Using the TIM and TIM Tools in Your Own Research

The Florida Center for Instructional Technology encourages the use of the Technology Integration Matrix and TIM Tools in research and evaluation. On this page, you will find examples of how to cite the TIM as well as information on licensing the TIM Tools for research purposes. We recommend visiting the Research page to find examples of how others have leveraged the TIM in their work. We are always happy to discuss your research or evaluation plan and offer suggestions. Please contact our Client Operations Manager to arrange a time to discuss your project with one of our researchers.

Licensing the TIM Tools for Research

(For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll refer to the TIM Tools school license as an individual license and the TIM Tools district license as a site license since the terms “individual” and “site” make more sense in a university context.)

In most universities, it is the responsibility doctoral candidates to license evaluation tools for their own dissertation research. Some universities, however, have already licensed TIM Tools for their students and faculty to use. If you are interested in using the TIM Tools in your research, contact us to see if your institution already has a site license.

In most cases, the smallest individual license is adequate for dissertation research purposes. The individual license includes all of the TIM Tools suite, but has a simplified administrative structure and reporting options. Even though this version of TIM Tools was designed with a single school in mind, it can be used with participants across multiple school sites. The internal reporting features will display all participants as though they were at the same location. Nevertheless, all data is downloadable and may be sorted as desired using the provided Excel templates or imported into the researcher’s preferred statistical program. The individual license is what we usually recommend when consulting with individual doc students.

The university site license has the same set of tools as the individual license, but it adds a robust administrative structure. This version of TIM Tools is used in large public school districts around the country many of which have complex administrative structures and teacher populations greater than some entire states. The Super Administrator of a site license would create a “zone” for each researcher to work in. Each zone can be created with any number of schools within it. Within one’s own zone, participants can be added to any of the schools, data collected, and reports created. The researcher may choose to group participants by their school or, as is often the case, the researcher will use the school designation to group participants by treatment group. If your university does not maintain a site license for TIM Tools, you may try to make the case for that since a site license is much more cost effective than the purchase of individual licenses.

Please see our Annual Subscription Pricing page for current rates.

For More Information….

Review these TIM research posts from our Teaching and Learning with Technology blog.