Principles Governing Technology Fee Spending at Queens College

The Queens College Technology Fee Task Force, consisting of faculty, students, and administrators at the College, makes recommendations to the President on Technology Fee spending. The Task Force is guided in its deliberations by the following principles:

1. The Technology Fee should be used to improve instructional technology and electronic resources at Queens College in order to enhance student learning and information and technology literacy.  Accordingly, requests for a new instructional laboratory or other major facility, or for a significant upgrade of an existing lab, must be supported by:
1. A statement of the student learning outcomes the lab is expected to produce and a plan to assess its effectiveness in meeting those outcomes.
2. Information on the courses with which the lab will be involved, the degree of involvement (i.e., is use of the lab required or optional, how much time will the lab be used in the course, etc), and the number of students to be served by the lab.
3. Estimates of recurring expenses, such as maintenance costs and possible annual software licensing fees.
2. To make possible the use of instructional technology in the classroom, faculty need to have adequate computer facilities as well as training.
3. The Technology Fee should be used to fund new projects; it should not be used simply as another way of paying for things we would do anyway.

The Technology Fee may be used for:

• Upgrading of instructional computer labs

• New instructional computer labs
• Faculty development
• Electronic information resources in the library
• Personnel for installation and maintenance of computer services

Assessment

To achieve the close relationship between Technology Fee spending and student learning specified by the principles described above, requests for new computer laboratories or other major facilities must include a statement of the instructional goals of the laboratory and a plan to assess the lab’s effectiveness in meeting those goals. The nature of these statements will depend on the type of request. For example, if the request is for a new lab to be used in several courses, the statement could indicate the number of students in the courses, how the new lab is to be used in the courses, what the learning goals of the courses are, how the new lab will help achieve those goals, and how its effectiveness will be assessed. As another example, if the request is for a general purpose computer lab, the statement might focus on the computer needs of the students (such as the department’s majors) who are expected to use the lab, describe how those needs relate to the department’s curriculum, and present a plan to assess the effectiveness of the lab through statistics on the number of students using the lab and surveys on their comments on its usefulness in their study.