It’s not about budgets. It’s not even about network overload.
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... and Colleges Must Create Technology Plans
When it comes to applying digital technology in the classroom, the biggest obstacle for higher education has nothing to do with resources or wiring. It’s about faculty members.
For the past five years, senior information-technology officers who have been surveyed annually by the Campus Computing Project have identified helping faculty members integrate technology into instruction as the single most important issue confronting their campuses in the near future. In this year’s survey -- like last year’s -- more than half also complained that faculty members have unreasonable expectations about the technological support that they should receive.
That’s nothing new. A 1999 survey at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor found that faculty members want one-on-one instruction when it comes to technology -- and not by strangers, if you please. Of those polled, 66 percent said they wanted a person to assist them in gaining new skills, and they wanted that person to be someone who knew their work -- a friend, family member, or colleague. In other words, if we’re going to have our hands held, we want them held by someone we know.
Is that too much to ask? Of course it is. We’re grown-ups, professionals, people who can learn from strangers. But it’s the kind of collective whine that too often marks our response to technology. We’re worried about copyright issues. We’re worried about security issues. We’re worried about bandwidth issues. We’re worried about ... us. And about what all this technological chaos is going to mean to our way of teaching, our way of knowing, and our way of professional life.
Which is not to suggest some aren’t rising to the occasion. Many early adopters among us are enthusiastic -- even exuberant -- about the technological possibilities. A 2000 survey by the National Education Association found that a small sample of faculty members who had taught distance-education courses were positive about the experience. And higher-education journals are full of show-and-tell examples of high-tech success.
But the Campus Computing Project paints a broader picture -- one that is not so rosy. This year’s survey found that, in more than one-third of their courses, college instructors still don’t even use e-mail to communicate with their students, much less integrate innovative online applications into their curriculums.
While 80 percent of public four-year colleges make course-management tools available to their faculties, professors actually use them in only 20 percent of their courses. And despite continuing pressure from administrators and easy-to-use design software, faculty members had Web pages associated with only 35 percent of their courses, up less than 5 percent over last year. In fact, on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being poor and 5 being excellent, the average ranking that information-technology officers give faculty members for being prepared to use technology as a resource in instruction is a measly 3.5 -- just as average as last year’s 3.4 ranking.
Just as troublesome, those numbers bear out last year’s prediction by Kenneth Green, the Campus Computing Project’s director, that we’ve reached some kind of technology plateau. “The number of faculty energized by the Web and willing to invest time and effort to infuse technology into their instructional activities, often absent adequate institutional support and recognition for their efforts, may begin to level off, at least for a little while,” he said.
It’s a little while, I would argue, that we don’t have time to waste. We’re playing catch-up as it is, and it’s a game that we can’t afford to lose.
Yet technology presents the kinds of pressures that many of us would rather just ignore -- a strategy that has worked pretty well so far. Technology raises all kinds of troublesome issues, most obviously the plain and annoying fact that it takes a lot of time and effort to figure out how to use it. It’s a professional pain in the neck in a hundred different ways -- and, at least according to the most recent study that the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles has conducted on the topic, it’s a source of stress for the majority of us.
So how do we cope? In every other segment of the economy, technology has triggered rethinking, reshaping, and, yes, even downsizing. Not so in the academy. Faced with marketplace pressures and private-sector competition, many of us cry academic freedom and a higher calling, and we proceed with business as usual.
The good news for faculty members is that administrators can’t really force us to change. They can cajole, they can dangle grant money in front of our faces, they can pay the tab to send us to syllabus conferences. But when it comes to putting our courses on the Web, or using new software programs as part of our instruction, or participating in chat rooms with our students, we can cry academic freedom and simply refuse. We have tenure, and we don’t have to if we don’t want to.
That’s overly simplistic, my colleagues will argue -- and, of course, they are correct. Tenure isn’t the only reason some faculty members have been the last to jump on the high-tech bandwagon. Another reason is that we’re control freaks, accustomed to having the first and last say in our professional environments. We’re professional experts, full-time pundits. And we’re surrounded by those who look to us for wisdom. Every single day.
Admit it: Each semester, you stroll into a room of students, each one gripping a pen and notebook. You begin to talk, and they begin to write. Yes, yes, there’s discussion and questioning, and in classes that are working well, even debate. But at some point early in our careers, if we’re paying any attention at all, it has dawned on most of us that we could tell our young, eager pupils just about anything -- anything -- and they would write it down. And memorize it, if we told them it was going to be on the test.
In other words, we’re in charge. We have real power, as absolute as professional, modern-day, civilized power gets. And we wield it in the privacy of our own classrooms, meaning nobody is there except those over whom we have control. (When was the last time a critical colleague spent meaningful, repeated, extended time in your classroom?)
And most of us find it uncomfortable -- all right, downright painful -- to be in a situation in which we don’t really understand what we’re expected to be doing. In fact, a power scenario in which our students know more about technology than we do is downright unthinkable.
That means we’re not as excited as we might be about tackling the technology challenge. It means we can be less than thrilled about creating our own World Wide Web pages, or finding great software applications to help our students practice complex tasks, or figuring out what the heck we’re supposed to be doing in a chat room with a bunch of smart-aleck students -- all of whom seem right at home. And it means we just plain hate to go into our classrooms and be the only ones who don’t get it.
But our students don’t give a hoot about our history, our traditions, our culture, or our paranoias. Already, they want to know why our syllabuses aren’t on the World Wide Web. In five years -- or sooner -- they’re going to assume that all our courses will be online, in their entirety, complete with streaming audio and video. No, not as a substitute for face-to-face classroom interaction, but as another option in a flexible menu of ways that they can access information. They will want e-books and immediate delivery and the ability to get in touch with us 24/7, from wherever they are.
In short, faculty members will need not only to use but to embrace new technologies in the classroom. And although those technologies may intimidate us, we can start with a few, relatively easy small steps. In fact, a lot of those steps require only that we shift our mind-set.
For starters, we can swap the role of teacher with that of learner. It’s not so difficult to make time to attend those workshops our institutions are constantly offering in presentation and Web-design software. We can easily get our tech-head work-study students to explain the difference between a chat room and a bulletin board. We can track down e-mail discussion groups focused on innovative uses of technology in the classroom, and we can lurk until we’re comfortable enough to participate. We can call one of those ever-eager representatives from the multitude of private vendors and ask for a hands-on demonstration of their software.
And it doesn’t take that much extra effort to mine the World Wide Web for innovative applications to support and encourage our students’ learning. Why force them to plow through pages of dull text when they can master Newtonian mechanics in three-dimensional, interactive applications? Why spend precious class time on basic grammar and structure -- in any language -- when students can write, edit, practice, and enjoy immediate feedback, all on their own time?
In fact, we can let them help us find those resources. Why not assign each student the responsibility to track down and monitor his or her favorite Web site on a particular topic, issue, or discipline?
We also must expand our definitions of teaching and learning. That calls upon us to open our minds -- and our schedules -- to asynchronous learning, to the notion that our students can learn as well in front of their computers as they do sitting in our lecture halls. We should look critically at our curriculums to determine which of our courses should be offered online in their entirety, and which would benefit more from simply posting the course content, schedules, and continuing communications. We can test the online waters by posting a single discussion question this semester and letting students interact with us and one another on their own time.
Finally, and most important, we can adjust our collective sense of place in -- and control over -- the educational process. What we have to offer is our expertise, our years of experience as teachers and researchers. That’s a commodity sure to increase, rather than decrease, in value.
In sum, we needn’t be so protective of our work product, our status, and our future -- so frantic to stay in charge. Within appropriate and commonsensical guidelines, we can post our syllabuses, our lecture notes, and our reading lists just as we have always published our research and our curriculums. We can handle the issue of who owns the copyrights to those materials from a position of strength, flexibility, and knowledge, rather than knee-jerk defensiveness.
Why should we change things when clinging to tradition has worked so well? We should do it not because we’re afraid not to, nor for the bells and whistles that the World Wide Web and new software incorporate into our lectures and syllabuses, nor because our students would rather watch video animation than read a physics textbook.
We should do it because appropriate delivery -- no less than content -- makes a difference.
We should do it because there is nobody better prepared or better qualified to teach -- now and from now on -- and nobody more dedicated to maintaining the rigor and quality of student learning.
And finally, we should do it because our students expect it -- and deserve no less.
Dianne Lynch is an associate professor of journalism and mass communication at Saint Michael’s College.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B15