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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?
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.
"... that at times are just out of the textbook and are sleep though."
What? You seem to have nodded off at the end of that sentence.
An alternative perspective is that the research faculty want the hopeless cases to realize as soon as possible that their niche is not in the subject that the professor teaches, and are teaching primarily to the better students. Why do you think med. schools in North America still want students to jump through the hoop of first year chemistry? Is it because every MD out there needs to know how to titrate? Or is it because if you can't even learn something as trivial as titration, the med. schools know that your chances of safely learning about surgery, anaesthetics, and prescription medication (including doses) are almost zero.
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.
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?
...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
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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.
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?
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.
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
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:
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.