Testing the limits of distance education and administration, the University of Kentucky has hired a professor and the technology leadership center that he directs away from Iowa State University—but will leave the professor in Ames to work remotely, unsettling some of his new colleagues, according to a local newspaper.
Scott McLeod will become an an associate professor in the department of educational leadership studies in the fall of 2011, the university announced today. His organization, the Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education, will be moving to Kentucky as well, along with another full-time faculty member. The center will have two research assistants.
The center focuses on school instructors and administrators, leading courses in cutting-edge educational technology use. Mr. McLeod expects to teach online, visit Kentucky several times each month, and work with local school districts as well as with colleagues at the university.
Some of those colleagues expressed a little hesitancy at the idea of a distant professor in an article in the Lexington Herald-Leader, wondering how Mr. McLeod was going to perform the service part of his job, such as mentoring other professors, doing classroom observations, and participating in departmental meetings. Mr. McLeod and university officials were reassuring, noting that he would be in Kentucky regularly, that teleconferencing is common and effective, and that he already has a great deal of experience teaching remotely. Mr. McLeod will be Kentucky’s first remote professor, although the university already offers many online courses.
The reservations don’t surprise Cole W. Camplese, senior director of teaching and learning with technology at Pennsylvania State University. “Anytime there is a radical change in the way things are done, people will be cautious,” he says. The university has apparently decided this is worth the risk, he adds. Mr. Camplese also notes that Mr. McLeod is well-regarded and very experienced. “If anyone can pull this off, it will be someone like Scott,” he says.
On his blog, Dangerously Irrelevant, Mr. McLeod admits “this is an unusual setup for a tenured faculty member at a traditional (i.e., not wholly online) university. I’ve repeatedly said that knowledge workers are increasingly able to work for anyone from anywhere. Apparently I now get to live that statement.”
