One of the greatest challenges that I face at my place of employment is my ever-shrinking budget. For the past three years, we have been tightening the belt in certain areas; especially with personnel staff. Ironically, the services offered to faculty and students have grown: lecture capture and videoconferencing in all of our classrooms, Human Patient Simulation Laboratories, Electronic Medical Record tracking systems, etc. The College that I work for often gets grants to pay for all of this equipment; the one issue that always gets overlooked is: Who is going to support this equipment?
When I started in this department three years ago as the instructional designer, there were eighteen employees (7 FTEs, 4 full-time technicians, and 7 student assistants). There are now eight (3 FTEs and 5 student assistants). Our services have also increased sevenfold. I think that this disconnect between equipment and support staff comes from a lack of understanding about Instructional Designers and Information Technology support staff. It seems like if anything can be plugged in, it is assumed that anyone in IT can support it. What people don't realize is how broad IT is - there are designers, programmers, systems administrators, desktop support staff, etc.
I went to a training today with faculty on EndNote - I've never used the software before and wanted to get up to speed on it for my own purposes. More than one comment was made about having to ask me later for help on the software. I just smiled and said okay but I wanted to say, "I know as much as you do at this point!". I wish that I had a budget where I could hire more staff to be specialized in certain areas. Right now, I feel like a Jill of all trades, as does the rest of my department. I also wish I had more staff so that I could have them research new technology for the faculty. I had a faculty member show some interest in the classroom response systems; I spent 2-days trying to become an expert on them so that I could answer all of the faculty's questions on integrating them in her class. This lack of budget support for staffing leads to a more reactive response from my department; I definitely prefer being more proactive!
