Aligning Research, Teaching, and Learning

Research, Teaching, and Learning (RTL) was created the summer of 2017 as a reimagining of the research and instructional support experience for researchers and instructors on campus. The initial phase of the organization initially brought together Educational Technology Services, the Center for Teaching and Learning, and Research IT. In the summer of 2018, Digital Learning Services (formerly Berkeley Resource Center for Online Education) was integrated into the team. The vision for this re-alignment of teams from various parts of campus was to provide better coordinated services and programs for instructors and researchers, and to explore opportunities and areas for innovation to meet Berkeley’s ever-evolving teaching and research needs. The combination of these teaching and research support groups under RTL umbrella improves efficiency, encourages collaboration, and creates opportunities to leverage existing resources in new and innovative ways.

To support the development of RTL, leadership and staff embarked on both mini projects to review the work of the organization and portfolio realignment. Mini projects focused on the various bodies of work being done by the teams, where they touched, overlapped, and where there were new opportunities. Portfolio realignments reviewed aspects of those mini projects along with resources to combine similar work into new or reimagined teams.

Vision/Objectives

  • Provide campus with unified resources and services delivery in support of research, and teaching and learning activities for faculty, instructors and researchers across campus. 

  • Simplify the process for consulting and support across campus common-good and fee-for-use research and teaching resources, tools, and services

Stakeholders

Direct: Campus faculty, instructors, researchers, academic support staff

Indirect: Students and administrators

Governance/Oversight

ReIT Committee/Alignment 

Internal mini projects with staff participation 

ETS/RTL Advisory Group (faculty and academic staff) 

Sponsors

Jenn Stringer, Deputy Chief Information Officer & Assistant Vice Chancellor 

Catherine Koshland, Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education

Larry Conrad, Chief Information Office

Project Timeline

  • Early 2017: Begin formal discussions with staff in ETS, RIT, and CTL about aligning the three organizations

  • Fall 2017: Kick-off organizational alignment project to bring together work of ETS, RIT, and CTL under one organization. Identify mini projects or bodies of work to be completed in the new organization in the next one - two years to support the transition

  • Early 2018: Begin formal discussions with staff of introducing BRCOE into the forming RTL organization

  • Summer 2018: Kick-off integration of BRCOE/Digital Learning Services (DLS) into the RTL organization 

  • Fall 2018: Review mini projects and update to reflect the addition of DLS into the organization

  • Winter 2019: RTL Admin Team launched to provide centralized business operations and purchasing support for the new organization 

  • Spring 2019: Celebrate milestone of completion of the initial 14 organizational alignment mini projects   

  • Summer 2019: Implement portfolio realignments 

    • KALX Radio moved from ETS portfolio: KALX Radio had operationally belong under ETS when the project launched. 

    • Projects, Development, and Operations Team identified: A centrally managed team of project managers, developers, and systems operations folks across RTL were combined into one area to centrally support RTL work across services.  

    • Learning Environments and Tools (LET) team shifted to DLS: The LET team with services included bCourses, Clickers, and Course Evaluations was shifted into the DLS portfolio to provide faculty a more unified digital learning and support tools experience 

  • Fall 2019: Kick-off phase 2 alignment activities and prepare for new RTL Executive Director, and Chief Academic Technology Officer, Shawna Dark

Phase 1 Mini Projects

The initial phase of the RTL alignment activities included "mini projects” or areas of work and collaboration prioritized for the first 18-24 months to launch RTL. 

A summary of each project is listed below: 

  • Administration Alignment 

The creation of the RTL administrative support team was implemented with responsibilities that include budgeting, finance, purchasing, HR coordination and compliance, travel, and reimbursement as well as coordination of other administrative tasks. 

  • Advisory/Governance

The RTL Leadership team had multiple conversations to learn about the various advisory and governance groups that are used to help guide the delivery of our services and our strategies and efforts were made to fine-tune a model for RTL.

  • Communications Coordination

Coordination efforts were enacted in the area of communications to facilitate better information-sharing and shared messaging around RTL organizational alignment

  • Customer Experience

The plan for an RTL-wide CRM implementation is being developed.

  • Customer Support/Help Desks/Documentation

A one-time effort to clean up our SalesForce database was enacted, allowing for connection to campus LDAP, and an opportunity to build a ticket bridge to ServiceNow.

  • Development/PDG/Museum Informatics/UX

What began as discussion around opportunities for cross-group interaction between Research IT and ETS resulted in a successful effort to reorganize the CSpace service into an emerging RTL service management model (dev, ops, service management, leadership).

  • Faculty Services

Recommendations were created to better serve the teaching and research community, some of which include a “RTL Understanding Faculty information packet” and a plan for socializing that information, taking inventory and sharing RTL-wide practices and processes, and developing an RTL Consulting Philosophy.

  • Grant Specialist

After review of resources across the units, this new opportunity was identified as a tactic to be explored further.

  • Internal Accountability and Info-Sharing

An analysis of meetings across the units was conducted with efforts to assess and discover overlap and synergies. This resulted in all units being represented in leadership, projects and services meetings and a new all staff monthly meeting, “What’s Up, RTL”, which brings staff together to increase awareness of RTL services, programs, and projects and encourages and cultivates collaboration

  • Project Management

After cataloging all project management work done across RTL, the organization has entered a new phase which consists of developing RTL project management principles and the institution of the PDO. 

  • Service management

This opportunity has connected to a larger scale IST initiative that bridges opportunities for all RTL and IT staff.

  • Student Workforce Management

Creating consistencies across units on pay scale was adapted and new systematic on-boarding across units was developed with opportunities to trouble-shoot with other student managers.

  • Systems Administration/Employee Desktop

Based on a Student Computing @Cal investigation, RTL explored Windows 10 and Chromebook incentive program with RTL staff.

  • Virtual Environments for Research and Instruction

After Research IT and ETS explored and planned options, a spring pilot in 2018 using Analytical Environments on Demand (AEoD) virtualized workstations was rolled out with a big success. Since then, the pilot has extended to the School of Public Health.