This year I visited our Center for Teaching and Learning for its weekly breakfast-and-gossip session. We got around to talking about teaching faster than usual this time because a colleague from our Instructional Technology Center brought an object for show and tell: Google Cardboard.
What is Google Cardboard? Well, Google calls it a “simple, fun and affordable way” to experience virtual reality. What that really means is that you can watch 3D films on your smartphone if you make or purchase a rather simple device that reminded me of those stereoscopic viewers from the late 19th century.
Nervousness over the economy and questions about the value of a college degree have contributed to growing expectations that colleges must make career services a priority. This special report on innovation examines some of the career-counseling efforts underway — by colleges, start-ups, and collaborations between the two. See the entire issue here.
That doesn’t mean I wasn’t impressed. When I put on the viewer, I watched sharks swim by, and it really did feel as if I could reach out and touch them. What I was less taken with was all the heated rhetoric I heard about how this was going to revolutionize higher education. “In a not-too-distant future,” read an article my colleague sent us afterward, “as VR technologies advance at a steady pace and become embedded in our lives, we may one day look back with a sense of amazement at students once bound to a physical classroom, campus setting, locale, or even place in time.”
I can see why we might want to bring such immersive experiences into our classrooms every once in a while, but that kind of rhetoric seems a little overheated.
Then again, who says faculty members get to decide what education will look like in the future? Sure, we can control the way our own courses operate, but given a choice between a class taught entirely in a VR environment and one taught by more traditional methods, which one do you think most students would choose? There’s a technological arms race going on in the ed-tech realm, and we’re all participating — whether we like it or not.
As Jeff Selingo points out in his 2013 book, College (Un)bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students, it has become increasingly common for students not to stay with the same university for their undergraduate education. If they don’t like the offerings available at their campus one semester, they can pick up a few credits at the local community college, take a course online from almost anywhere, or maybe just transfer altogether. As faculty members, if we don’t offer students a certain level of engagement with the material, it’s entirely possible that we might come to work on the first day of the semester and find nobody there to teach.
Multiply that situation across an entire department or even a whole university, and you’ll have financial exigency in no time — a condition that even the American Association of University Professors acknowledges is a valid reason to dismiss tenured professors. More important, since tenure isn’t what it used to be these days, your employer probably wouldn’t even need a crisis to get rid of you long before your university reached that point.
So am I recommending that you go out and buy Google Cardboard for all your classes immediately? No. Neither am I recommending that you give all your students automatic A’s in order to fend off your high-tech competitors. What I am recommending is that you do your best to keep abreast of technological developments and incorporate the ones that fit your teaching style and educational objectives. You might even consider changing those things if you are intrigued by a particular technological development that would require you to make adjustments.
I’m fully aware that many readers will ignore my advice. Some of you might even be a little hostile to it. “I’ve been teaching this way for 20 years,” you might be thinking. “How could my lectures have suddenly become obsolete?”
It’s not that anything you’ve done before is somehow less effective, it’s that the overall environment in which you’ve been teaching has changed — both for the better and for the worse. Other professors can do amazing things with educational technology, even as nearly everyone’s attention span — especially students’ — keeps getting worse. What worked 20 years ago might not work now, and those methods will become only more precarious as our technologically infused future gradually arrives.
Those of us whose faculty careers span this technological divide face two options: either ride the wave or risk getting swallowed by it. That does not mean that you must adopt virtual reality or go extinct. Instead, you should try to gradually adapt your classes to this new environment, because your students have plenty of alternatives that they didn’t have before. Your choices in light of developments in ed tech — including the choice to do nothing — have consequences. Like it or not, some of those choices will inevitably blow back upon you.
Jonathan Rees is a professor of history at Colorado State University at Pueblo. This essay first appeared on Vitae, The Chronicle’s career hub.
