Lance Tomei is Director for Assessment, Accreditation, and Data Management at the University of Central Florida (UCF) College of Education. He took a close look at LiveText in 2002 when he attended the company’s first annual Collaboration Conference held in Chicago. He says he attended the conference in order to hear what users had to say about LiveText technology, as well as to get an understanding of what kind of reputation the company had established as an organization.

Impressed by Reputation
Tomie says he came away from that conference "with a really solid impression of their tools being well-suited to our particular needs here, but perhaps more importantly with a clear impression that those institutions already working closely with LiveText really felt that the company was particularly responsive to the needs of the teacher education community. And that probably was the single most important factor in our ultimate decision to establish a relationship with LiveText."

This responsiveness-to-the-community factor also comes out in a Florida LiveText users group, which is a statewide, informal, collaborative group of representatives from institutions that use LiveText, Tomei explains. "We have a fairly large contingent here [that has been meeting twice a year for five years]. When we meet as a group, one of our products is a list of technical and operational recommendations for LiveText. Many of those have been implemented over the years."

Users Have Active Voice
Tomei has also been an active participant in the LiveText beta-testing community and serves on the company’s peer-review committee that helps to decide who will present at the LiveText annual Collaboration Conference. He says that the company has an impressive open door policy for continuous software development. "LiveText has direct interaction with its user community to ensure that what they are doing stays highly responsive to the changing needs of the community," Tomei claims. "I’ve gotten to see a lot of their stuff before it went operational, and, in many cases, I was able to advise them in order to help reshape some of their new tools to make sure they really met the needs of the user community. I’ve always found them to be extraordinarily responsive to the feedback that they ask for from us. They are really trying to give the community an active voice in how they are operating."

UCF’s College of Education produces more teachers than any other institution in Florida, with a total undergraduate and graduate population of more than 5,000 students. Tomei says that by this Fall 2008, the use of LiveText eportfolios with standards- and performance-based rubrics will have grown to be implemented across the full spectrum of UCF College of Education undergraduate and graduate programs that lead to teacher certification.