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Should Professors Be Required To Teach With Tech?
An anonymous reader writes "Are professors who don't update their teaching methods like doctors who fail to keep up with the latest ways to treat disease? Or are professors better off teaching old-school? From the article: '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.'"
I teach math at a decent university, and I could teach a semester's worth of material in one class using PowerPoint. Nobody would learn anything, of course. But speaking as a math teacher, it's really easy to go far too fast using things like PowerPoint.
I teach with a lot of the techniques they're talking about (group activities, hands-on exercises), but I really don't want to use presentation software like PowerPoint. I'm willing to bet a lot that a student that has written down a couple of examples from the board is better off than one who has seen the same example projected on a screen.
Finally, the technology the article mentions include blogs, videoconferencing, and "clickers". I've avoided clickers mostly by teaching in small classes, but I can see their use as instant feedback. But blogs? Do my calculus students really want to read a blog I write?
I don't know where you studied, but I studied basic matrix operations like calculating determinants and inverting matrices in high school in Brazil. More advanced operations, like calculating eigenvalues and eigenvectors, came in my first year in college.
In our modern life technology is very important for learning any subject. Even in social studies you can benefit from tools like search engines. Blogs and discussion groups help you communicate ideas. You cannot have a face to face discussion with someone from the other side of the world, but technology will enrich your life by allowing you to meet different ideas and concepts.
When I come to think of it, there's only one group that wouldn't benefit from the facilities in communications that our modern technology brings us: the religious fanatics.
And as a university student, I take exception to this ;-)
It depends far too much on context to make this sweeping generalization that a student can read 700 pages of material in a week. I'm an engineer, and one of my hardest courses in grad school covered about 200 pages worth of textbook material over 10 weeks. One of my roommates is a controls engineer (and a very smart guy), and he can spend a week studying a single 20 page journal paper. Maybe you're simply referring to *reading* while I'm talking about *understanding*. It is possible to read 700 pages of technical material in a week, but not possible to understand it, unless it is already below your skill level.
There are courses like "Introduction to Psychology" (not to pick on the field, just the teaching methods I've seen) where all you have to do is skim the textbook and regurgitate key facts on a multiple choice test. I might have read about 50 pages a week for that class, probably in an hour or two, but I don't feel like I learned very much. And I don't feel like that's a useful way to teach a class.
700 pages/week might make sense as say an english student, where you need to read lots of novels/stories/etc but aren't writing an in-depth paper on each and every one.
So don't get arrogant and tell GP that he's just taking too many classes, because in many fields 700 pages a week is way, way too much.