CAL-laborate Volume 1 October 1997

Computers in Teaching Initiative

Since 1988 and the establishment of Computers in Teaching Initiative (CTI) centres in Britain, there has been a substantial increase in the use of computers as teaching tools. There are currently 24 CTI centres, funded by The Higher Education Funding Councils for England, Scotland, and Wales, and the Department of Education for Northern Ireland. These centres cover a wide range of subjects: the centres for science are distributed between the University of Surrey (Physics), the University of Liverpool (Chemistry & Biology), with Mathematics at the University of Birmingham.

The centres' brief is:

to support academics who wish to use computers or other educational technology in their teaching; and

to act as an information resource and centre for expertise for the computer-aided teaching of science.

CTI Centres also maintain databases of resources for computer based teaching, most of which have been reviewed by lecturers in the field, and publish a regular newsletter. Contact with institutes is maintained through a series of frequent one-day workshops and site visits where interested educators can gain hands-on experience with a selection of the latest teaching software. For those educators who are unable to attend the workshops or who wish to browse the available software at their leisure, CTI Centres maintain Web-accessible databases which contain a large amount of teaching software, both commercial and shareware. Furthermore, subject-specific mailing lists are available to all teachers for open discussion, e.g. of computers and their impact on teaching techniques.

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