This year, plenty of faculty members — while struggling to use the learning-management system or online teaching tools — have puzzled over a larger question: How, or why, do administrators decide to invest in some tools and technologies, but not others? Decisions about educational technology can appear opaque to academics. On the flip side, the IT staff in charge of acquiring the technology may find faculty preferences in the classroom to be similarly hazy and ill-defined.
The disconnect between faculty and staff operations contributes to a chicken-and-egg problem in the acquisition of educational technology.
We’re at a moment in academe when everyone is wondering about the future of college teaching. A big part of the conversation is about how online, hybrid, and HyFlex courses fit into the larger instructional climate in the long term. With increased attention to online teaching and learning, there has also been more focus on the digital tools and classrooms that colleges and universities have spent time and money procuring for faculty and staff members.
What students and instructors experience in class is fundamentally shaped by campus tech choices. Yet decisions surrounding digital tools — and the professional development necessary to use them effectively — seem to have no clear catalyzing origin for either faculty or staff members. To put it more plainly:
- Staff members and administrators often do not know why or how instructors intend to use certain ed-tech tools. The staff and administrative role is just to facilitate their purchasing and support.
- Meanwhile, faculty members seem to think that some amorphous administrative body just decides to buy random ed tech purely for the sake of buying the latest fancy technology. Sometimes that perception aligns with reality; sometimes it doesn’t.
The fact that it’s often unclear — on both sides — who and what drives these purchases is an area of deep concern if higher education is to move forward with designing more technology-enhanced courses and offering a more diverse array of instructional options than ever before. Among the key problems:
Poor channels of communication. Because the faculty and the staff operate in separate spheres on most campuses, whether communication about teaching technology is clear and consistent often depends on where, and how, the ed-tech staff members are housed in an institution. On a single campus, you might find some ed-tech staff members in an IT department. Others are in campus teaching centers. Still others may be housed in an academic-affairs office or as part of a distinct online-learning division.
Given those differences, reaching ed-tech staff members is understandably confusing for faculty members.
Lack of representation. While faculty perspectives often shape campus technology choices, the mechanisms for collecting those perspectives may not always be representative. Some institutions have designated faculty-senate groups to discuss the choice and implementation of educational technology. But those committees may not be representative of the full range of faculty and staff voices and needs. In addition, those governance committees may not always consistently communicate with the staff members who are directly responsible for getting the technology up and running.
Instructors going rogue. Faculty members may opt to use online teaching tools without the explicit support or licensing of their institution — turning the ed-tech environment on any campus into an idiosyncratic jumble that differs from one course to the next.
For professors, the advantages of using institutionally supported tools in their teaching may not always be obvious. But there are several major benefits: technical support from trained staff members, institutional vetting to head off potential problems, and cybersecurity procedures that maintain the privacy of student data, such as grades or assessment scores.
Granted, those benefits may not feel worthwhile if the tools don’t work well with your particular teaching style. And frankly, many institutionally supported tools reinforce a reliance upon “top-down” teaching models or lecture-based instruction. So faculty members whose teaching is more collaborative and interactive may be frustrated by the limits of their institution’s chosen tools and technologies.
Faculty members should have some degree of freedom to decide which tech tools they want to use in their teaching, and why. Scholars like Michelle D. Miller (in her advice guide on “How to Make Smart Choices About Tech for Your Course”) and Flower Darby (“How to Be a Better Online Teacher”) provide excellent practical tips on this front.
Yet instructors who go it alone run certain risks. Some really powerful tech tools may compromise student privacy or be inaccessible to students with disabilities. And while some enterprising teachers may know how to avoid those problems, many others won’t even be aware of the risks if they haven’t consulted their college’s academic-technology or IT teams.
Finally, many excellent ed-tech tools that are initially free to use may require payment or a subscription down the line. To keep using them, someone will have to pay. So even with the best pedagogical advice and intentions, a faculty member interested in using collaborative, student-centered technology will have to rely, at some point, upon functional campus IT infrastructure.
What needs to change. All of which brings us back to our chicken-and-egg problem: Instructors may struggle to use the ed tech chosen by their institution because of its limitations, while staff members and administrators can’t make the best tech choices if they don’t understand how instructors want to use the tools. It’s easy to blame the tools themselves, but what’s more to blame are the hierarchies and silos in higher education that keep important stakeholders apart from one another.
It’s been very encouraging to see the heightened interest in good teaching during the pandemic. Writers like Jesse Stommel and Joshua Kim have long called for academic departments to commit to better digital pedagogy going forward. I see two major changes that would be a step in the right direction:
- Give faculty members with expertise in college teaching a joint appointment in administrative units where they can directly influence campus decision-making about teaching — especially around purchases of educational technology.
- Rethink the role of educational-technology professionals on campus and allow them to engage in a mix of scholarship, teaching, and administration. That way new research on college teaching directly influences technology procurement, testing, and implementation.
If an institution insists on maintaining the status quo — that is, allowing people in IT, academic affairs, and even student affairs to purchase and acquire ed-tech tools for teaching — then staff and faculty members need to work together to set clear benchmarks and mechanisms for listening to one another. That way, we’re not guessing at whether the chicken or the egg came first, but can instead work together to figure out how we build ourselves a sustainable chicken coop.
