Okla. Stat. tit. 70, § 70-4701

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

Oklahoma Statutes - Title 70. Schools Page 1673

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.