Buzzwords Are Stifling Innovation In College Teaching

jyosim writes: Tech marketers brag about the world-changing impact of 'adaptive learning' and other products, but they all mean something different by the buzzword. On the other side of it, professors are notoriously skeptical of companies, and crave precise language. Richard Culatta, director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education, says the buzzwords have thus become a major obstacle to improving teaching on campuses, since these tribes (professor and ed-tech vendors) must work together.

Comments

"Online" classes

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a buzzword with no common meaning: Online classes.
Does it mean:
The class meets in a traditional classroom, but assignments are submitted electronically?
There is no class meeting? Only assignments are posted online. There is no lecture and students work independently?
The class meets online in realtime?
Only a recording of the classroom lecture is available online?

FWIW, I am a community college prof and have seen ALL of the above describe "online" learning.

Bingo

[PvtVoid]

This faculty comment pretty much sums it up:

"Curiosity, imagination and critical understanding are reduced to rodent responses in an academic Skinner-box."

Sadly, this might acually be better than sitting in a 300-student lecture taught by an adjunct.

Re:Bingo

[fermion]

Learning, at some point, depends on the motivation of the student. The difference between a teacher and a professor is that the teacher actively encourages motivation in the student, while it is hoped that the professor though deep knowledge in the subject and inherent interest will passively generate the motivation.

Or, to be more realistic, that the college student due to the money being spent will be inherently more motivated. This ignores the fact that some students go to college just for health insurance.

I see the situation with using technology to be more complicated. An underlying assumption that the computer will be more motivational that a 'boring' professor. I have not seen this to be the case. The long term motivation of the student still depends on human intervention. Gamification is not going to work for every student, and while there is nothing wrong with a college that uses it, such a college would not inherently be better than a more traditional college

There is also an assumption that the making the buzzwords more precise will help, i.e. Competency, Adaptive, Individualized,Differentiated. In fact it comes back to motivation. Most of these are not expecting an equal level of achievement by the end of the course, i.e. not every student is expected have read and analyzed the Odyssey by the end of the course, and maybe that is ok. Some will see it as unfair that they were expected to comprehend Ulysses while others were given an A for reading the Devil Wears Prada, but that is an issue with equity and equality being different things.

No, the problem is that an intelligent student can game the system. I have seen it will well respected adaptive courses. Student purposefully keep their level low so they are able to get credit with minimal effort. If the system still requires equal outcomes, then they are not adaptive or whatever buzzword one wants to use.

I see the problem as it always has been, valuing a degree over learning. There is no technology that is going to educate a student that is simply in school to buy a sheet of paper. For a student that is there to learn, the old technology of a book, a professor who has time to talk, and equally motivated classmates, cannot be beat.

Educational technology is therefore a critical part of universities who simply exist to funnel student loans to executives of the university. It a symbiosis between institutions who care nothing for education, and students who do not care to be educated.

Re:In other ways as well

[bluefoxlucid]

Instead, we should teach students how to effectively process information even when it's not in their preferred style.

(Trimmed for grammar.)

This is part of why the modern flurry of political attention to education disturbs me greatly. I champion teaching people to use their brains: the brain is a tool, and any person can learn executive functions, mental mathematics, and mnemonics techniques. Learning these tools and techniques gives any individual strong grounds for academic and real-world performance: there are no super-brain geniuses, but only those of us who have learned techniques, or who have obsessions which drive us to know things others don't and to think in a way others do not think. That means our brains are wired just like Donald Trump's and Larry the Cable Guy's, and we figured out how to flip the right switches.

Instead, everyone is convinced teaching first graders programming will instantly build a master race of critical thinkers with strong problem solving skills and an armored plating of logic.

The other part of my dismay is free and otherwise government-supported independent access to college education is the greatest tool to institute broad serfdom I can think of. It's exactly what I would push for, as a ginormous corporation, to enable me to reduce salaries, strip benefits, abuse my employees, and eliminate any responsibility to build a workforce. We should drop all public efforts to get everyone into college, and focus on K-12.