Jeff Hecht
by Mark McGowan
NIU’s College of Education has spent the 21st century on a mission to make sure that students, professors and working school teachers stand on the cutting edge of technology.
Now the college has created a position to centralize those efforts, naming one of its faculty leaders in technology and research to spearhead the work.
Jeff Hecht, chair of the Department of Educational Technology, Research and Assessment since August of 2000, is now the associate dean for technology, research and faculty innovation. Professor Lara Leutkehans is now serving as acting chair in ETRA.
“This was a real opportunity to go out and try some new things,” Hecht said. “I can have an influence in setting direction throughout an entire college rather than in just one department.”
Many of Hecht’s new duties are clear: He oversees tech support, provides guidance for moving into technology and supervises purchasing and maintenance of equipment. He will set direction on how to integrate technology into the college’s teaching, research and service, including concepts of e-learning, distance education, the Internet and classroom innovation.
He also will work with the college’s Research, Evaluation and Policy Studies office to encourage more extramurally supported research within the college and to reach out in new directions.
“I want to support our faculty in their research and in their efforts to secure the resources needed to support their research. Being active in scholarship is an important aspect of faculty life in the College of Education,” said Hecht, whose scholarship focuses on use of new technology in education and educational research as well as research ethics and technologies.
But the third plank of his office – faculty innovation – is a responsibility he continues to explore.
“I want to encourage faculty to try new things: to experiment; to be leaders in the innovation of practice and pedagogy of teaching,” he said.
“I want to help faculty by providing resources and assistance, working collaboratively so they can achieve the goals in technology use, research and new practices that they want to. These could be new ventures for on- and off-campus programming, new modalities of instruction, new systems or technologies for the delivery of instruction – anything to provide faculty flexibility and support to try new and exciting things for themselves and their students.”
The mission is critical in a time when more working adults and other non-traditional students are seeking higher education while juggling families, jobs and record gasoline prices. Meanwhile, competition has heated up: Online colleges have appeared to offer those students an alternative to traditional universities.
NIU’s College of Education is the university’s leading provider of off-campus programming, offering well more than half of those courses, but Hecht said that constant reflection is a priority: “Can we be better? How does one do that?”
It also keeps NIU on the forefront of higher education rather than behind the trends, he said. “We want to remain a leader,” he said.
“We’ve come up with a model that one of our departments is trying out this semester. Students take two classes a semester but only meet one night a week” for four hours rather than two hours and 40 minutes, Hecht said. “The rest of their work is online as they’re able, and they love the model. There is less interference with lives and families, and they get to work when the kids are asleep. And it’s not fully online: some subjects don’t lend themselves to that.”