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Professors Rejecting Classroom Technology
CowboyRobot writes "The January edition of Science, Technology & Human Values published an article titled Technological Change and Professional Control in the Professoriate, which details interviews with 42 faculty members at three research-intensive universities. The research concludes that faculty have little interest in the latest IT solutions. 'I went to [a course management software workshop] and came away with the idea that the greatest thing you could do with that is put your syllabus on the Web and that's an awful lot of technology to hand the students a piece of paper at the start of the semester and say keep track of it,' said one. 'What are the gains for students by bringing IT into the class? There isn't any. You could teach all of chemistry with a whiteboard. I really don't think you need IT or anything beyond a pencil and a paper,' said another."
At my university, the CS department are, counter-intuitively, some of the most reluctant to use our online capabilities and classroom presentation tech. I'd say about half of the CS profs still want everything handed in hard-copy and don't even post their syllabi online. And we have a pretty robust system for online content too, if a prof chooses to actually use it. But many don't want to even touch it.
You would think programmers would be more comfortable with computers.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
and the professors don't want to teach and have the big lectures that at times are just out of the textbook and are sleep though.
The old college system is not cut out for today's needs and today's tech / IT settings.
They only interviewed 42 faculty members for this study? Seems like too small of a sample to come to any kind of conclusion.
Faculty at the large public research university I work at have embraced the technology that has been provided to them.
They're undergraduates -- you need to attract their attention before you can teach them
Rattles or mobiles work wonders on undergraduates.
Honestly, it really depends on the subject and the lesson whether or not technology is going to help. Technology for the sake of technology is money that could have been used on things that matter.
I teach English and I'll use technology, but it's mostly technology that's a decade old and only for certain things. In fact I tend to avoid using it because I'm then at the mercy of the hardware to be functioning when I need it and I can't shuffle my lesson around if I need to.
anything beyond a pencil and a paper and they want to tech IT???
This is why CS has big skills gaps.
You can't highlight every piece of text, run a search on it and then spend hours jumping from one wikipedia article to the next, losing track of where you even started. You can't take a screen grab of an amusing typo, caption it, and post it to some social media network. No little bubbles pop up on your piece of paper to let you know you have a new instant message, email, completed download, software update or follower... Perhaps class in a Faraday cage isn't neo-Luddism, but a practical lesson in focusing on one thing at a time for 40 minutes straight.
I don't see technology as inhabiting much of the universe of effective teaching. A good teacher with deep subject understanding and good communication skills is always going to be better than a crappy teacher festooned with the latest IT.
In a band? Use WheresTheGig for free.
You don't "use technology" to teach, you use specific, customized products to teach.
You don't offer generic technology. You custom design specific software.
As in the Khan Academy. Or as in Cargo Bridge, or similar physics games.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
My wife teaches English (composition) at a local University and she used "Blackboard" for the sylabus, supplementary reading material and communication with the students. She also put up a few short lectures (combination of slides and voice over narration) on a few of the important topics in her classes.
I think this is about the limit of possible use of technology for this type of class where learning depends on sitting with a student and their paper and working on how to make it better. I think that technology is over-sold in education.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
The professor went on to say: "Now get off my lawn!"
The most common thing that I see in chemistry is that online resources are used to post powerpoint slides for first year courses. This is mostly done as a concession to placate students who complain that they can't follow the lecture if they don't have something to follow. Fair enough I suppose. The problem comes when students then go to study for exams and think that a few collections of what amounts to flash-cards are sufficient to study from and are shocked when not a single question on the exam ever appeared in lecture (though all of the concepts were there, and all of the concepts were explained in even more detail in the textbook).
...and I can see why technology is not more thoroughly embraced. For starters, the OP makes a good point: How hard is it to keep track of a syllabus? If you're the kind of person who can't keep a piece of paper, or who can't enter the important information from that piece of paper into the data device of your choosing, you're probably not going to do well in the course anyway.
But more to the point, learning technology is almost always more suited for the student than for the instructor. I can project a video on the screen and talk about it, but students who sleep during lecture are still going to sleep through lecture, and students who pay attention will learn either way. For students on their own, the technology can be more useful. I have used technology, and will continue to, but it's not a major part of my instruction and I could easily do without it entirely.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
I'm not sure I care. I had classes with lots of fancy tech, and classes with next to none where everything was done on paper. It made no particular difference to how good the class was, or what I got out of it.
Occasionally there's a good reason for it (submitting 50 pages of code by printing it out really makes no sense at all), but in my experience most of the time the technology costs a lot of money and doesn't really add anything of value. If the prof actually wants to teach and knows how to do it, the class is going to be good even if he's using stone tablets. If he considers teaching to be that thing he has to do in between research projects, it's going to suck no matter how much tech you throw at it.
They could probably get better outcomes if instead of spending the money on tech, they spent it on instructors who want to teach so the professors that don't can go do the research they actually want to do instead. Everyone is happier that way.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
>>>You could teach all of chemistry with a whiteboard. I really don't think you need IT or anything beyond a pencil and a paper,' said another."
Or with Khan Academy, without the $10,000 upfront.
... a friend today got an assignment that has to be five pages, double spaced, times new roman 12 pt with 1 inch margins, and I thought that was a curious anachronism. So maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about. :)
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
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The professors don't grasp the tech because they haven't used it themselves. They don't see how much more information they can present to students with these tools. Chemistry can be taught using only a whiteboard, but if you put some of that information in an easily accessible and dynamic format that can be used outside the classroom then you can cover so much more.
It's not about them rejecting technology, it's about them rejecting an overhaul of their teaching methods to best use the tools at their disposal.
The old adage is "Those who can't, teach", but I would say it's more like "Those who can't adapt, teach"
Coincidentally, this was posted two hours after my EE lab TA asked us to ignore the directions at the end of the lab assignment about submitting it to Blackboard, and instructed us NOT to submit it via email. Instead, we were directed to submit it via hard copy. To be clear, these lab assignments involve programming in a $200+ mathematics package. And these instructions were given in the computer lab, surrounded by tons of machines that have internet access... but no printer. I can't even begin to imagine the logic behind that decision. I mean, Blackboard sucks, but isn't email submission (using the GMU email system that that we are required to use for classes) more convenient for everyone, more environmentally friendly, AND verifiable?
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
One thing to keep in mind is that professors are not, for the most part, trained teachers. They are experts in their own field, but that does not necessarily imply a particularly good ability to pass that knowledge to others. By the time they become professors, most have of course taught some classes, but that is not the primary criteria used to anoint new professors.
I agree with some of the sentiments in the article that technology can be useful for your prototypical large lecture class. Anything better than the current situation of 200+ bored students and a one-way lecture that could just as easily have been posted online as a video would be an improvement. But for regular-sized classes (which was most of mine, outside of the "everybody takes these" classes), I don't see technology as enhancing the experience much. The smaller class size induces the back-and-forth conversation that makes advanced technology more of a distraction than anything else.
He was talking about Chemistry. Do you have some sort of learning disorder? You fail at reading comprehension and forming cogent sentences.
Also, do you really need to make a half dozen posts?
Why? What do "today's tech/IT settings" bring to the table that is of actual benefit to the learning environment? How does a big CMS and computers help teach a university course? I'm not saying there aren't uses and benefits, but that is the question that is posed. Your summary dismissal of the university system does not remotely answer that question and in fact lends pretty heavy evidence that formal education is sorely lacking in today's tech/IT settings. It seems to me that the university system is exactly cut out for today's needs...people with little grasp on critical thinking, literature, culture, history, logic and reasoning, writing, debate. The games played in the media and in politics wouldn't work if the people demanded better. But they don't know better precisely because many people have tried to use a degree as a job training program and we've apparently let them, so long as the tuition gets paid. That's the problem.
Technology should serve a purpose. You seem to think that purpose should serve technology.
I think it would be more accurate to say the old college system is not cut out for the needs of today's vendor commission expectations.
The comments from the faculty members are, I think, factually correct: you CAN teach any subject with very little technology. Heck, you probably don't even need a chalkboard. But, what you CAN do isn't necessarily the best way to do it. I think technology can help teach better in many fields. Demonstrating this improvement can be challenging, however, and all technology has resistance to implementation. Often, customers will push for change before a vendor will. In this case, when enough students are asking for the course web site, the course lecture videos, and the course homework aids, then the professors will follow.
Similar issues are currently occurring in the medical profession...
Imagine this: you have a notebook of your course content - basically and outline and examples - you've used for years. Each year, you walk into class grab a marker and go to town on the whiteboard. Nobody can get ahead of you, everybody has to concentrate on what you're saying or miss the details, and you can actively let your theories blossom infront of them. By the third or fourth time you've taught the class, you spend almost no time at all preparing. Each class can get a customized window of your knowledge that suits them. If you make an error, you just say "oops" and change the mark on the board by erasing the last one with your sleeve and everybody fixes it with a pencil. Done.
Now, in the name of "connectedness" and "interactivity" you are expected to produce a full picture book of your entire semester's class work and examples, all worked to the nth degree. Everybody is supposed to download them and you just point at the board as your slides go by. There's no way to correct them on the fly, and any corrections you make require everyone to update their local copy. Those that take notes have to insert the new slides and just hope that the pagination doesn't change so they have to redo the whole back half of the presentation. Everybody is working from their laptop or their tablet, so nobody is really "taking notes" - even the good equipment sucks at it - and half are off checking facebook or playing games.
It's not wonder profs are loathe to incorporate stuff into their lectures - more work for them, less interaction from the students. The whole idea of having a professor is getting a customized version of the class. Otherwise you could just go out and buy the (e-)text, take the exam and skip college altogether. It's not a business presentation where nobody gives a shit, and pretty slides makes up for the lack of real content. It's actual learning.
College professors aren't, in general, very high on my list of respected professions, but I've got to side with them in this case. There are lots of things IT can do to help out, but in the classroom the experience should be very human and very hands on. /rant
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
... but I'd sure appreciate the course materials, schedule, policies, etc. being available online so I can check in from home and know what's going on.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
It's always a tough sell to get someone to buy into a major change in methodology for a marginal improvement that is not clearly demonstrable. The only way to sell any new technology is to clearly demonstrate a marked advantage to adopting the new technology, with a demonstration that is clear and awakening. Thus it was ever so.
My translation of the summary is "I made my pitch, but people keep asking me: 'Why bother?', I shouldn't have to answer that! They are so mean! WAAAHHHH"
Students are the ones who are to gain from IT in the class room, not professors. Easily accessible and detailed syllabus online? Professor already has it memorized. Easy access to slides and notes from classes? Doesn't help the professor. Online study material? Again, does nothing for the professor. Online submission of coursework? Professor might actually take longer to grade it or even have to print it out to hardcopy, or else learn to use a software solution to mark the paper. Professors aren't motivated to use it because it means changing their existing process and they see no direct benefit to themselves.
There is no memory shortage. yes I have heard of XFCE. Go away.
Since when were whiteboards old-fashioned? I remember chalkboards. Now get off my lawn!
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Does not matter if you study it the old fashioned way with a pencil, paper, and a copy of "The Art" or on your latest i-toy, but when you will come to me for a job interview, you better be able to write, debug, and analyse code on a sheet of paper or our interview won't last long.
This is completely on point. Technology is great! I have been in the business for a long time and we can make many things better through the use of technology. But, pushing IT off on every supposed problem (what was wrong with the classroom that we are trying to fix) does not make things better. For instance I like to cook, but putting my oven on the internet doesn't make me a better cook. It is just a waist of technology. A solution looking for a problem. A teacher has stood in front of students and taught them to understand a subject matter for literally millennia. Adding high tech online line cloud based learning solutions is an answer to a problem that does not exist.
No sigs in BETA. Beta SUCKS.
+1, Insightful.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
He is actually a poster child for TFA
We didn't have computers.
Technology is not the solution unless you're talking about changing the nature of the classroom. For example if yoush to enable remote learning a content management system might be of assistance. If you want an efficient mechanism for evaluating teaching methods, technology may be of assistance. However technology can just be a waste of time, MS word is great for writing stories but is possibly the biggest time waster in corporate history, playing with templates, creating documents that noone reads that you store multple times.
People who make a living with technology know what it's good for.
That's why they use is sparingly (and to greater benefit) than instructors that fully embrace a bunch of expensive junk with no actual educational value.
Whiteboard, projector, laptop, document camera. That's my ideal set of technology for a classroom.
Work Safe Porn
Are you familiar with Eric Mazur's research in physics education? He's not interested in technology as an end in itself, but in developing more effective techniques for the teaching of science. Technology has a role. I saw him speak about this work about 10 years ago and it was compelling. Too bad his group's Web site seems to be missing links to most of his papers, but the short blurbs there give an idea of his findings.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
I don't know what this has to do with anything but I had to learn FORTRAN in a chemistry class about 36 years ago. This was before whiteboards.
I mostly agree. Having all these expensive tech solutions seems like a waste of time.
However, powerpoint is awesome. I'm in CS and I had an algorithms and data structures teacher that only wrote her notes on the board, and let me tell you, if you didn't have immaculate notes, you were not doing well in that class. Furthermore, mistakes and errors were very common, and it made the class very difficult. More difficult than it needed to be.
Powerpoint.
Some technologies I saw that were actually useful:
Classroom clickers for student participation (not so great for attendance)
Online class message board for students to ask questions versus catching office hours
Online site to view current class grades for each assignment/exam
Online calendar to remind students of assignments
Video recording system to allow online students (very useful if one missed class due to illness or didn't want to spread their illness to other class members)
Some technologies that weren't so useful
Online quizzes (always technical problems or just slowness)
Online submission of assignments (always limited and difficult to use, some students always had issues when the server would crash, small file limits)
Microphones at each desk (usually captured too much background noise)
Allowing laptops,tablets, etc in classrooms (nobody took notes just played games or IM)
What makes a college system effective is not and never has been the use of technology. It's the quality of the instructor and their strategy when teaching. Its tough to specify what will do that, but modern technology is not a necessity.
What's falling short in many cases is students with brief attention spans who think glitzy technology is necessary to keep them awake and learn, and who think merely writing or speaking to students or leading them in a hands-on lab exercise is a deficient way to teach. If you are easily impressed by the use of technology in teaching, then I suppose the traditional ways can seem suboptimal, but I've seen a great many attempts to use technology that are clear failures in terms of both cost and teaching results. Technology for its own sake is not useful, so it's not surprising that many instructors shun it or use it sparingly.
I program and use all sorts of computers, and I build and repair electronics at home. That doesn't mean I use computers or other technology in every exercise. Sometimes I still draw on the board because I think that will get the point across more clearly. If you mean that a college with an instructor speaking to a bunch of students learning from them isn't a good way to learn, then I'd argue that the last few centuries of education suggest otherwise. Yes, there is a place for new technology and new ways of learning -- always -- but the basic principle that someone with experience and a long period of study can help students who are starting their studies is a pretty obvious and time-tested one that does work. I can't see how that could be replaced by technology, or why you would want to.
I have to say, I agree with them that the best way to teach is often writing everything by hand on a whiteboard. Why? It's the best way to create interaction. Talking over a PowerPoint presentation is only slightly better than just giving people a book to read. Working out everything out by hand in the lecture lets the students see how you work through the problem, and, critically, they see you make mistakes. Spotting these mistakes and either correcting them for you, or seeing how you approach going back and correcting them, is one of the most important things for the students to learn. In their later careers its often more important than the actual content of the lecture itself.
So, yes, it's helpful if a course has a good website, and some simple CMS may be useful too, but it is absolutely critical that many of the lectures are still done by hand.
Congratulations, you reinvented the filing cabinet. The good or bad news is that unless it has a picture of a certain mouse on it, all copyright/patent/trademarks on said invention have likely expired. At least until you add, "in a computer system" to them and start all over. Maybe your post now counts as "PRIOR ART.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
The web based classroom management stuff is largely a solution looking for a problem. Having used two such systems, it's largely an exercise in frustration to figure out how to figure out how it works. They're loaded with hard to use features. For those of you who have access to such a system: create a survey. Then go to surveymonkey.com and create a survey. Which one was easy?
The only actually useful features are posting files (assignments, lecture slides, solutions, etc) and posting grades. The requirements are simple, yet the solution is horribly complex. No wonder the profs don't want to deal with the huge learning curve.
I can understand some of this. There are people who push technology where it really is cumbersome. Blackboard, for instance, is a horrible tool and costs more time, money, and effort for both instructors and students than just using paper would. At my university, only the most incompetent computer professors used Blackboard. The best ones used their own simple web sites and pushed content with FTP.
There are places where technology does help, but it's not universal. I still strongly believe that math and theoretical physics should be taught on a whiteboard and pencil/paper. I was using a tablet PC, way before the tablet craze, which worked pretty well.
In liberal arts classes, however, a laptop and keyboard was invaluable. I could type way more content than people with pens and paper, and if somebody missed a class, sharing notes was trivial.
In the end, it's about the right too for the right job, and fancy tech often simply doesn't add any value. It all depends on the kind of course and learning environment.
Meanwhile, the people who were smart enough to figure out how to make today's tech, didn't have today's tech to learn with. Today's kids are too busy playing video games to know what math is good for. Something they'd see no end of if they had actual hobbies.
Doesn't matter to me though. This idiotic obsession with technology just makes me more valuable in the work force.
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Of skill, there are lots of math concepts I did not learn as taught to me in school but as an adult seeing the concept animated on a computer I understood instantly.
The idea that technology necessarily improves the way we do things is the fallacy in your argument. In practice, many people avoid this technology because it is really not worth the hassle for didactic gain that it brings.
Want to use a whiteboard? Take a pen. Want to use an "innovative" tablet approach -- well make sure the battery is charged, take your gear to the lecture theatre, discover that it doesn't work in the lecture theatre you are in.
The second point is that most "e-learning environments" are lowest common denominator. I asked once how big a file can I upload? Pretty big came the answer, think the limit is 60Mb or so. Not so useful when I want to upload an 7Gb ISO, or a 100Mb data set. Use of these environments is largely limited to uploading your powerpoints because uploading your powerpoints is all that they will do reliably.
Yep, learning on pencil and paper might have made him look less retarded.
Professors, even the techie ones, need a reason to adopt new technology.
Making Tenure (just to cite one example) is usually tied to how many scholarly articles a prof. can publish in a year, and NOT how well they use the latest technology.
Until that changes, we can expect more of this type of behavior. Not that professors should use technology just because it's there, mind you...
You're obviously new to e-mail.
SMTP works through 'store and forward' ... and many systems won't alert that they've had a problem forwarding e-mail for at least 2 hours, possibly as many as 48.
So by then, your homework's late ... but what if it got caught up in a spam trap? Then you might get *no* indication that it wasn't delivered. When I worked for GW, we had a little incident when an update to our mail system's anti-virus flagged every e-mail with a 'w' in it ... and all of that e-mail was trashed.
I once went to a conference where the abstract submissions were via e-mail ... they ended up cutting the conference from 5 to 3 days because of the low number of submissions ... but it turned out that their spam filter had eaten over 50% of the submissions.
I took a class once where we had a take-home final; but the teacher e-mailed it to us. Luckily, I gave him more than one e-mail address, as my university e-mail was locked a few days before the final. (I worked for the university, and was fired for 'use of sarcasm'). The email account had been set up as a student e-mail account, but they refused to unlock it, and their system wouldn't let me create a new account as I already had one associated with my SSN. (I mean 'GW ID number ... it's just a conincidence that they were your SSN ... they'd never put those so that every adminstrator could see them, right?)
If you're going to take submissions electronicly, you'd be better off using FTP, or a website, or anything that has a positive confirmation that the file's actually been submitted.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
On large scale a LMS is cheaper than printing tons of paper. Electronic white boards are a convenience to teachers they don't help students in any way. Electronic attendance means you don't need a secretary tallying everything up. But for the teacher it's not better, it's just different.
I can't think of any technology that actually helps students learn better, outside of directly learning about using computers. This isn't a bad thing as long as your IT costs are justified by savings and aren't harming student learning.
This works, except when a computer is brought in the classroom, the prof is no longer the center of attention. It is the computer. It is correct to say that there is no advantage to putting the class on the computer. It takes a lot of work, and the payback at the college level is not that great. This is especially true when you consider some profs just come in, read from the book, assign from the book, and don't really give it any more thought.
The value of the class system, which really does not have to cost very much, is that they silllybus is no longer a separate document, but an integrated set of readings, activity, etc. Students can be given the option of online or paper texts. It is easier to refer to a variety of texts. For freshman lit, for example, anthologies can be collated from online source. listed in the proper place in the syllabus, instead of having students buy a book. For science simulations can be collated. Online tests can be created so that each student had an individual test. TAs can be used to tutor students instead of grading test.
Using such a system, though, is a skill, and it is time consuming. I have heard of that hourly profs are not given time to set such a system up, so I understand why it is not popular.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
At research intensive universities, professors are not at the school to teach, they are at the school to do research and are basically required to teach. If they can push work onto the student instead of having to do it themselves, they will. Pen and paper notes and using a whiteboard or overhead projector means spending as little time out of the classroom doing things involving that class. Technology is designed to make things easier for the students (and in some case the professor as well) but they require more investment in time in order to get them populated or to learn how to use them. At schools without a research oriented philosophy, teaching is the main component of the school and the teacher actually wants to teach or they wouldn't be there. As such, they are willing to spend the time to learn the technologies and the effort to populate them with the information needed to make them work for their students. My experience in general is that professors don't really care about a student's success, they are just duty bound to pass on information and want to make it as easy on themselves as possible. Teachers, on the other hand, care about a student's success and pass on the information, but also try to give the students the best chance of success by using what they have available to them. Obviously you have exceptions to both categories, but I've found this true in general. I also work at a research oriented university, so I see it every day.
The simplest systems are most often the most efficient and effective.
There is a reason these systems such as paper and whiteboards are still dominant. They work, and do their work well... on the cheap.
I teach in the social sciences. Early on in my teaching career, ten or fifteen years ago, I was pretty gung ho on some of these systems, but over time I've become increasingly skeptical about them.
The reason is that using technology properly is hard, time consuming, and can detract from classroom teaching. A simple example: put up too many slides, and students concentrate on them and ignore what I'm saying. Put the whole lecture on those slides (and put them online) and students won't attend class. Students rightfully understand that there's no point attending unless there's something to be gained by doing so. Of course, what they miss is that skipping removes the important interactive component to learning that they get in the lecture setting, at least for small to mid-sized classes. Now, you can replicate some of that interactivity online. There are a lot of techniques: online discussion groups, student created wikis, that sort of thing. They work, although not as well as class discussion, in part because students can easily game whatever scheme you put into place to make them participate in a way that can't in class. They are also hugely time consuming to use. If I'm mandating using a discussion group, I or the TAs have to moderate it and keep track of participation quality. Moodle, the courseware package we use, can count participation events, but that tells you little about the quality of a student's participation. I think, for a fairly traditional lecture course or seminar the benefits of using courseware are comparatively small and the costs in my time and in TA time just too great to be worth it. I think there is an important place for it where you do away with the traditional lecture component, but I'm not willing to go that route, at least not yet.
I do use Moodle for online readings, communication with students, posting the syllabus and class slides, receiving assignments, and returning grades and comments. I also usually turn on the student forums, for those that like to use them. All of this is useful stuff, but it just replicates things that we could do using paper and bulletin boards. Heck, my powerpoint slides could just as well be presented using an overhead projector.
It that it's an insulting waste of money is being spent on it, all the while it shows little to no benefit to the student. The money that is spent reduces the potential for raises that could be spent on the teachers who don't make very much to begin with. It's about the same as dumping all your extra budget into a stadium for the highschool the football team and telling the faculty/staff that no one is getting raises except dept heads the VP and the principle. Books aren't that expensive and can be reused year after year with out having to constantly upgrade them (if an edit needs to be made then it can be taught in the class instead of buying all new books) or have an entire staff that simply keeps them usable and replaces all of them every 3-4 years. Put the computers back in the lab and the library and leave the teaching to teachers with books and boards and quit wasting my damn tax money.
Yeah, we no longer need philosophy, art, theater, or any course of study that doesn't lead directly to the only job remaining in a modern economy: programmer.
I am an IT Director / CIO for a small liberal arts university, and I've discussed this issue on my blog about IT leadership in higher ed. What many of us in technology sometimes forget is that technology is fairly new to the workforce, and that includes faculty. Remember, the PC was only introduced to office desktops in the 1980s (unseen mainframes in server rooms don't count). If people enter the workforce in their 20s and retire in their 60s, that's a 40-year work generation. So computers have only been part of the workplace for less than a work generation. There are still a lot of people out there who remember doing their work without technology.
And faculty are less likely than, say, accountants to embrace change. Accountants realized that they could use the computer to add up the numbers and create a spreadsheet to track the income & expenses. People in sales used the computer to write letters and other communication. But for faculty, their job is teaching and for that they have relied on a chalkboard (or whiteboard) for pretty much their entire careers, going back to undergrad. Powerpoint was a stretch for some faculty, but Powerpoint isn't much more than a "captured" version of their whiteboard talk, so many faculty took to Powerpoint as a means of delivering lectures.
One of the faculty at my university often uses the phrase "Technology should be like a rock; it should be that simple to use." And there's a lot to that. Faculty want technology that is easy to use. They don't want to tinker with technology, they don't want to try the latest thing. Faculty only want technology when it supports what they need to do for instruction.
And that's where we in IT see things differently, of course. For us, technology isn't just our job, it's often our passion. We got involved with technology as a career path (programming, desktop support, server admin, databases, etc) because we were pretty much doing that already (building web pages, building our own computers, installing our own OS, etc) and what better job than to get paid doing what you love? So campus technology folks are going to gravitate to the latest technology: the Raspberry Pi, smartboards, video capture, and the like. And we get confused when the faculty don't want to use it, as TFA mentions.
Faculty will adopt technology when they need it to do the job of teaching. The article includes some quotes along those lines.
"I went to [a course management software workshop] and came away with the idea that the greatest thing you could do with that is put your syllabus on the Web and that's an awful lot of technology to hand the students a piece of paper at the start of the semester and say keep track of it." What makes it easier for faculty to focus on teaching? Learning how to put a PDF on the web (or a course management tool like Moodle) when they've never done that before, or printing out a syllabus and asking the students not to lose it.
"What are the gains for students by bringing IT into the class? There isn't any. You could teach all of chemistry with a whiteboard. I really don't think you need IT or anything beyond a pencil and a paper."
One quote that highlighted when faculty were interested in using classroom technology: "They're undergraduates - you need to attract their attention before you can teach them anything." Because that helps the faculty in the job of teaching students, which is the most important thing. In this case, using some technology in the classroom may help get the attention of students, which the professor says you need to do "before you can teach them anything."
I'd also remind anyone working in campus technology to remember three important questions when trying to effect change on campus:
The reason we invented www.netclick.me is precisely because Professors won't use a new technology for teaching unless it is extremely easy, doesn't require new preparation, and actually benefits students.
I hate to be a grammar Nazi, but I have to shake my head when I read a Professor, presumably with a Ph.D. who is teaching in an institute of higher learning say the following: "What are the gains for students by bringing IT into the class? There isn't any." If a university professor doesn't understand the difference between singular and plural verbs, the English language is pretty much doomed.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
One first needs to keep in mind that the VAST majority of university professors are basically parents needing tech support people. They're in their 40's or later, they don't have time to be trained on the technology, assuming the training exists, and they aren't capable of taking advantage of it anyway. The ones who *are* capable already have solutions in place, and have for ages and don't need whatever the latest 'Blackboard or WebCt etc. product is. If you think it's a pain in the ass teaching someone to use their iPad (and that's bad enough) now imagine that all of their screwups effect a class of 1500 people.
Technology doesn't help a lot in the classroom itself. Well, it does, in that powerpoint slides are a vast improvement over a lot of other types of slides, and if you use a slate/tablet you can write on your own powerpoint at the front of the room. But writing on the whiteboard is helpful too. You *need* to pace yourself when at the front of the room, and if any of my students care to pipe in on this, I am terrible at pacing myself with powerpoint, but it can be done, and done very well by some people but not me. Of course my writing is basically illiterate scrawl so I have to use powerpoint.
The backend stuff. Getting assignments electronically is great. But it's actually really hard to mark things electronically, or at least efficiently. Yes you can write on PDFs and use all of the revision tools in Office or the like, but it's usually a lot faster for me to take a printed paper copy and put marks on it than it is to manage an electronic copy. I could write my own software to manage this a lot better than any of the tools out there because its very problem domain specific. If I have students writing an algorithms assignment I need a different type of submission than a iPhone project. I don't write my own because just doing it by hand for 20-30 students is good enough.
Marks on the web are hugely valuable. Both for me and for students. Students can look and see what the grades are at any time, and I can make a change and students know I've made the change. So that's fine. There are the usual security concerns (TA's including me when I'm TAing and not teaching) can make changes to grades on webct, and in a big class I have no idea if a change was made to something, or if that change was because the TA got a blowjob, or discovered and error in their marking, or just has a crush on redheads.
The multiple choice 'clicker' nonsense is worse than useless. First you make every damn kid buy some special device they only need for a handful of classes. Then you have to manage the bunch that are broken. Students that forget them, get them confused with someone else's. Ugh. Not worth it.
Online quizzes and that sort of thing... I could take or leave. I don't think they actually add much. Too easy to cheat, too easy to have IT problems make things go badly.
In classroom IT is also a problem because every damn classroom is different. I went to do a guest lecture at the place I did my MSc. They have a standard classroom setup for audio-PC-projector-screen, and I knew that going in. But I got to that specific class and... I couldn't set my computer anywhere I could access the screen or see my notes to myself while talking. And the 'screen' was actually touch sensitive. So rather than pointing at something on my slide to talk about I kept having it interpret my points as gestures. Bloody nuisance.
In classroom IT isn't 'owned' by any of the teachers, so none of them feel particularly responsible for it, and as I say most of them are computer illiterate at best (even in CS), where they might know their way around linux, but not Windows XP with whatever specific hardware configuration or the like. So you go into a class expecting to play audio, and... nothing. So now what is it? Is the audio muted, are the speakers unplugged, where was the audio muted etc. And this isn't my computer, so even if it takes me 15 or 20 seconds to figure it out, which isn't
I don't really understand this fascination with getting computers in the classroom. As far as I'm concerned the only room computers should be in is the computer lab. Teachers should be teaching, students should be learning. Computers don't help that situation at all. If it were better on the computer, we wouldn't need the classroom in the first place. I love computers, and students should be learning how to use them, but when I walk into the local highschool and the teachers got digital blackboard that cost the school more that it would have to hire 2 more teachers... and the class is on literature... I have to question the sanity in that.
The best literature teacher I ever had would prepare her work ahead of time, print it on transparencies and then just slide them onto an overhead projector. She could update them on the fly with a dry erase marker. Infinitely more useful, and substantially cheaper than all this tech being thrown at education.
Real life in which everybody has internet access, almost always.
Sure, it's important that certain things are learned by heart, very sure.
But certain things simply are not.
Insight questions, those are the important ones.
But hey, who am I kidding, the school system will probably never change. Until our robot overlords do ;)
Short summary of the whole thing, /. comments and all: Pointless intermediation doesn't improve the experience or outcome. Doesn't seem to matter if its .edu software or most anything else.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
So you print out the entire man files for people you interview? Or is it bonus points if they bring their own?
Lets remember, most of today's professors experienced most of their learning using pen and paper, chalk and blackboard. When they were learning such things as video lecture or interactive blackboards weren't even invented. Efectively using IT in the classroom not only require tech savvy, but a much faster pace of cognition on their part.
These are professionals, experts on their respective fields but to be an effective teacher it is not only necesary to pocess a mastery of the subject it is also necessary to be be effective at communicating it by any means.
It's all about finding better ways
You've got it backwards. The parent is saying that old-school colleges have not adapted to modern society and are largely useless as a result. For example, you said "the university system is exactly cut out for today's needs...people with little grasp on critical thinking, literature, culture, history, logic and reasoning, writing, debate" but most people who do work in ID have university degrees. If colleges did what you claim they are meant to do, the problems you are citing wouldn't exist. In fact, they do not. That is why the parent has said "The old college system is not cut out for today's needs and today's tech / IT settings." You seem to think that colleges and universities are actually the standard bearers of society, which is what they aspire to be and claim to be, when they are actually just degree factories that are required for a well-paying job but teach you very little.
The textbook industry is the biggest scam in higher ed today. Schools (via bookstores) and authors (usually professors) make amazing margins on ever-changing textbooks when most of what's changing is cosmetic, at best. Just because these fossilized professors don't (or won't) see value in technology doesn't make them right. I'm over 50 and use a tablet for almost everything these days. I've frequently thought technology for technology's sake in education was silly and wasteful, but its time has clearly come. These folks are slouching towards irrelevancy in their fields and don't even want to know why. Dry-rot in the ivy is a much more prevalent problem than many think.
Organization? You must be joking..
just adding technology does not make it better.
just like adding the word digital or cyber doesnt make a toaster any better at heating bread.
its what you actually do with it that counts, and for a large segment of educators, just adding fancy high tech gizmo #10 adds nothing of value to the course.
now i think you'll start seeing a higher uptake as the current professors retire and die off, and younger people take their place. they may make their presentations and lectures using and utilizing digital smart boards instead of chalkboards, and store them on tablet computers. but again, that doesnt mean the lecture is going to be any better.
the point of the lecture isnt to use or not a piece of technology.
the point of the lecture is get Idea A into Student B's brain.
If you as the teacher can accomplish that using chalk, do it.
If you as the teacher can accomplish that using a hologram, do it.
If you as the teacher can accomplish that standing on your head and randomly yelling as your invisible dog, do it.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
What about harnessing IT and bringing it into the classroom as a way to enhance the experience of the students... There are so many creative ways these days to bring IT into the classroom. Think outside the dogma/education sphere for one minute and it doesn't take a rocket scientist (or one that teaches them) to know that by bringing these tools into the classroom will ensure the next generation has a fighting chance.
Using a lot of tech detracts from the classroom instruction experience because it becomes very easy to commodify and degrade. Putting all the resources all online and using cute web based tests? Ok, then open up another 10 sections for the online students. Also, the university I graduated from had very strict IP hording policies. The university automatically took ownership over all materials professors put online for their students. Keeping everything paper was a defensive mechanism.
IT for IT's sake in the classroom is ridiculous. Like all other technologies, it needs to be examined for its utility in a certain application.
I teach engineering thermodynamics, heat transfer, and fluid dynamics. All of these courses involve using basic fundamental equations to solve real world problems (sizing pumps and heat exchangers properly, etc.). I do example problems in class on the board and walk through them step-by-step so the students can follow the *procedure*. Then I throw a modified problem at them, set it up on the board, and prompt the class what the steps are to solving this problem.
If they had to solve these problems in the field they would have to pull out a sheet of paper, a pencil, and a book of property tables, so that is how we roll in class. There *are* some computer programs that will automate many of these calculations in the field, but I want them to understand what those programs are doing and to be able to verify the answers. I tell the students this - the good students understand why I am making them do it the long way, the poor students whine that it is a waste of their time.
I do utilize Powerpoint to show photos and videos of real-world applications. Showing engineering students how things can blow up and fall apart when they don't understand the fundamentals is a great motivator, provides an entertaining break for the student from the number crunching, yet is still educational in the "big picture" sense. A few of my classes are amenable to demonstrations where I can get a student or two to come up and make something go *BANG* using some apparatus.
I am working on digitizing my lectures using PDFs produced by a LiveScribe pen, which essentially produces an electronic lecture. My handwritten notes become visible at the rate I would normally write them during a lecture, and a simultaneous recording of my voice plays along with the text. A student could sit down at a computer, open this PDF and have an experience similar to following the lecture (unfortunately without real-time ability to ask questions). I consider this a fall back for students who for whatever reason cannot attend class.For everything else, there is email, phone, or my office hours.
I generally try teach to the "B and C" students in the crowd - the ones that are putting their shoulder to it but are struggling with a concept or two. Exposing these students to these problems showing a basic procedure, then graphical illustrations of the importance, prodding them to think through the problem seems to work very well for these students. The feedback that I get from my students indicates that they like the flow of my classroom.
"A" students generally could be handed a poorly-written subject text at the start of the semester, told when the exam dates are, and would still find a way to do well. "D" students might physically get their bodies to class occasionally, but their minds aren't there. All of the IT in the world won't change these outcomes, though it does probably improve the A student's understanding of the topic.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
I've had the opportunity (misfortune) to use quite a few different systems over the years - BlackBoard, Sakai, McGraw-Hill Connect, WebAssign... and out of all of those I have only found these services to be useful for two things -
1) Submitting papers online - it is much more convenient (and environmentally friendly?) to submit our essays and papers online, just uploading them to Sakai or Dropbox or whatever than it is to print them out and hand them in.
2) This is where technology has actually been really useful - Math Homework - my college assigns all of our math homework through WebAssign. Basically, we sign in, and it gives all of us students similar problems, but with somewhat randomized constants (e.g. I see "integrate this from 0 to 3", but for my friend it will be "integrate this from 0 to 4" etc). The nice thing is the way the system grades our answers - it actually evaluates our answers to see if they are mathematically equal to the desired answer (within certain limits, for example if it asks me to integrate something, I can't just put in the integral, I actually have to do the work) so, basically if the answer is Pi/3, it will also accept 3Pi/9, etc.
Using WebAssign for our math homework is by far the best use of technology I have ever seen in a classroom. It will let us try up to 5 times to answer each problem correctly, and we get instant feedback on our answers.
Using technology in the classroom only goes so far, in my opinion BlackBoard added nothing at all to my high school english class, it just meant that I had one more site to check for homework ever night. I didn't even like doing our chemistry homework online - the system was far to picky, if you have to draw a diagram of a molecule and your diagram wasn't oriented the same as the system was expecting it would just mark it wrong, even if the molecule was accurately drawn.
I don't blame professors at all for ignoring a lot of the technology they have at their disposal, many times it only makes life more difficult for them and their students, and moving the class homework online very rarely adds anything to the class. However, when technology is used correctly, it can make a HUGE difference - online work is the reason I passed Algebra 101 in community college.
Daughter going to a state university.
Semester Tuition (17 hours) $8500
Housing $2200
Books $1200
$1200 x 8 = $9,600
That's a lot of iPads and Macbooks.
Organization? You must be joking..
Some preliminary thoughts, after having read the full research article:
It is a provocative study and it's going to be either totally ignored (because the author is just a PhD student in a non-technological discipline) or really stir the waters of educational research (just take into account the hundreds of books, tens of journals and thousands of research papers arguing about the benefits of IT in the curriculum).
One weakness of the study that will definitely be used against the author is that he (and, not surprisingly, the interviewees) seem to confuse instructional technology with information technology - these two "IT" are not the same. As an educator, I firmly believe that PowerPoint presentations (except when embedding animations/video) are totally equivalent to plain old overhead transparencies or even 35mm film slides - they are static images and are definitely not Information technology, just because a computer and a data projector are needed to project them.
Another more important criticism is that the author did not seem to investigate (or mention) the professors' insights about the potential learning benefits of using IT. From what I understood by reading the paper, the teachers seem to implicitly or explicitly believe that IT has no useful aspects beyond the motivation of the students (to keep them from falling asleep during class). Apart from the fact that such responses could be argued to be a sign that the sample is biased, the major question is, are the students actually learning better/more by using IT or not? IMO teaching cannot be separated from learning. Therefore, I'd like to know explicitly what these professors think the learning outcomes of IT are, and if possible, interview some of their students too to see if they consider they are benefiting from such technologies.
Finally, I think that four disciplines and 42 teachers are a very very small sample of the USA (and global) academia. However, the data presented should be very alarming to those universities (or secondary schools) that plan providing their students with free iPads just because they are offered free or at a bargain nobody can deny.
We have information that needs to go from one brain to another. The more shit is in between, the bigger the chance that there will be problems with that process.
Everyone in IT knows this, we all experienced it first hand.
I'm a math/physics professor at a teaching intensive university, and I'm _way_ up the bell curve for tech adoption in my classes among my colleagues -- I try out lots of stuff, partly because I think part of my job is to curate potential resources for my students, showing them tools that they might choose to use themselves. Some of those things I try stick, many don't. And I have sympathy for my colleagues, who are a little overwhelmed by all the possibilities and their regular work-loads -- any new thing they try will necessarily slow things down at first, so for many of them it has to get over the activation potential very quickly to be worth the effort, or the long-term payoff has to be very big.
I see a couple of issues:
1. Admittedly, many of my colleagues are just hesitant to try new things
2. Often, old tech solutions are just as good or better, especially when the goal is _learning_. I bring slide rules to my lessons about logarithms. Nothing better than physically moving them around and understanding what "adding logs" means, and why it is more convenient than multiplying enormous numbers. Of course, I dump them as soon as the students understand "what" they are doing and go back to using their phones or laptops with R installed when we care about efficiency.
3. Many of the tech solutions are passed down from above (we are politely "asked" to use Blackboard, for example), and their adoption has more to do with IT budgets and gimmickry than any real learning goals. How many ed tech products have actually gone to the effort of demonstrating real learning gains in real classrooms? I care about what my students _know_ and what they can _do_ -- I don't give a damn what tech it takes to get them there, and my colleagues are, I think, understandably weary/wary of all the pressure to try new things _because they're new_.
4. How many ed tech companies understand pedagogy? Admittedly, many professors don't understand it either, but I care about it, and frankly, a lot of potential technologies aren't compatible with all the learning goals a professor might have, or their use takes time away from some other goal.
Oh, I think putting your syllabus on the web is worth doing.
Then again, all the syllabi for all the classes and all the professors in all the departments in the entire school could be easily put on the web (assuming you can get the professors to allow it) using one three-year-old midrange consumer-grade computer and a copy of Debian, and if you can't get an IT major to set it all up for free as a class project you need to seriously re-evaluate the quality of your IT program, so yeah, the "course management" software may well be unnecessary.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
It's great when your streams of information are /rant
1) in-class notes
2) in-class handouts & announcements
3) textbook assignments
4) personal emails with profs.
It gets out of hand in over-technologized universities where you must also keep up with:
5) your school email inbox (that can't even forward to your personal email)
6) the prof's own webpage (that you have to check every day because there's no mailing list)
7) the course's Blackboard/Moodle (and its PDFs, Word documents, online assignments, online submissions, etc. etc.)
8) your Blackboard/Moodle message inbox (that also can't forward to your personal email)
and god knows what else!
It gets to be where you spend an hour a day just trying to figure out what your homework IS, let alone doing it and figuring out how it's to be submitted. You didn't know about the assignment? But it was clearly announced in one of these 8 friggin' places!
I went to a conference about online courses a few years back and it was reported that students taking online courses learned about one-third as much as those taking the same course using traditional direct classroom teaching from the same prof who was involved in preparing the online course. There are some things that internet technology is useful for such as making the syllabus and perhaps class notes available to students and answering non-complicated questions about a lecture. There must something very important about seeing the prof in action, getting immediate feedback about something not understood in the classroom, answers to other students questions and interaction with other students. Also, my experience is that office hours with individual or a small group and help sessions really help learning. These observations suggest that interactions with the prof and those who study a subject are critical to learning.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
No. A professor cannot teach 300,000 people. That's nothing more than a video presentation, which no more replaces an actual teacher than a book is a substitute for a class. What you're describing isn't bringing technology to school. It's just using technology to send information.
One person cannot engage 300,000, cannot respond to questions, cannot challenge a student to defend his views or share his knowledge. There is a reason that only factory-farm classes are taught to 500 people and why higher level studies are taught in increasingly smaller groups. What makes that professor the very best? How could that be the case when the only function that person can perform is that of totally non-interactive narrator?
You can't create the "single very best professor" by putting him or her through an education of online courses of tens of thousands of students each.
This is actually the core of a pretty significant modern trend, "flip teaching" (or "inverted instruction", or a bunch of similar names), in which lecture is done through video (usually delivered online) outside of class time and class time is used for student work with direct instructor interaction, essentially reversing the in-class lecture, out-of-class "homework" model.
OTOH, if you've spent an entire professional career getting things down under the classical educational model, I can see why you'd be resistant to adopt new models over what you've made work well.
Less than 3 sets of one of each at the prices cited by GP, which is a pretty low threshold for "lots".
The ability to deliver lecture outside of the fixed time and space of classroom time, enabling the use of classroom time for more productive interaction.
What makes a college system effective is, and has always been, effective use of all resources available for education, including whatever technology is available.
Working in education below college... I think I see the same thing occurring, really. Teachers/Professors are threatened by technology in the classroom. Their teaching has been generally unchanged for the last X amount of time... and the introduction of devices, especially those connected to the web (which I think increases concern), makes them nervous because students will be able to access information that the teachers/professors might not know of or about. It's a dangerous proposition to them, when confronted with the fact that students may enter a class knowing more then them.
It's been my experience that while they can be excited by technology, they are also fearful of it. Control of the environment plays into this as well. Just my .02
Why? What do "today's tech/IT settings" bring to the table that is of actual benefit to the learning environment?
Lower costs and better instruction. By using technology, a professor can teach to 300,000 instead of thirty.
That's not teaching, at the best that's "lecturing".
While lecturing is necessary, it is by no way sufficient in most of the cases.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
A professor cannot teach 300,000 people.
Of course not. But 300,000 people can watch one professor's lecture. Teaching is more than just lecturing, but by delivering the lecture to a mass audience, you can divert a lot of resources into other aspects of teaching.
That's nothing more than a video presentation, which no more replaces an actual teacher than a book is a substitute for a class.
So do you also think we shouldn't use books?
What you're describing isn't bringing technology to school. It's just using technology to send information.
No it isn't. You should visit a modern "flipped" classroom. The students watch the lectures online at home, and do the "homework" at school. The teachers don't lecture, they teach , mostly one-on-one with any student that is having problems. By using mass lectures, you are not commoditizing education, you are freeing up resources so that you can customize it for each student.
I agree. I am a chemistry professor, and have taught both large and small classes, and with and without technology in the classroom. The biggest advantage of technology comes either where face-to-face contact is difficult, or when you need things to scale to large sizes. While the 50 minute lecture is a bit useless (though not much more useless than a 50-minute youtube clip, or a 50-minute animated clip) what really matters in the learning environment is small group student-student and student-teacher interaction. This could in theory be done through chat/web forum/e-mail or whatever, but that is so much less efficient that sitting in a room talking. Where there are students that cannot be physically present, these technologies work. Alternately, if we want to start scaling things up to 1000s of students per class then it could start making sense.
An interesting example of the (mis)use of technology. I teach a freshman chemistry class with 250 students. We use a multiple-choice test for mid-term assessment, and then do post-exam reviews to help the students. When I first taught the class, I was talking with a colleague about the reviews, and he explained that he would make a DVD using Keynote for visuals. When I asked him how much time he took, he told me that it takes 5-6 hours to make the keynote presentation, record the audio, cut it all together in imovie, and then make the DVD. I quickly realized that if I did 3 50-minute live reviews, it would take me 2 hours less, and would therefore be more efficient, and it would give me the chance to answer questions and get feedback. It seems like the technological solution is better, but is more work for me, not less, and there is no obvious benefit to the students.
The ability to deliver lecture outside of the fixed time and space of classroom time, enabling the use of classroom time for more productive interaction.
Which brings no benefit what so ever.
We use this (Blackboard) at USC and a prominent professor recently summed up the general feeling on the usefulness of the software: "I think the user experience could be greatly improved by eliminating about half of the features. And I don't think it matters which half."
This has not yet been demonstrated. Even the MOOCs don't have mechanisms for giving students meaningful feedback (because the labor needed for actually reading their submitted work scales up too quickly, and the scaling is more than linear if you try to keep grading consistent) or serious assessment of student learning (cheating on an online quiz is very easy, to say nothing of plagiarism on homework). There's also the issue of dumbing down material to appeal to the wider audience -- many people taking these courses have reported that their "homework" was essentially mindless (e.g. copy this into octave, run it on that, see what the result is). If you aren't left stumbling over difficult parts that the assignment doesn't mention will happen, let alone tell you how to code around, writing out proofs which will be checked and graded by course staff as correct, etc., then you're not really learning the material. You're just getting the layman's introduction.
If the interface doesn't have a low learning curve, they're probably not going to waste time with it. I was at a university that used Blackboard, which would be great if it worked as intended. But, it was slow (sucked for students) and apparently has a terrible interface that professors have to go through (I never heard a positive word from them). As a consequence, I'd guess about 1/3 of my professors didn't use it, 1/3 used it sparingly, and the other third made a graduated use of it with a handful relying on it almost totally. I don't think I had one professor that didn't have to rely on their own website to pick up the slack, and many just said "hey if I have to set up my own website anyway, why bother learning Blackboard on top of that?"
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
After working for 13 years creating course and resources for higher educations, this is what professors and instructors are coming to, and they are themselves partially to blame as well. First, it is the struggle to let them know that there is value in online and computerized education. Mainly doing what the professor can't or doesn't have the time to do. Example, the social sciences have lost all funding for real lab experiments. These are easily reproduced virtually where student can "play" with the outcomes over and over and over again. Second. The university and college administration panics and just throws money at a problem they don't even understand. Lets get WebCT, Blackboard, any CMS will do that will fix it!! Even the open source Moddle and Canvas are not the solution. As the professor in the article says, its only good for putting the syllabus online. What they aren't getting is the that with the loss of a "real" lecturer in front of the class every day you need to hand craft the course so you keep what the instructor does best. Years of experience in teaching can be captured and served to student but not by canned text lectures, and multiple choice exams. Hand crafting(programming) virtual labs, game and simulation, videos with branching into subsets and details, links to other lectures, texts and classes that give different prospective. Until admins and professors are educated themselves and running universities like a business is recognized as the fallacy that is, there is little hope that real online education will develop beyond the cave drawings that we have now.
I did the IT support for a top ten engineering department for almost 10 years.
I half agree with TFA.
Most online tools (Blackboard here) are not that great about making it easy for the instructor to upload content and to migrate it between semesters.
About the nicest thing I could say is that having the grades online is nice.
Of course, things could have become better. It's been 2 years since I directly supported faculty in that matter.
The heart of the matter is the idea I've borrowed from the Amish. Their Ordnung.
What is the purpose of the technology? How does it affect the community?
If it doesn't really improve things for the instructor and the student (in the instructor's view mostly) then why use it?
Most faculty really just need a place to upload files to share with the class and that's about it (as has been mentioned earlier). They (or their TA's) still need to create and assign homework, quizzes, exams and project; and then grade all of that. Not easily automated.
Some (most in my opinion) transfer of knowledge is best done when you can interact with the person. I think this image best illustrates that (from Software Development as a Cooperative Game).
A technology has to be useful and have a purpose beyond itself.
>hand the students a piece of paper at the start of the semester and say keep track of it
I remember back when Nixon was compeeting with Carter to be the worst president ever and we had shortages not just of motor fuel but also paper. Not handing a student a peice of paper is a good goal. My wife who is a high school teacher routinely has paper shortages.
I wish it wasn't so [our family raises pine plantation timber and so everyone should use all the paper the want, we will grow more for you to use] but the facts on the ground are that institutions are always skimping on paper to hand out.
Faculty are frequently uninterested in teaching--or uninterested in spending much time teaching--but they are more than anxious to use teaching responsibilities as the raison d'etre of their salaries (often government funded salaries with substantial retirement benefits). If their course materials, including lectures, were to be digitized, then the teaching business model would be very much disrupted and their job security undermined.
we don't. too many people go for those degrees and then have no way of paying off their $100,000 diplomas...unless an individual is very lucky, and then makes millions. however those people now show their talent by age 15 on youtube and bypass college altogether.
No, there should be no media changing hands. Media and code binaries are just vector for viri. For programming related things you email your source code (text files) to the designated class account and get an autoreply for confirmation. We were doing this in the 90s. There is no need to send data files. The data files (perhaps mere text files redirected to std in) to develop and test against were provided by the professor/TA.
I've used one these classroom management systems in the late 00s when I went back to school. It was a clusterf**k and added little to nothing more than a web UI for some ftp-like functionality plus a class specific chat. No real functionality beyond what CS programs had in the 80s.
As for professors wanting printouts. That is the easiest way to grade. You can scribble notes as you read through it. You do not have to be at your computer or be online. Just park you butt someplace convenient and grab a pen. Beach chair, pool chair, bar stool, I've seen all of these used. Plus the more conventional kitchen chair, lazy boy recliner and office chair. Sure a tablet might work for the reading part in many of these venues but makings notes would be far more difficult than paper and pen.
So why do you have to print it out? So it comes off of your quotas rather than the professor's.
It's because the schools want to HALF-ASS it. A proper AV tech built classroom is about $15,000 per classroom for a BASIC system. Advanced that works perfectly and easily is in the $30,000-$90,000 range depending on what is needed like Multiple Screens, Multiple Videoconference connections and auto tracking microphones and cameras in the room.
But the college is far more interested in spending that money on useless crap like the Football stadium, Basketball arena, etc... They instead want to half ass it as hard as possible. so instead of hiring a real AV company they have the morons in IT do it. IT knows absolutely nothing about classroom AV or AV in general but they will do it for less than $3500 per room using crap dell projectors, no control system, and all consumer grade junk that barely works or is complex to use.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Sure, you can teach chemistry entirely with a whiteboard. You can also run a Fortune 500 company with a whiteboard. Or a chalkboard. Or legal pad. It was done for decades. But we generally don't do it any more, because we have better options.
Consider: What happens when you change your syllabus? Or when a student has five different classes, each with different syllabi -- and more importantly different office hours, methods to communicate we professors, methods to turn in work, etc.? What good classroom management software does (or "should do," as I'll be the first to admit there is little "good" classroom management software on the market) is automate and standardize those processes as much as possible.
As an older guy (and software developer) who returned to school recently, I'm shocked at how wound up academics get about using software tools. In my (albeit small sample of) experience, these tools rarely interject into the teaching process, and most of the objections I've seen are more due to an unwillingness to learn the new system, or worse yet an unwillingness to provide grade/process transparency to the student/commit to deadlines.
This also doesn't take into consideration the added value out-of-class interaction can add. A couple of my professors have integrated forums, Twitter, and other interactive tools into the classroom, significantly increasing my ability to discuss the material with my fellow students.
And I agree with you 100%. My daughter has to pay an extra $40 a semester for an account where her chemistry prof posts her assignments on-line once per week. He could open a blog account for free and post them there or just hand them out on a piece of paper like every other professor does, but no, every student has to pay $40 a semester for access to a "educational resource system" just to see their weekly assignment.
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The old college system is still just fine for new tech; after all it was people who were educated in the old college system who created that new tech. Now if you just need grunts to keep the new tech working then DeVry or ITT Tech is fine for churning those out in large numbers. Most IT jobs are just grunt jobs anyway. If you don't want to do IT though and instead want to create something new or expand the field, then you will need a good education (and no naive pointing to Gates and Zuckerberg as your dropout role models).
By reducing the per-student cost and increasing the convenience of the -- as you note, necessary -- lecture component of the teaching, you are increasing the resources available, all other things being equal, for all other necessary components. Thereby, improving education overall. Lecturing doesn't have to be sufficient on its own for increasing the efficiency of delivering the lecture component to be sufficient to enable overall improvements.
Well, yeah, the free option is less than ideal (though valuable); hybrid systems which use a MOOC-like online component for delivering lecture (some of these are actually now being built by integrating existing MOOCs, though non-massive online lecture components in the same role have been used for hybrid online/in-person teaching since the late 1990s, and IIRC there were some similar things done with television-based courses even earlier) with in-class projects with interaction with a live instructor are another model.
Using classroom time for student project work with instructor in-person interaction without sacrificing lecture (by moving the lecture out of classroom time) does bring a benefit. Its probably a more significant benefit for secondary education than university education (though for many large university courses, it allows eliminating the cost of a large lecture hall for a mass, noninteractive lecture course and frees up the space for more productive use, while otherwise preserving the model of the course of a lecture where interaction is impossible + smaller discussion sections where lecture is practical.)
... and I filled a four-drawer file cabinet over the course of a four-year degree. Unless your dormitories are going to include a four-drawer file cabinet, and you're going to help your off-campus students purchase one,
I also resent carrying a 2" thick envelope full of the necessary syllibi, handouts, and readings - in addition to a few hardback texts. It's heavy, I wear out expensive backpacks in a year and change (cheap ones in about a semester), and it's generally unpleasant to have to carry your 40 pound backpack while your professor goes over things for the people who only brought a spiral notebook and a pencil, if that.
Less than 3 sets of one of each at the prices cited by GP, which is a pretty low threshold for "lots".
If I bought 3 iPads and 3 Macbooks every semester I would feel confident saying that I buy "lots" of Apple devices. I have just one server, one desktop, and one laptop, and my girlfriend tells people that I have lots of computers in my office.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Of course not. But 300,000 people can watch one professor's lecture. Teaching is more than just lecturing, but by delivering the lecture to a mass audience, you can divert a lot of resources into other aspects of teaching.
Only if there are other resources to divert. In your post, you suggested that 1 excellent professor could replace 10,000 mediocre ones. That's demonstrably false. A great professor is not synonymous with a great lecturer, and a lecture is not synonymous with a course or with learning.
So do you also think we shouldn't use books?
I'm not opposed to the use of any tool that provides a meaningful benefit to students learning. I'm simply asking why there's this implied NEED to shoehorn computers into classrooms just for the sake of "keeping up with technology".
The teachers don't lecture, they teach , mostly one-on-one with any student that is having problems. By using mass lectures, you are not commoditizing education, you are freeing up resources so that you can customize it for each student
Exactly. The teachers teach in small groups. That's the only effective way. Replacing the lecture piece with a video to be watched on a student's own time is fine, but that's not the theme of your comment. Your theme was that technology eliminates the need for people to be as intimately engaged in learning, because one person and a computer could somehow replace 10,000 people. It's absurd.
By reducing the per-student cost and increasing the convenience of the -- as you note, necessary -- lecture component of the teaching, you are increasing the resources available, all other things being equal, for all other necessary components. Thereby, improving education overall. Lecturing doesn't have to be sufficient on its own for increasing the efficiency of delivering the lecture component to be sufficient to enable overall improvements.
Lower cost... probably. Better education? There are other necessary components for teaching/education: unless you cover them what you reduced in lecturing costs is not getting you any closer to the desired result. So, no, only by addressing a single component of the education, an overall improvement may be illusory.
My point: fail any of the necessary aspects of the education and you are going to be wasteful not matter how brilliant you cover the others.
Car analogy: it doesn't matter if the potential mileage of your engine is extraordinary if the car doesn't have a driving wheel.
Yes, I noted your "all other things being equal" assumption and I'm willing to add the implied meaning of "all the other things are properly provided". My point does not contradict yours: it just complement it by highlighting the consequences of operating outside the assumption.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Imagine saying the same thing about high school. If high schools weren't publicly funded, we'd have the same dilemma. Also, the next time you complain about ignorant citizens making poor decisions (Texas Board of Education, I'm looking at you), consider what publicly funded college education might buy us - beyond merely more jobs.
By reducing lecturing costs you are freeing up more resources for those things. Assuming you can spend those additional resources with non-negative return, you can improve the other necessary components. This was, explicitly, addressed in GP; even in the paragraph you quoted.
If you can't do that, you just don't change the non-lecture bits at all, and get the same education quality at less cost.
Either way is a net win in value.
"... you tend to see every problem as a nail" I think the old maxim applies to IT too. It's also a minuscule poll size at research heavy schools.
IT is just another tool, it may or may not be useful depending on the subject or discipline. I'm not sure there's some great use for expensive tech in classes where there may be a lot of discussion or debate; like in liberal arts courses (philosophy, sociology, history, religion, English literature, languages, etc.) I guess you could read material on tablets/iPads of course.
And what about the arts? Studio art (unless you're creating in a multimedia/animation class obviously). Dance. Theater. Seems like you have to force it.
In the sciences, I could see more perhaps for engineering, geology, chemistry, etc. But again, not necessarily in all situations.
I don't think it just that teachers/profs are necessarily lazy or inflexible, but good ones are usually busy and have a lot of experience in the class. I think most of them have a decent sense of what works and what doesn't
And really, their job is to teach not be IT specialists -- IF you show them the benefit, and ease of use, I think most would be fine with it. My profs were very current in the fields, I didn't feel they were resisted to new things/ideas/resources at all, if anything, they saw that as part of their job.
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
Thereby, improving education overall.
In the above, if by "education" you meant: "the education process", you are right.
If you meant "the results of the education process", then my point applies. In this context, I'll be repeating myself: if you fail one of the necessary components, all the others are wastage (even you reduce their cost to zero, it's still wasted time).
(I hope the terminology is clearer now).
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I guess we've gotten bored of diverting public money into the pockets of a handful of administrators and want to try diverting it into the pockets of a handful of shiny toy vendors instead.
Maybe things will eventually come full circle and giving money to teachers will become fashionable again.
The more one works with technology at an intimate level the less one wants to embrace technology. I've reached a point where I'm fed up and quite frankly exhausted with technology because I don't find it be as useful and harmonious as it once was. Sure, technology has given us great tools and made out lives easier (subjective of course) but at what cost ?
Technology today has become too intrusive, too complex (software) and is causing serious sociological problems (depression, isolation, addiction). In addition I feel that technology is also making people ignorant and lazy - our thinking abilities are being eroded by an over-dependency on technology which is wrong/
There ain't no YES in TechNOlogy
Professors don't reject technology in general. They reject any particular classroom approach that doesn't fit their needs, whether it is technological or not. The latest fad is Blackboard and other course management systems. They are largely a complete waste of time. It is easier for me to use my rudimentary HTML skills to hack up a webpage with links to syllabi, assignments, etc.
The one technology I am learning to like is the clickers. One doesn't learn mathematics by watching the professor, one learns it by doing mathematics. The clickers allow me to force my large lecture to work problems in class. It is also helpful in diagnosing their issues when they are too shy/reluctant/embarrassed to ask questions. Automated homework (e.g. WebAssign) is okay; it's kind of lousy for the students, but easy for me to assign/grade.
As far as comments above about lazy professors just wanting to research and not wanting to teach, our priorities are set by the administration. They will tell us that we are evaluated 50% teaching/50% research, but they are not being honest (with us or themselves). Essentially, if you can speak English and aren't just naturally terrible at teaching, you are better served (from a tenure/promotion perspective) minimizing time spent on teaching so you can maximize the time spent on research. When students demand more focus on teaching, administration will adjust their priorities, but it's hardly the professors who set the rules of the game.
Yes, IAAP (of mathematics) at a large research university.
This would only make any sense if one took as given that the value of education is the minimum value of any of its components. I don't see any reason to believe this is the case, and plenty of reason to believe that its not and that individual elements of education can have value on their own, even when not integrated into an ideal spectrum of elements of equal quality, and that improving one element can improve the overall results (though, whether it improves results for any individual learner may be less certain) even if you aren't improving all the elements.
I would say that the closest this comes to a valid point is that for each element, there is a point at which disproportionate investment in that element is inefficient in producing improvement in results and you can get better value spending the same amount of effort improving other elements.
I would say that the closest this comes to a valid point is that for each element, there is a point at which disproportionate investment in that element is inefficient in producing improvement in results and you can get better value spending the same amount of effort improving other elements.
Have a look on the "critical thinking" vs "results in grided exams" as the possible/desirable outcomes of education in today's colleges.
Does it look the cost reductions resulted from conducting grid test exams overcome the impact of the "tell me how you measure me and I tell you how I'll behave" position has on the formation of critical thinking abilities/habits?
In this context, do you think decreasing the lecture costs does can have a significantly good impact to the results of education?
Offer them a bigass high contrast partially erasable boogie board with a save chalkboard option. Not exactly high tech but beats markers or chalk.
In a similar vein to the bit on smaller colleges, I later interviewed a professor at a community college who was able to implement really awesome instructional tech, and the trick there was to implement it in such a way where it saved professors time and allowed for more functional instruction. Too often it seems like another loop for them to go through, but if they provide the correct scaffolding and support on the academic side, it can be done right. It just rarely is, but that's usually caused by a number of factors all working together to create a really awful e-learning experience.
A lot of students are unable to use a CMS or website come to that. Or a least their questions about how to find course content seem to indicate that. They seem to feel it's a mysterious site where things move around on a regular basis.
I put together some TeX macros for typsetting my homework when I was an undergrad. It made it easier for the professor to read, left consistent margins for his/her comments, and saved me time in the long run because I could easily correct mistakes and move around blocks of text that I had already written but wanted to restructure.
I'm not sure why this isn't more common among students in mathematics and related fields. It forces the student to double check their work while providing them the ability to easily rearrange/modify the paper they are actually turning in, it is a good way for students to learn and practice (La)TeX, and the homework can be easily submitted electronically or in dead tree format.
Universities should teach students how to master the already existing technology. Very few of my classmates were comfortable with using (La)TeX, emacs/vim or any computer algebra system. Most computer science undergraduates I knew were hardly literate in Unix - more than a few of them had a similar attitude towards using the command line as I imagine my mother must have. In my personal experience, there were actually more Unix geeks in the math department than in computer science.
For context, I graduated in 2011 from a large research university with a B.S. in mathematics.
"IT" is vaguely defined and the definition varies depending on the context.
It's fairly common for companies to have an IT department answerable to the IT manage or the IT director. If programming projects aren't in their remit then who runs them? The tea lady, perhaps?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I went to school in a progressive tech university. I can say, its a complete failure and disaster. WHAT A HEADACHE. You have to look at your class announcments EVERY day, for Each class, if it were as simple as just clicking 5 times and quick website, MAYBE. But blackboard is terrible ineffecient and confusing. If I want to check 5 different class announcements, its literally going to take me 5-10 minutes. Maybe I'm being ridiculous, but thats 5-10 minutes of my life I have do use everyday when I wake up, just to check for most the time, there is NOTHING THERE. I dunno, for something that is supposed to enhance your life, it sure seems to be a complete waste of time. Doing math assignments on the computer can be a huge hassle, but I guess it isn't TOO bad. Not the mention different teachers have different things. I have to go to all my books on websites, going to 1 website to take a quiz away from the university website.
The worst part of it all, is the constant amount of attention your teachers think they deserve now. No longer is it, come into class, take your test, take notes, back back and know the material the next time you have class. Its check your announcements every single day. Make sure you dont have any POP quizzes, POP announcements. Aside from turning my homework online. I hate the way tech has infiltrated universities. I might as well be going to the university of phoenix
While (in the example) chemistry can be entirely taught on a white board, IT can be extremely helpful to the student's learning. I'm currently working on intermediate algebra, and we're using a tool called ALEKS (I forget right now what the acronym expands to, you can look it up!) and it is *tremendously* helpful. I'm learning far far faster than I ever learned from mathematics taught on a whiteboard due to the way ALEKS works. It will figure out what you do and don't know and automatically tailor the material accordingly. Not only am I learning how to do the stuff, I'm retaining it too with a lot more ease than I ever could from material taught in a big class with a white board.
We're still by and large teaching students like we did in the 1860s. We can do it better with *appropriate* technology. And course notes on some website isn't really using IT in teaching.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Actually, in Estonia, in one of the best schools that teaches IT. Computers and smartphones etc have been banned from classrooms because they became too much of a distraction. www.ttu.ee/en/
i think you could get most of everything YOU PERSONALLY need from Amazon (or your localish supply store)
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and give your students eyestrain while they learned because DAMMIT MY PROF COULDN'T PRINT OR DRAW EITHER.
I had one prof who spoke in a low voice and thus half the class became disinterested and talked among themselves so you really learned nothing unless you snagged a chair in the first three rows. Naturally, they promoted him to Dean.
If it takes 5 different logins to cover your course
YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.
Everything and i mean EVERYTHING should
1 flow directly from the main school portal to where ever
2 study materials should always have a way to make offline/hard copy so you can use them without a network connection.
3 have a way to connect while not on the school network
4 have full support for NOT MSIE browsers and small screens
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In my experience students pay more attention to a piece of paper handed to them than if I say "the syllabus with all the test and assignment due-dates is available on-line". If an instructor assumes that everybody in the class is comfortable with computers and will actually look at an electronic-only syllabus, it's a recipe for disaster, although I admit that in a computer science department it's probably a safer assumption than usual.
Unfortunately in practice it can be worse than that. I used to study a distance course with the Open University, and we got a big box of books at the start of each course. If there was a change to an assignment (an incorrect deadline or incomplete information), an email would be sent out as soon as it was noticed. When I got the email, I grabbed a pen and noted it on my copy of the assignment booklet. I could forget about the error until I was ready to do the assignment.
Then they moved everything on-line. If there was an error, they'd email us, as always. But I had no paper copy to update. "Never mind," thought I, "they'll update the file on-line to remove the error." Eehhhhmmmm.... no. I lost marks because I'd forgotten about an erratum that was emailed out several months before the hand-in date and was never posted online. Apparently the internal contracts only allowed them to update materials once a year, or they'd have to pay extra.
The people who suffered were the us, the students.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
My biggest problem has been that when I'm taking notes, I'm not paying attention to what the Prof is saying next.
And when I'm rapt with attention, then I'm not taking enough notes.
I remember when the first electronic whiteboards came out, I marveled at how students could just sit there and listen for the whole lecture, and be handed a printed sheet at the end with all the notes taken from the whiteboard. If used correctly, technology can be a great facilitator.
This MOOC thing seems pretty good, because it will help improve access to education, like Khan Academy does. Who's to say that I shouldn't be allowed to study neuroscience? After all, it's my time/effort/money to waste, isn't it? Accreditation is a completely different matter of course, since just because I think I'll be a good neuroscientist, doesn't mean that others will trust me on that. So accreditation needs to be decoupled from education, while education is made as ubiquitous and as accessible as possible.
Access to education seems to be dictated by class sizes, and in our modern wired world the size of a room should no longer be a limiting factor. This is where technology needs to break down the barriers, so that everyone can get the education they want (and need).
IT is "Information Technology", and developing IT systems includes, as its main component, programming. "Projects" are closed-ended development efforts.
Yes, many IT jobs meet that description, because most IT isn't IT projects, its maintenance and operations of existing IT infrastructure and systems.
More specifically, when programming is being done on a product intended to be marketed to external customers as part of the organizations general business (as is the case of much programming done by firms in the IT industry to start with), programming is usually done in the "product development" group, since, in relation to the organizations business operations, that is what the purpose of the programming effort is. But that's true of whatever activity develops an organizations products for market, whether that involves computer programming, designing hardware, or designing boardgames. The name of the organizational entity in this case generally reflects the relation to the company's business efforts, not the discipline.
When programming is being done for the developing organization's own use (especially when the organization doesn't produce software for the market as part of its usual line of business), its typically done in an application development group that is part of the organization's overall IT group.
Professors at universities learned fine from lecture classes because they'd learn fine from anything. (They were smart and motivated.) Lectures have been shown to be horribly ineffective ways of teaching vs. more interactive methods such as peer instruction. The benefit of online tools is that they can dramatically increase the degree of student interaction (think of the in-lecture quizzes that are now popular) and free the instructor to spend time actually solving problems *with* the students instead of talking *at* them. This is the real promise (and the real threat) of online technology.
Knowing something about computers means you know that most systems, particularly at universities, are not very secure. That may or may not be the reason here, but it would at least make one think before putting everything up on the web. It is also a pain in the ass if you already have a course designed, and you now have to go type everything in again.
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company -- Mark Twain
Nothing should be embrace that provides no value!! Technology for technology (or wanting) sakes is never a reason to use it. Never. Only if it provides educational value or leverage that is not other wise possible. And the ONLY people who will every know that is the end-users of the technology NEVER techies schooled or creating the technology. If the customer is NO, the value is NO, no matter how much IT or techies bitch and complain otherwise. It's also NEVER about the convenience of IT or techies. If that's the value then IT just obsoleted itself and part of the problem rather than part of the solution. IT are the servants of the organization, not the masters.
I've taught physics for almost a decade, and I have kept a website for most of it; recently I've started taking notes on an electronic whiteboard and posting it and class audio to the website as well. What I've found is that the only way I can keep the website up-to-date is if I make updating it as dead-simple as possible. The more clicking and typing I have to do, the easier it is for me to say "Oh, I'll do it later." (Perhaps I'm just a lazy person, granted.) My current homegrown system lets me dump files I want to post to the website into a webDAV folder, and they show up automatically on my CGI-generated website in the appropriate place.
Unfortunately, last time I checked Blackboard (the leading course management software) was nowhere near as simple. No capacity for automation, and much too much clicking and typing required to post anything. If I were stuck using Blackboard I'm not sure I'd bother either.