What We Do

The main activities of our group are described in the following list, which is roughly in order of priority. However, depending on impact and time-sensitivity of different outcomes, the priorities for requests may vary slightly from this list.

  1. Online Course Development. As Instructional Designers and Technology Support Specialists our primary goal is to support, guide and advise you in developing courses by drawing on our backgrounds in education, teaching and learning theory and technology. 
  2. Scheduled Training. This training is divided into two subsets:

    • Faculty Workshops and Training. Throughout the academic school year we offer workshops for faculty focused on providing information and tutorials on educational technologies and ACORN. We are also happy to schedule appointments for one-on-one training with faculty wanting to leverage ACORN, the Survey System (LimeSurvey), tips and tricks on the heterogeneous laptop environment, and the laptop pick up and care and feeding sessions for new faculty. We may also provide some other training on request by individuals or departments. For more information about the workshops we offer, and to register for them, please refer to the Faculty Workshops section of our website.
    • In-class training for students. Currently, our resources for this activity are limited, and can only offer a small slate of sessions - mostly Survey Creation using LimeSurvey. We may be able to satisfy other requests if we have sufficient advance notice and we have or are able to develop the skill-set sufficiently to train on a given application.
  3. Project Consultation. A critical success factor for projects is making sure they are compatible with our support environment and have other related needs considered. If you're considering undertaking a significant project involving technology, we can help in the early phases of planning the project.

  4. Projects and Project Coordination. We undertake a number of projects in support of teaching and technology at Acadia, as well as helping define and coordinate technology projects among multiple groups (primarily us and Technology Services) for academic purposes.

  5. 2nd Tier Support for academic applications. We provide advanced support for certain academic applications such as ACORN and the Survey System (LimeSurvey). We are connected with Technology Services' Service Desk, and issues with those applications will be transferred to us (or other groups) as appropriate. Additionally, if there are issues brought directly to us, we can re-assign requests to the appropriate people if we need.

  6. Technical Support for Exams. We provide some technical support for technology-based exams to help make sure they run more smoothly. Each term, we email specifics of technical support available to faculty for exams, but if you have a technology-based exam, please let us know in advance by emailing examsupport@acadiau.ca.  

  7. Institutional Research on the Technology Environment at Acadia. We undertake some surveys and research projects on the technology environment at Acadia. These are used to help guide our understanding of how the technology environment is used and perceived in order to help guide decisions being made about the technology environment.