§ 70-4701. Center for Instructional Excellence - Feasibility study.

The Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education are hereby authorized to study the cost feasibility of developing a "Center for Instructional Excellence".  This Center should serve as the primary coordinating agency for the development and dissemination of instructional technology and should proceed immediately to collect from current resources the best available media materials, computer software, and other instructional technology available.  This Center should renew public higher education's commitment to its principal mission of instruction by identifying master professors from throughout the system and underwriting, through release time and direct funding, the dissemination of their instructional work.

It is the intent of this legislation that all institutions within The Oklahoma State System of Higher Education shall cooperate in the development of the "Center for Instructional Excellence" by making available faculty and instructional resources.  The Center shall then serve as a clearinghouse in disseminating the best of these resources to the remainder of the system.  It is the intent of this legislation that the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education shall provide direct funding to the Center from both private and public resources to carry out the task of developing or acquiring all aspects of the rapidly changing instructional technology so that these methods may be evaluated and made available to institutions within The State System of Higher Education.

The Center should become the most cost effective method for instructional development by providing coordination for similar existing efforts on individual campuses and eventually bringing these operations under a central mechanism providing for a better economy of scale in making the necessary resources available to all higher education faculty members in order to provide for excellence in instruction at all levels.

The Center is made necessary because the traditional instructional process competes, without sufficient resources or modern technology, with much more powerful informational media and computer software being made available through the private sector in noneducational environments and because students, accustomed to more sophisticated methods of information acquisition, demand and deserve the most effective instructional process within their educational experiences.

The "Center for Instructional Excellence" should devise, in cooperation with the budget staff of the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, appropriate formats for inquiring of institutions regarding resources devoted to improving the instructional process with a particular emphasis on depicting budgets, not just in programmatical terms, but in terms of the proportion of available resources devoted in each academic program to computer interaction, media, tutelage, team teaching, and other instructional innovations.

Added by Laws 1987, c. 227, § 4, operative July 1, 1987.