Office of Academic Technology :: Spring Arbor University

Old Coke vs. new Coke.  Remember that battle?  Old Mustang vs. new Mustang?  Original Star Trek or Next Generation?  We all have a soft spot in our hearts for nostalgia.  But sooner or later it’s time for us to move on.  The Office of Academic Technology has done just that.  We’ve created a brand new Web site.  Behold, OAT 2.0.  The New OAT.  Hopefully it will be more successful than “New Coke”.

Why A New Site

People redesign Web sites all of the time for different reasons.  For us, the decision was easy.  We model integrating emerging technologies and our Web site wasn’t allowing us to do this.  We needed to create something that would allow us to display and model for you these emerging technologies like RSS feeds, podcasts, Twitter, comments, categories, tags, and more.  You’ll see a listing of the new features in the About The Site page.  The site is a bit different than the previous OAT site, so take it for a test drive and let us know what you think.  We don’t have a comment form.  Simply stop by, send us an e-mail or call.  Our contact info is ready for you to take advantage of for some constructive feedback.  You can also post comments on any page or post.  Simply login and post your comment.

Biggest Feature

One of the biggest changes to this site is authenticated content.  We’ve migrated much of the content from the OAT Blackboard Community site and moved it here.  Much of the content is password protected or has copyright issues.  We’ve accomodated this by adding authenticated content.  The new OAT Web site is public.  But if you see “Login to see more”, simply click the link, login using your standard SAU credentials, and you’ll be taken to the content you need.  We think this will provide us with a great flexibility to distribute on-demand tutorials, training and support to SAU faculty as well as model for the higher education community how to connect and serve faculty.

Mission

Our mission as always is to serve you.  We hope this new home will allow us to do it better this year.  We hope this new Web site will even more help you take your teaching further.