back to the TAC program assessing the success of the project. Department-wide proposals often extended over multiple years, as a group of faculty members incorporated new assignments into a series of courses, providing interim and annual assessment reports for each year that the department received TAC funding. A good example of a department-wide project was the Technology in the NCC Curriculum project, in which several faculty in the New Century College developed a series of technology-based assignments, trained other NCC faculty in the use of those assignments, and described those assignments in a detailed online report. An example of a very ambitious, "individual" project is the U.S. History Online project, in which two faculty members developed a series of online modules for a particular course, teaching students how to think like historians and how to use various online sources and tools to interpret historical events and to analyze historical data. Individual TAC projects more typically involve a single assignment with clear, technology-based learning goals, advancing one or more of the 10 TAC IT goals.

One of the original creators of the program, Dee Ann Holisky, has overseen the program since its inception. As Associate Dean and Senior Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences (now the College of Humanities and Social Sciences), she has also been responsible for overarching curriculum development for the college. The TAC Program is thus related to a general process of curriculum redesign, in which departments and faculty members rethink their course and program requirements to fulfill the college's mission of preparing students for their working lives and for citizenship in a complex, technology-rich society. Several TAC Coordinators have guided the program over its existence, including Jim Sparrow, Susan Warshauer, Leslie Harris, Beth Secrist, and Glenda Morgan.