New technologies could take over many of the instructional duties that now define professors’ jobs, according to faculty members who are peering into the future. Some of them are alarmed by what they see, while others are encouraged.
Among the latter are faculty members -- joined by some administrators -- who expect that teaching will become more efficient, and that students will benefit, as parts of the professor’s job are taken over by multimedia software, recorded lectures, and other high-tech tools. Professors could end up having more time to do the things they do best, these people suggest.
Others -- even some faculty members who use technology in their classrooms already -- worry that professors will be left on the sidelines. Publishing companies and brand-name universities, they fear, could team up with a handful of well-known scholars to market lectures and even entire courses on CD-ROMs and World-Wide Web sites. The quality of education, these critics say, could erode.
At issue is the basic job description of a professor. Under the traditional model, a professor plays a variety of roles: He or she is a course designer who chooses which readings to assign, what information to deliver in lectures, and, perhaps, what film clips or other materials to show; a lecturer who delivers the information amassed from research, reading, and experience; a discussion moderator who helps students understand the material from lectures and readings; and an evaluator who writes and administers tests and decides how well students have mastered the subject.
The question raised by new technology is a difficult one: Would students and institutions be better off with a new arrangement that allows the professor’s tasks to be divided up -- “unbundled,” to use an emerging shorthand?
For example:
- Courses could be designed in distant cities by teams of top faculty members and technology experts who could craft lessons that might mix on-line materials and face-to-face meetings with on-site instructors.
- Individual professors’ lectures could be replaced by multimedia Web sites that could include video clips of famous scholars in the field.
- Tests could be selected from national test data bases, or administered by outside organizations -- eliminating even grading from the professor’s portfolio.
With so many of their responsibilities removed, professors could spend more time leading discussions that take place in classrooms and in on-line chat areas. Even if institutions had to pay providers for courses or Web-site access, such a realignment might save money by allowing fewer salaried faculty members to serve the same number of students.
None of those ideas are science fiction -- experiments in each of the areas are already under way, and seem certain to succeed eventually in one form or another. What’s unclear is how widespread such changes will become, and how many faculty members they will affect.
The idea of rethinking the professor’s role is cropping up at traditional universities that have invested heavily in technology on their campuses; at new “virtual universities,” such as the one planned by the Western Governors Association; and at groups such as Educom, a consortium of 600 colleges and universities and more than 100 corporations that is dedicated to bringing technology to academe.
“There is no evidence that the lecture model of teaching is the most effective model for the most students,” says John T. Moseley, provost at the University of Oregon. “Faculty members spend much of their time conveying information. The faculty member’s time can be better used,” he says, and the technology can be used for basic teaching.
PRESSURES TO CUT COSTS
New technology offers tantalizing prospects at a time when universities are under tremendous pressure to cut costs. Some college administrators, especially those at two-year colleges, fear that unless colleges change their ways, they may lose students to commercial institutions that use video tapes and other technology to offer courses at greatly reduced rates. “If traditional colleges and universities do not exploit the new technologies, other nontraditional providers of education will be quick to do so,” says an Educom report entitled “Using Information Technology to Enhance Academic Productivity.”
But some observers say the idea that CD-ROMs and Web sites are as effective as faculty members is flawed and dangerous. “If teaching were the same as putting a disk in and downloading information, that would hold,” says Mary Burgan, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors. “Doing away with human contact would be disastrous.” She says she’s afraid administrators see technology as “a cheap, quick fix” for complex problems in higher education.
And bowing to market pressures could corrupt higher education, some say. “Once this dynamic gets going, there will be an economic incentive to reduce the interactive components to reduce the labor cost,” says Phil Agre, an associate professor of communication at the University of California at San Diego who monitors the social impact of new technologies. “The faculty need to wake up and realize that their butts are on the line. Their jobs could easily be radically changed for the worse over the next 10 years.”
REPLACING A DINOSAUR
When some people look at a room full of desks facing a central podium, they see a dinosaur. “What was once the most effective and efficient way to teach and learn -- the research-university model of faculty who create knowledge and deliver it to students via lectures -- now cracks under the strain of meeting new learning demands,” writes Carol A. Twigg, a vice-president of Educom, in a report called “The Need for a National Learning Infrastructure.” “As an old technology, the traditional classroom suffers from severe limitations, in both its on-campus and its off-campus versions. We need a better system of learning to enable students to acquire knowledge.”
When the printing press came along hundreds of years ago, Dr. Twigg points out in an interview, the role of the professor changed to reflect the fact that books became widely available. Rather than read tomes aloud during classes, she says, professors began to talk about information students had read on their own time.
Today, technology allows wide distribution of lectures by a few famous scholars. It also offers opportunities to create multimedia materials that can combine recorded monologues with video clips, three-dimensional computer models, and other visual and audio aids.
The question now is, Should university teaching change again? And if so, how much?
A ‘GUIDE-ON-THE-SIDE’
Some professors who have taught with technology say that computers can help foster a more interactive and lively learning environment appropriate for today’s information-rich world.
“In the old days we used to talk about the teacher as expert, the ‘sage on the stage,’” says Chere Gibson, associate professor of continuing and vocational education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “There were a whole lot of passive students who were kind of like baby birds and the professor dropped the worm in their mouths,” she says. Now, however, professors in many fields are expected to serve as a “guide-on-the-side,” she says, helping students learn how to analyze and synthesize information.
‘You can’t just continue to lecture,” says Dr. Gibson. “You’ve got to involve the audience. Otherwise let’s just send a tape.”
She adds that colleges should teach students how to learn from computer and video presentations -- skills they may need in the workplace. Learning from an on-screen presentation is “not the same as watching a Packers game,” she points out. “Faculty have a moral and ethical obligation to start incorporating these tools.”
But designing a course that replaces lectures with interactive materials requires more technical know-how than most professors possess. “Most people who are good teachers have a good idea about how to design a classroom course,” says Gary W. Matkin, associate dean of university extension at the University of California at Berkeley. But to create customized multimedia tools, he says, “you have to have a command of the technology.”
Some people suggest that, in the future, courses might be designed by teams of professors and technicians working side by side in a publishing company’s offices or on the campus of an Ivy League or Big Ten university. Creating a course might be more like producing a Hollywood film or a video game.
Others say that professors will still be directly involved with designing their own courses, but that they will have to work with technicians and other professors to prepare multimedia materials. Wisconsin’s Dr. Gibson says bringing in outside experts “adds a new spark to teaching.”
But some professors fear that they’ll lose control over the courses they teach. “Your own autonomy is being placed in serious jeopardy,” says David Noble, a professor of history at York University in Canada who studies the effects of technology on society. Dr. Agre of the University of California at San Diego agrees, noting that as courses rely more heavily on prepared materials, control over the content becomes more centralized. “The ability of professors to write their own course syllabi, for example, could very easily evaporate over the next 10 years,” he says.
ROMANTICIZING THE LECTURE
Carol Twigg of Educom says it’s all too easy to romanticize what a professor does in the classroom. She says most people who discuss university teaching “act like all professors are teaching 19th-century history at the University of Michigan.” But many courses are introductory in nature, she says, and the professors are simply presenting the basic vocabulary of a discipline. In such cases, sending students to a computer room to use a Web site at their own pace might be more effective than a traditional lecture, she argues.
But even the most basic introductory courses involve a large amount of improvisation, says Lawrence Gold, higher-education director for the American Federation of Teachers. He says he disagrees with the stereotype that most professors’ lectures are already “canned.” For many professors, “watching their class has a great deal to do with how they give a lecture,” he says.
Other professors say that prepackaged materials, even those with plenty of bells and whistles, lack the spontaneity of live lectures.
Some professors say such tools are fine as supplements, but should not replace traditional lectures. “There are a lot of people who can benefit from a virtual classroom,” says Beulah M. Woodfin, an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of New Mexico, “but not the traditional college undergraduates.”
NEW FORMS OF ASSESSMENT
Another challenge to the traditional professorial role comes from the Western Governors University, a “virtual university” that plans to teach through video courses, tutorials delivered over the Internet, and other technologies. It will mix course work taken from established colleges and universities with materials developed by publishers and software developers.
One of the most innovative aspects of the virtual university is that students will be evaluated by a third-party organization rather than by their instructor. “We take over the assessment of what the student learns,” says Robert C. Albrecht, chief academic officer for the new university.
Although such third-party evaluations are common in some professions, such as accounting, nursing, and law, the Western Governors University plans to use standardized tests to measure “competency” in English, history, and other courses required for the associate of arts degree that the university plans as its initial offering. Mr. Albrecht compares the tests to the advanced-placement tests taken by high-school students.
“We believe there is a considerable demand for competency-based degrees,” he says. “If an employer knows that there’s been a third-party assessment, then the employer has more confidence that the student has the skills.”
Critics question whether standardized tests would limit the range of topics discussed in college courses. The University of Wisconsin’s Dr. Gibson worries that such tests would measure only how well students learned material a course was initially designed to teach. “We’re losing the serendipity,” she says. “We need to make sure we don’t lock ourselves in.”
Dr. Twigg of Educom suggests that technology could eliminate the need for professors to write their own tests for basic courses, such as algebra. “Making up tests, that’s kind of a waste of their time, if you think about it,” she says, suggesting that universities could help develop national test data bases for use by professors.
Even those who are contemplating the transformation of teaching say the standard lecture model will always have a place in the mix of academic offerings. Like gasoline stations that offer both self-serve and full-service islands, colleges might offer a range of services at various prices.
Officials for the Western Governors University, for instance, say they aren’t trying to change traditional classroom teaching -- they’re simply offering an alternative. And they say they aren’t pursuing the traditional undergraduate market.
Many of those who warn of the dangers of overusing technology take pains to say they aren’t Luddites. They say they’re simply calling for more study before sweeping changes are made. “I’m not against efficiency -- I think that’s important,” says Mary Burgan of the A.A.U.P. “The question is whether or not we’re ready to withdraw all those real-life grownups.”
