From Academic Senate Paper on Ensuring Appropriate use of Technology

All of this activity will lead to budget requests and work with the college budget and planning committee.

In multi-college districts there is often an additional conversation regarding services such as Internet access that may be provided on a district-wide basis. It is particularly important to ensure that college educational and curriculum needs drive this agenda rather than a district policy, office of technology, or technology committee dictating what is possible in instruction.

The Academic Senate’s Spring 2000 paper Technology in Education: A Summary of Practical Policy and Workload Language put it like this: Local academic senates should support the right of individual faculty members to select the technological materials most appropriate for their course. In the case of technology this would include the choice of the best software. This is analogous to a faculty member’s selection of appropriate textbooks. Moreover, the broader decisions such as choice of computer platform and other hardware must be made using a process where academic instructional reasons take priority. (p.10)

This is most immediately applicable to software used by individual faculty to create course content, whereas the choice of institution-wide course management software should be made with significant

academic senate advice rather than as an individual selection.