Week 4 Assignment 2

I work for a Health Care Company that runs several different hospitals.  I have seen my fair share of technology mishaps since I started working here.  I work in training and development, so often we have to rely on the technology that is in the room we are working in.  Unfortunately, at the hospitals, there is little to no consistency of technology in the rooms that are available for training.  I have personally struggled to get technology working in some of these rooms.  One of the most frustrating things is that we have gone into the room to test our training, and it will work, but when it is show time, we run into snags. 

One of the times that our group ran into trouble was for a technology class that we were training.  Our idea was to hold a live traditional class, face-to-face, while at the same time host a synchronous webinar.  “Students appear to segment different modes of communication for different purposes.”  A. Guess, 2007.  Several of our department members were there and set up the equipment.  We couldn’t get wireless or a hard wire line connection on the laptop or desktop in the room. 

In order for the training to work, we had the desktop computer in the room up with the presentation on it.  On the laptop that we brought, we had WebEx up, but could not get an internet connection on either computer.  When we called IT or information technology, they said they showed in their systems that the internet was on and was working.  “So technology’s utility in the classroom comes down to how it is used.”  A. Guess, 2007.  The problems was that we couldn’t use the technology that was right there in front of us.

We spent about forty-five minutes trying to get these systems to work, but to no avail.  Our poor facilitator was completely frazzled, and got off to a rough start to the class.  While the face-to-face training was a success, the webinar never happened and we had to go back to the office and send an apology email to all of the participants that were trying to view the class via WebEx.  For the training department, these types of issues come up daily.  It is frustrating that there are different systems in different places.  The lack of consistency to reach the internet in our facilities can be one of our biggest issues. 

The idea to hold a WebEx class as the same time that we held a traditional live class was not a good fit for us.  We tried something new, but it didn’t work.  Unfortunately, we had no choice but to use system approved technology, so we had no choice to use different or better technology.  We consistently complain to our IT department about these issues, we are hoping that they will upgrade their systems so that we can multi-task these types of sessions in a true blended learning scenario. 

Reference:

Educause Center for Applied Research. (2007). Students’ ‘evolving’ use of technology. Retrieved from http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/17/it