Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    College Advising
    Serving Higher Ed
    Chronicle Festival 2025
Sign In
College 2.0

Reaching the Last Technology Holdouts at the Front of the Classroom

By Jeffrey R. Young July 24, 2010
Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at Harvard U., helped write the Department of Education’s new National Educational Technology Plan, which challenges educators to leverage modern technology to create engaging learning experiences for students.
Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at Harvard U., helped write the Department of Education’s new National Educational Technology Plan, which challenges educators to leverage modern technology to create engaging learning experiences for students.Rick Friedman for The Chronicle

Every semester a lot of professors’ lectures are essentially reruns because many instructors are too busy to upgrade their classroom methods.

That frustrates Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at Harvard University, who argues that clinging to outdated teaching practices amounts to educational malpractice.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

Every semester a lot of professors’ lectures are essentially reruns because many instructors are too busy to upgrade their classroom methods.

That frustrates Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at Harvard University, who argues that clinging to outdated teaching practices amounts to educational malpractice.

“If you were going to see a doctor and the doctor said, ‘I’ve been really busy since I got out of medical school, and so I’m going to treat you with the techniques I learned back then,’ you’d be rightly incensed,” he told me recently. “Yet there are a lot of faculty who say with a straight face, ‘I don’t need to change my teaching,’ as if nothing has been learned about teaching since they had been prepared to do it—if they’ve ever been prepared to.”

And poor teaching can have serious consequences, he says, when students fall behind or drop out because of sleep-inducing lectures. Colleges have tried several approaches over the years to spur teaching innovation. But among instructors across the nation, holdouts clearly remain.

Mr. Dede’s arguments (in more bureaucratic language) form the basis of a new National Educational Technology Plan, issued in draft form in March by the U.S. Department of Education. “The challenge for our education system is to leverage the learning sciences and modern technology to create engaging, relevant, and personalized learning experiences for all learners that mirror students’ daily lives and the reality of their futures,” says the plan, which he helped write. The title of the report, “Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology,” suggests that the country’s teaching methods need a reboot.

It is tough to measure how many professors teach with technology or try other techniques the report recommends, such as group activities and hands-on exercises. (Technology isn’t the only way to improve teaching, of course, and some argue that it can hinder it.) Though most colleges can point to several cutting-edge teaching experiments on their campuses, a recent national assessment called the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement suggests that old-school instruction remains the norm.

Only 13 percent of the professors surveyed said they used blogs in teaching; 12 percent had tried videoconferencing; and 13 percent gave interactive quizzes using “clickers,” or TV-remotelike devices that let students respond and get feedback instantaneously. The one technology that most teachers use regularly—course-management systems—focuses mostly on housekeeping tasks like handing out assignments or keeping track of student grades. The survey, answered by 4,600 professors nationwide, did not ask about PowerPoint, which anecdotal evidence suggests is ubiquitous as a replacement for overhead and slide projectors.

Should colleges do more to push new technology? Should professors throw out those yellowed lecture notes and start fresh (or at least update their jokes)?

Here are three suggestions for next steps based on interviews with experts.

Focus on the Non-Techies

The least-wired faculty members make the best advocates for high-tech teaching. That’s according to a session at last week’s Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Symposium, held in San Jose, by the Sloan Consortium.

ADVERTISEMENT

The session’s title promises a world where every professor works to teach better: “Faculty Motivation and Technology Integration: How to Bring 100% of Non-Techie Faculty On Board.”

The key is to enlist longtime professors with no particular interest in technology and get them to try the latest online forums, videoconferencing, or clickers, said the two presenters, from Florida Hospital College of Health Sciences. Then encourage the professors to give a lunch talk for their colleagues.

And their peers’ eyes will light up as they imagine their own experiments, said one of the presenters, Dan Lim, assistant vice president for educational technology and distance learning. “Their minds will start working, thinking, ‘I know I can do this,’” he said.

One of Mr. Lim’s non-techie converts is Lenore S. Brantley, a professor of psychology, who taught an online course with audioconferencing tools last year. “It’s always a little frightening because people from my generation did not grow up with technology,” says the professor, who has been teaching for more than 40 years. “I was willing to try it because I like to try new things.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Things didn’t always work perfectly—she had to trek to campus to teach the online classes because she couldn’t get the software to run on her home computer. But the technology came in handy when she wanted to leave town for a church conference: She could still teach from the road.

At her lunch talk to colleagues in February, she gave a PowerPoint presentation titled, “My Journey in Teaching: From Then ‘Til Now.” She kicked it off with pictures of the tools that were standard back in the day: typewriters, adding machines, film projectors, and a paper grade book. She doesn’t miss them.

“I’m very surprised how well I like it and how well you get to know your students,” she says of her experience in an online classroom.

Administrators said at least one other “non-techie” professor showed up for a college-sponsored tech-training workshop soon after Ms. Brantley’s talk.

Watch Your Language

Summer is prime time for professors to go back to school themselves, to attend short workshops on how to teach with the latest technology tools.

ADVERTISEMENT

Typically, colleges give seminars with titles like “5 Ways to Use a Wiki in Your Class” or “Getting Started With Blackboard.”

Too often those stress the technology more than its goals, though, says Mr. Dede, of Harvard.

“Those technology sessions are useful, but often they’re marketed the wrong way,” he told me. “What you want to do is deal with issues that keep faculty up at night. The titles should be, How do you keep students coming to your class rather than just copying the notes off the Web? or, How to get students to respond really deeply rather than from CliffsNotes.”

Donald Williams, senior vice president for academic administration at Florida Hospital College of Health Sciences, says his institution goes out of its way to hire tech-support staff who speak teaching rather than technology. “None of them are salesmen for technology—they’re all educators,” he says. “They’re not the geeky type of tech person who can’t really get down to the level of the everyday user.”

Look to Disciplines

Some professors attend one workshop, try one new trick, and consider their teaching reinvigorated.

ADVERTISEMENT

But a number of teaching experts hope to encourage professors to think of their teaching as something that needs constant care and feeding.

“I like to think about it as an ongoing process,” says Pat Hutchings, senior associate with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Scholarly disciplines, rather than colleges, may become the best drivers of teaching reform, then, because scholars already turn to disciplinary organizations and journals to keep up with research.

History is one field leading the approach to reform, says Ms. Hutchings, pointing to the work of David Pace, a history professor at Indiana University at Bloomington.

ADVERTISEMENT

In a 2004 essay in The American Historical Review, Mr. Pace, as Mr. Dede has done, compared college professors to doctors operating on patients without proper training.

“Why is the classroom a place for the uncritical perpetuation of folk traditions, when the operating room is not?” he wrote. “Most of us care passionately about teaching and believe that it is vitally important that students be exposed to the kinds of reasoning and the knowledge of the past that members of our profession have developed. But until very recently, it was believed that no formal training was necessary before historians began thinking about teaching and learning, no examination of the efforts of other scholars, no collective effort to ground knowledge as firmly as possible.”

Notice there’s no mention of technology there.

Indeed, the National Educational Technology Plan has long sections with little mention of technology at all, Mr. Dede says.

ADVERTISEMENT

And there doesn’t have to be, he says, because the role of technology in classroom innovation is a given. “Most of those changes are almost impossible to make without technology,” he says. “Technology becomes the handmaiden of the change.”

College 2.0 covers how new technologies are changing colleges. Please send ideas to jeff.young@chronicle.com or @jryoung on Twitter.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Tags
Technology Online Learning
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
Portrait of Jeff Young
About the Author
Jeffrey R. Young
Jeffrey R. Young was a senior editor and writer focused on the impact of technology on society, the future of education, and journalism innovation. He led a team at The Chronicle of Higher Education that explored new story formats. He is currently managing editor of EdSurge.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

Related Content

Professors’ Use of Technology in Teaching

More News

Joan Wong for The Chronicle
Productivity Measures
A 4/4 Teaching Load Becomes Law at Most of Wisconsin’s Public Universities
Illustration showing a letter from the South Carolina Secretary of State over a photo of the Bob Jones University campus.
Missing Files
Apparent Paperwork Error Threatens Bob Jones U.'s Legal Standing in South Carolina
Pro-Palestinian student protesters demonstrate outside Barnard College in New York on February 27, 2025, the morning after pro-Palestinian student protesters stormed a Barnard College building to protest the expulsion last month of two students who interrupted a university class on Israel. (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP) (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images)
Campus Activism
A College Vows to Stop Engaging With Some Student Activists to Settle a Lawsuit Brought by Jewish Students
LeeNIHGhosting-0709
Stuck in limbo
The Scientists Who Got Ghosted by the NIH

From The Review

Vector illustration of a suited man with a pair of scissors for a tie and an American flag button on his lapel.
The Review | Opinion
A Damaging Endowment Tax Crosses the Finish Line
By Phillip Levine
University of Virginia President Jim Ryan keeps his emotions in check during a news conference, Monday, Nov. 14, 2022 in Charlottesville. Va. Authorities say three people have been killed and two others were wounded in a shooting at the University of Virginia and a student is in custody. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
The Review | Opinion
Jim Ryan’s Resignation Is a Warning
By Robert Zaretsky
Photo-based illustration depicting a close-up image of a mouth of a young woman with the letter A over the lips and grades in the background
The Review | Opinion
When Students Want You to Change Their Grades
By James K. Beggan

Upcoming Events

07-31-Turbulent-Workday_assets v2_Plain.png
Keeping Your Institution Moving Forward in Turbulent Times
Ascendium_Housing_Plain.png
What It Really Takes to Serve Students’ Basic Needs: Housing
Lead With Insight
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin