ETS Hot Teams
The ETS Hot Team process is the first step in helping ETS decide what new technologies or approaches we should invest time and energy into. The Hot Team concept was born out of the need to quickly evaluate an emerging technology or approach and to assess its viability for use in an educational setting. In a general sense, we are also interested in creating a set of resources that we as educational technologists and instructional designers can share with our primary audiences — faculty, staff, students, peers, and project sponsors. Each Hot Team can be assembled based on a recommendation from a member of the staff, from an organizational need, from outside interests, or for the purpose of informing ourselves. Hot Teams are typically made up of five people with a timeline of no more than three weeks. Anyone inside or outside ETS can propose a Hot Team and we encourage people from outside ETS to participate.
All Hot Teams are made up with a set of people with diverse backgrounds — instructional designers, multimedia specialists, technologist, faculty, etc can be asked to participate together. Having multiple perspectives always yields strong results. The Hot Team will be assigned a team leader whose responsibility it is to organize the team around the project. Each Hot Team will be given a formal charge and a set of questions to answer. Typically the outcomes come in the form of a short white paper modeled after Educause’s “7 Things You Should Know” series.
Below you will find comeplete Hot Teams. Take a moment and explore what we have to share. Each title is clickable.
Hot Team: LionShare
To quickly investigate and assess emerging technologies ETS employs a custom Hot Team process. A Hot Team is essentially a small group of instructional designers, technologists, faculty, or other interested parties who are given a fixed amount of time to quickly review a specific technology. In addition to reviewing technology, Hot Teams must discuss its applications to higher education and produce an analysis in the space of a few of weeks. One of the end products of this process is a white paper, which is a summary of the team’s discussion. Today, we’re releasing the white paper for a product called LionShare (http://lionshare.its.psu.edu). LionShare is a Peer-to-Peer application that enables faculty and staff to share academic matierials. The idea is similar to programs like LimeWire and Kazaa, except that users are authenticated and sharing can be restricted to individuals or groups of a certain type, such as all faculty at Penn State and Stanford University. We’ve included a few use cases to help people imagine how this tool could be used and there are a few interesting features (look at the PeerServer idea) and some areas for future development.
So have a look at the white paper and let us know what you think, both about the technology and the hot team process.
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