Today’s higher education students have grown up in a participatory, interactive digital culture. Today’s educators lag behind in employing educational technologies that engage students. TOEP encourages faculty and staff to explore and reflect on innovative and creative uses of freely available online instructional technologies. TOEP is no traditional professional development, but instead provides online access to resources for faculty to explore at their own pace through a set of hands-on, self-paced, discovery activities. TOEP provides a vibrant social-network community as an avenue for peer support and collaboration to enable the transfer of valuable skills between faculty and from faculty to their students.

TOEP website http://suny.edu/toep
TOEP Scholarly Publications and Presentations https://sites.google.com/site/sunytoep/about/publications

Today’s university faculty are under pressure to integrate educational technology such as video, social media, photo sharing, and citation management into their courses to engage their increasingly digitally savvy students. Faculty have difficulty finding the time to vet new technologies for pedagogical effectiveness and to become proficient with the technology prior to course integration. The result is that many SUNY faculty are not using these new technologies to enhance student learning experiences and outcomes.

TOEP is successfully addressing this problem. This innovative cloud-based professional development model gives faculty a focused venue for expanding tech-infused pedagogy and provides an online community of peer mentors to share experiences and ideas. TOEP saves faculty time by focusing research and helps them implement new technologies in the classroom and online.

Through structured inquiry-based learning, TOEP provides resources for self-directed discovery and knowledge creation. TOEP is a series of online activities that encourage faculty to explore emerging technologies. This innovative professional development model gives faculty a focused venue for expanding tech-infused pedagogy and an online community of their peers in which to share their experiences and ideas.

“The TOEP toolbox continually evolves and covers a wide range of established and cutting-edge online tools relevant to today’s faculty. Sections of the site are dedicated to topics such as blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, photo sharing, audio/video, presentation tools, and other collaborative applications. All sections follow a parallel format. Core information about the tool area/topic is summarized using rich media content with embedded links to online materials designed to extend understanding. Discovery Resources link the user to the tools, and curated exemplars including tutorials and other resources. A Discovery Exercise then provides an opportunity to apply new knowledge through hands-on activities. Each area then concludes with a research bibliography section titled, “What does the research say?“ After exploring and interacting with the content, participants embed a link to the product of their learning experience and post a reflection to a private social-network community. Participants are encouraged to read and comment on each other’s reflections and experiences.”

Source: Sullivan, R., Burns, B., Gradel, K., Shi, S., Tysick, C., van Putten, C. (2013). Tools of Engagement Project (TOEP): On-demand Discovery Learning Professional Development. Journal of Educational Technology Systems, 41(3).

TOEP allows faculty to explore online tools/new technologies in a safe and supportive cloud-based environment with instructional modules on various Web 2.0 tools; fosters greater inclusion of online tools and technologies in instruction; and transfers valuable skills between faculty and from faculty to their students.

Multiple SUNY campuses have expressed a desire to collaborate with TOEP and replicate this professional development model. Inquiries regarding potential partnerships were also raised at the recent international conference where TOEP recently presented.

A 1 1/2 minute promotional video about TOEP is available on the project homepage and can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8wWGYabB1c