Oct. 20, 2005

Beyond ‘Toys, Travel and Food’

Institutionally, most colleges have, in one way or another, embraced the use of technology in how they educate their students. Four in five colleges and universities use some form of content management system, and educational technologists are no longer unusual creatures on their campuses.

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The trick at many institutions, though, has been broadening the swath of faculty members on their campuses who are “on the team.” Many IT administrators grouse that unless and until many if not most professors take advantage of the tools and learning environments available to them, colleges will lag behind their students in technological savvy, and the institutions’ sizable investments in the new technologies will be, if not wasted, underutilized.

At a session Tuesday at the Educause meeting in Orlando, a panel of academics from a diverse group of institutions discussed “incentives and rewards” for getting more professors to experiment with and use the latest technological innovations in their classroom work.

Many of the ideas revolved around what Glenn Everett, director of instructional technology at Stonehill College, a small private institution in Massachusetts, called “toys, travel and food, always food” — practical rewards, like improved equipment, travel to conferences and lots of meetings (preferably over a nice lunch), that entice faculty members to overcome the inertia or fear or other disincentives that tend to work against innovation.

Joseph Vaughan, assistant director of the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of California at Los Angeles, spoke about UCLA’s Brian P. Copenhaver Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology, which recognizes the work of faculty members who use technology to improve undergraduate instruction. He noted, with some pride, that one of the winners was 71 years old.

One audience member said her institution had set up a system in which departments received more money for their instructional budgets if they increased the number of courses that were built using the campus’s WebCT course management system, while another noted that, when asked to put together an online course, she had pointed to her “equipment that came over on the Mayflower” and said, “On that?”

Colleges “need to find a way to incentivize instructors with good equipment,” she said.

Susan Fliss, director of education and outreach at Dartmouth College, reflected the view of several panelists when she said colleges could encourage the involvement of some faculty members just by “not making them feel like they’re all alone out there.”

She described her participation several years ago, while she was at Mount Holyoke College, in a now-completed Mellon Foundation project, called the Technopedagogy Initiative. In it, a faculty member who wanted to change a course worked on the redesign with a librarian, an information technology specialist (her), and a student who had taken the course. The professor was so heartened by the involvement of the librarian and the others that she threw herself into the project with gusto. “Sometimes you just have to pay attention to their teaching — it doesn’t always have to be money and rewards,” Fliss said.

But while “tried and true” financial incentives and care and feeding may work to some extent, Everett argued, such steps don’t nearly overcome the most significant disincentive for faculty technological adoption: the fact that the time and energy that professors must invest in embracing new technology is typically not recognized or rewarded in the tenure process, which still overwhelmingly favors research over teaching at many institutions.

“Until we make some progress on that front, we aren’t going to reach that large group of faculty who are concerned by these things,” Everett said. “We cannot honestly promise a junior faculty member that there is a guaranteed outcome. This is in many ways experimental, and we don’t know there will be something measurable, that student evaluations will increase as a result.”

He added: “The reason chairs still warn them not to get involved in technology is because at the end of the six-year tenure track, the questions are “Where are your publications? Where are your student evaluations? It’s nice that you learned some Photoshop or whatever this is, but you can’t do that and expect to get tenure. Nice that you put in all this time. See you.”

The comment seemed to resonate, as heads nodded around the hotel meeting room.

One audience member, William H. Riffee, associate provost for distance, continuing and executive education at the University of Florida, said he believed such a shift is taking place, if not quickly enough. Riffee is also dean of Florida’s College of Pharmacy, and he said that because more than half of its students took courses at sites off the main campus, 90 percent of pharmacy professors there are trained in teaching technology, and the college provides salary supplements based on the number of courses they teach online.

The true shift nationally, though, won’t happen until institutions begun “having technology and innovative teaching advocates on tenure and promotion committees,” Riffee said. “When someone on the committee says of a candidate, ‘Your record isn’t strong’ ” because it appears to emphasize teaching rather than scholarship, “you’ve got to have somebody there who says, ‘Oh yes, these results mean just as much as this particular publication in this particular journal.’ “

Shifts like that will only occur when campuses put leaders in place — presidents, provosts and deans — who themselves recognize the importance of technological innovation in teaching, Riffee said. “If people at the top don’t recognize the value of technology based teaching, you’re sunk. You can have a dean who doesn’t have a clue.”

— Doug Lederman

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Comments

Measuring Teaching

Another shift which would greatly aid technological boldness would be an acknowledgement that not all new technologies (or any other teaching technique) always works right the first time. In other words, a willingness to learn from mistakes and evidence of development, rather than student satisfaction surveys, must be somehow factored into the tenure teaching evaluation

Jonathan Dresner, at 7:12 am EDT on October 20, 2005

Technology

Technology is not the be-all and end-all. It needs to be appropriate to the material being studied. There is no substitute for conversational exchange in a classroom in a foreign language, for example— though it can be about a digitally delivered movie. Thus distance-learning may not be the best solution for language teaching, while it may work fine for accounting.The other disincentive is the constant change of programs and equipment. Faculty (especially humanities faculty) cannot afford the equipment, upkeep and upgrades on their own paychecks.

LM, at 7:55 am EDT on October 20, 2005

There are, too, some professors who believe that, in some classrooms, technology is no help. Is there any solid evidence that technology improves the writing skills of students? Humanities professors might be a little more receptive if folks like Educause weren’t so zealous about the all-the-time, anywhere educational benefits of new systems.

mark, at 8:33 am EDT on October 20, 2005

Good and Not So Good

I am a “part-time” instructor who teaches more than a full load every semester. I teach several online courses and several face-to-face courses at a major state university. Recently I have started maintaining an online site for all of my courses. There are some really good points, and some really bad ones.

1. The software takes hours and hours AND HOURS of your time to learn, and the people on campus who are paid to teach it are incapable of teaching it: I wind up having to agonize and waste days of my time figuring it out through trial and error every time they change the software. The tech support has patchy knowledge, and half the time they’re no help at all, just aggravating. Computer people don’t have any real feel for teaching a college course and the issues involved in setting up an online course site. There is a huge budget for the salaries and equipment of computer people, but I don’t get paid for all the hours I spend trying to work out the bugs in their system. This is unfair, and it’s not conducive to professors doing more with the technology, whether they’re on a tenure-track salary or not. I make the sacrifice in order to guarantee myself a job, since I’m a contingent worker. But the time it takes wouldn’t permit most people to do it. I am close to retirement and have nothing else to do in life but teach.

2. Students are mixed in their desire for and appreciation of, an online course site. Some students really like it, and others don’t use it at all, if it’s not an online course. Some students are technologically inclined, and others aren’t. Just because the technology exists, it doesn’t mean it’s crucial to teaching. Sometimes I wonder if the push for using the technology doesn’t come from the IT people and their need for their big salaries, and the software companies that provide attractive conferences with food for the IT people. Is it all about food? I’m on a diet.

3. There are good points, though. I have been able to design beautiful courses, visually. This gets high approval from the administration. I have made it my goal to design courses that are not only beautiful, but that aim to discover whatever possibilities there are for teaching through media. Just looking at a beautiful web site or streaming videos isn’t enough. I spend hours and hours writing lectures that will come though online. This turns out to be a lot harder than talking in class. I spend hours and hours constructing discussion topics that will spark the students’ interest and attract them to the course site regularly, which is also hard to do, since a number of students who sign up for an online course expect it to be a snap, and don’t log in much. Some instructors get around this by making online discussions mandatory, and I’ve heard from students who hate it, especially when the discussion topics are boring or mechanical. I even know of one instructor who bases his grades solely on the discussions. I have found that by carefuly crafting discussion questions I can get a much better response rate, and my online discussions now tend to be a lot better. In fact online discussions have the potential for being a whole lot better than in-class discussions — because they go slowly, over a period of days or even weeks, and students have a chance to reflect and build on their ideas in a way that they can’t when they’re put on the spot to come up with something instantaneously in a classroom. Even timid students can feel comfortable speaking out online, without classroom approbation. I make the online test questions a whole lot harder than for the face-to-face courses, because they are open book exams. My online courses are not a snap, and I believe they are in some ways more enriching and rewarding than classroom courses. But I spend hours and hours, every day, responding to student discussion threads, and I think this is key to teaching online.

I doubt that very many professors would be willing to spend the amount of time that I do to teach such courses, because in the end my salary does not reflect my degrees, my experience, my qualifications, my commitment, or the immense amount of time and agony I put into designing and delivering the courses.

Professors who prostrate themselves before the Technology Imperative are cash cows for the IT industry and the corporate university.

JMHO

B, Good and Not So Good, at 8:43 am EDT on October 20, 2005

It’s about the learning and the software

Educational technology is valuable to education, and therefore valuable in the tenure process, only insofar as it actually enhances student learning. So we have to be a little restrained when we consider the bold use of technology. This in and of itself is not necessarily an appropriate metric in the tenure process; it only becomes appropriate when the use of technology actually gets students more engaged and helps them to learn better. And I think in many places this outcome is already part of the tenure process, or at least is becoming part of the process.

In other words, mere innovation is not necessarily good. It’s only good if it helps students learn, and that’s what the profs and tenure committees should focus on.

One thing this article doesn’t bring out is that the likelihood of student learning being enhanced isn’t so much about new and improved *hardware* (or “equipment", as the article puts it) but much more about improved *software*. If you have a course management system, for example, that lets students chat and discuss online — but the chat room program keeps crashing, and the discussion boards are unwieldy and hard to navigate — then it doesn’t matter how bold you are in using this software, because the students will not like the experience and therefore won’t use it. There’s not enough discussion about how education software is designed so that student learning is enhanced because of, not in spite of, the experience students have as users of the systems we employ.

Robert Talbert, at 9:35 am EDT on October 20, 2005

Software

If the technology worked and the teachers were trained to use it, I suspect it would be ubiquitous. However, if software is anything like the math software my school is using, I blame no one for not using it.

I think when educational software starts being made in a reliable manner more teachers will start using it. As it is, frequent computer glitches, crashes and errors infuriate all but dedicated technofiles, prompting many to discontinue their use.

Kevin, Undergraduate, at 10:14 am EDT on October 20, 2005

Thou doth protest too much

“Is there any solid evidence that technology improves the writing skills of students?”

Any bolgger or anyone who has been active in a chat room will look askance on that question. These people spend several hours per week writing. I realize some people condemn this because the students are nor writing correctly. I disagree. IMHO (in my humble opinion), technology is redefining writing skills. Although we can read King James English, no one writes that way any more. Thou dost understand my point dost thou not? In twenty years, the English used in academia will be as archaic as King James English.

If used correctly, technology can improve all higher order thinking skills. The spoken word is transitory and is easily misinterpreted or forgotten. One can always resort to, “I did not say that”. If someone writes something in a blog or chat room, the writer cannot deny what was written, and therefore, can be forced to defend or modify the statement. This leads to higher order thinking. I am not sure that seeing the instructor’s face while the instructor talks does. Most course management tools offer areas for asynchronous discussions. In my opinion (IMO) these are underused.

James, at 10:55 am EDT on October 20, 2005

Technology and/or Teaching

The problem that I see is that the panelists assume that a.) the only advances in technology that matter are those utilizing technology, and b.) that technology by itself necessarily improves teaching. They have confused, in other words, the delivery device with content. Yet as several comments have already pointed out, there is no evidence directly linking the use of technology with improved learning. In fact, one could make the argument (albeit probably similarly unprovable) that a small class (say, 12-15) students with a professor who pays close attention to the students, but does not use computers, will result in a happier and more successful learning experience than a 120 person class utilizing Blackboard. To be clear, I am not saying that computers and improved learning are incompatible. I use technology a lot in my teaching. But they are a convenience. They help me communicate with students a little more readily, and they help me put stuff up on the boards in the classroom. But in no way does technology replace the confrontation between the student, the professor, and the text that is at the heart of good teaching.

Peter C. Herman, SDSU, at 11:49 am EDT on October 20, 2005

Technology and dumb and dumber

As a reformed techie, who pioneered the use of, for example, vcr’s in the early 1970’s and photoshop in the mid-90’s, I must agree with the post about the workload put on faculty by tech folks who now have great power, great amounts of money, and not much idea of how to teach. Like administration in some schools, technology has become the ultimate peter principle venue.

Much of current technology is just not as smart as a good teacher in a good setting. I suggest that people read Tufte, The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint (www.edwardtufte.com) to see how that vaunted application has dumbed down research to a point where it can actually cause fatalities.

Technologies are simply tools; when a University decides that its tool-brandishers are more important than its wise people — its teachers — it is on the pathway down into dumb.

DM Scott, at 11:50 am EDT on October 20, 2005

improved writing

Mark asked if there were solid evidence that technology improves writing? Well, ask yourself, have my writing been improved since I’ve been using the email, blog, or threaded discussions? Yes, when users are afforded the ability to go back and edit their texts before sending that ’send’ button, don’t you think that ain’t an improvement to your writing :)

Relax, whether a friend or foe of technology, it’s here to stay. So you might as well embrace it before you get too lost in the dino-age.

Fe, at 11:50 am EDT on October 20, 2005

Beyond Toys, Travel, and Food

Perhaps some courses are better taught with technology than others. Perhaps a story is worth a thousand PowerPoints. Perhaps substance still trumps style. Perhaps Thomas Kuhn was right that the resistance to change can preserve what remains effective from the old paradigm. Perhaps teaching involves more than training. Perhaps what the IT people say should be taken with a block of salt ...

John Gould, Associate Professor at Union College, at 12:40 pm EDT on October 20, 2005

James, I agree with you that technology can be invaluable in teaching writing and critical thinking.

One big advantage in asynchronous forums is that you can expand the classroom discussion over a longer period of time, giving students the opportunity to think, rethink, and revisit difficult material or complex critical questions. I use online discussion boards to give students questions over the weekend, or to to supplement my classroom discussion by asking students to rethink a point from class and connect this to an issue to be discussed in an upcoming session. I craft discussion questions carefully, usually targeting some kind of tension in the academic text we are reading, and then ask students to complete specific tasks in their responses—"define” or “summarize” or “identify the theory here” and then engage in rhetorical analysis or apply the theory to real life examples.

This process, as a process, teaches students many things. That thinking and writing are processes, and not the zero sum game students learn to play through too many years of exams and testing. In addition, the online forum can challenge the model of individualism and competitiveness (and cheating) that many good students have mastered in order to get to college in the first place. Success in online discussion is all about contributing, building knowledge together, and participating. You simply can’t cheat to win here, you don’t win by getting done first, and you can’t win by doing your own thing.

But cooperation and participation need to taught, and online discussion boards can be a great way to accomplish this goal. The more introverted often find a voice here, while the annoying student who can’t let others talk is going to find him/herself overwhelmed by 25 other posts.

To address your other point, I’m not sure how much critical thinking students are learning when they sit on AOL Instant messenger and gossip about how drunk their friend was last night and who she is sleeping with now. While I agree that it is great that students are writing, this KIND of writing is not significantly different than their own speech. Academic writing has its own forms, and I don’t think the “English used in academia” is going to go away anytime soon. This isn’t a special kind of English, but rather, learning how to make arguments using claims and evidence and being conscious of audience and premise. JMHO

Jill, at 12:40 pm EDT on October 20, 2005

Dumb and Dumber

To DM Scott — You are so right! The academy is on a trajectory toward Dumb and Dumber. It’s all about money, profits for the university corporation, big salaries for the administrators, and they aren’t in touch with the reality of what Higher Education really is. A real education is getting harder and harder to find these days because of micromanagment and interference from the Corporation and their lackeys, the administrators and most recently IT people. I suspect that the ultimate plan is to do away with the professors, and replace them with IT people who will teach distance courses based on their own views of what teaching is about. It’s already happening. Many universities are now 25-50% taught by “part-timers,” and distance courses are on the rise, becomeing more and more accepted as a way of life. The university of the future will be taught by computers, and managed by coomputer technicians, with a few corporate Heads at the top.

Is it any wonder we have so many really dumb people in our country these days? We are headed toward Dumb and Dumber.

WP, at 12:40 pm EDT on October 20, 2005

salaries? are you kidding me?

hate to break it to the adjunct, but the days of high salaries for technology are gone. i get paid little more than a secretary for teaching technology, AND i don’t get trained on how to use the new software. because i work in technology i am expected to figure it out for myself and then teach you, so if my knowledge seems spotty, it’s because we’re not getting any support from the top, just like you. did i mention that i’m also expected to know *every* new piece of software as soon as it comes out (and it often comes out before there are any books or tutorials?)

Sara, at 2:02 pm EDT on October 20, 2005

I have to agree with Sara. If you think the IT people are making tons of money, you’re crazy. I could take my skills and go make three times my salary in industry. Software companies, maybe.

I’m an IT person with 10 years of actual college teaching experience. I know how long it takes to plan classes, especially when you decide to do something new (technologically or otherwise). The kinds of technology that I encourage faculty to use are lightweight, web-based, and easy-to-use. Most of the faculty who use technology here have decided to because they saw a need to change some aspect of their class and chose a technical solution. It’s true that all technology isn’t good. As someone above said, you have to be willing to try and fail. And I think the panelists are right. Until using technology in the classroom is rewarded, only the people willing to take the risk will use it.

Laura, Instructional Technologist, at 4:21 pm EDT on October 20, 2005

Cut the Middleman

Well, gee, if the university is paying somebody to just figure the software out for themselves, and then that person can’t even teach the faculty how to do it, and we faculty have to struggle to learn it ourselves — why not just cut out the expense of the middleman in the first place and raise the faculty salaries? Isn’t it clear?

It’s absolutely clear to me.

B, at 4:23 pm EDT on October 20, 2005

A better article might have acknowledged that “Educause” is, though nonprofit, heavily, cheerleadingly, committed to the idea of high-tech education. Check out its website and while you’re at it be sure to see this page

http://www.educause.edu/OurPartners/996

and this one

http://www.educause.edu/CorporatePartnerProgram/583

which tells you what the corporate partners paid, to get a sense of what’s going on here.

I’ve been using computers and web tools in classes for ten years, and have put together elaborate websites for certain courses including interactive exercises; I use online discussions and have worked extensively with librarians to integrate technological tools. So I’m an enthusiast. Now the buts:

(1) I added tech tools because I saw specific ways to aid student learning in specific courses, not because someone dangled an “enticement” in front of me. Speaking in these terms shows contempt for the instructors who are actually dealing with students.

(2) Tenure committees and tenure processes should absolutely contain voices for *good* and *effective* teaching. But over my dead body will there be “technology and innovative teaching advocates on tenure and promotion committees.” Do you see the distinction? For a lot of courses the appropriate technologies are a blackboard, chalk and eraser, and carefully-written student papers.

(3) Grave suspicions are raised by this: “increased the number of courses that were built using the campus’s WebCT course management system.” In other words some people are measuring the degree of technification by how many instructors adopt a particular piece of software, in particular what goes under the rather sinister designation of “course management system.” My institution pays for “Blackboard” and I tried it one quarter. I found it ugly, clunky, and over-elaborate, and everything it did I could do myself, better and for free, using either simple web pages or a nice set of tools made available by another office at my university. So I am particularly wary of efforts to enforce a certain kind of uniformity, or to justify the large amounts of money that institutions are, perhaps unwisely, spending on these one-size-fits-all “systems” by getting more people to use them. Blackboard appears first among Educause’s $100,000-a-year-or-more “Platinum Partners.”

Colin Danby, University of Washington, Bothell, at 4:23 pm EDT on October 20, 2005

Making the time commitment feasible

My university has, as part of its policy on retention, tenure, and promotion, that development of a technologically mediated course, when properly done, counts as a scholarly activity — in other words, it can count as if it were a serious scholarly publication rather than just counting as one more item in the teaching column.

Since it’s a relatively new policy, of course, the committees at various levels need to be *reminded* that this is the policy. But, once everyone is really on board, it may mean that more people will put in the time to develop new online courses, courses with lectures produced for cable TV, etc. Otherwise, you invest the time (and it is significant time!) at your peril.

Janet, Professor of Philosophy, at 7:28 pm EDT on October 20, 2005

I think Colin hit the nail on the head.

Laura, at 8:13 pm EDT on October 20, 2005

Technology and Foreign Language Teaching

The use of technology for foreign language teaching is feasible. Even in the area of conversations, Web conferences can be effectively and efficiently used by instructore and their students. The technology is available and students only need to purchase a Web camera and microphone and join in.

Emana (Enyina), Graduate Student, Instructional Technology at UH, at 1:33 pm EDT on October 24, 2005

feasibility

I agree with Janet from 10.20 about the commitment on the part of the institution to the level of skill needed by the professor to engage in technological interaction with courses and students. These excellent skills are time consuming to learn and need continued thought and development.

Janet, department chair, at 11:34 am EDT on October 25, 2005

One of our goals in presenting this panel was to continue and broaden a conversation that we’ve been having for about a year. So it is really great to see the discussion continue here. Thank you!

It is also really fascinating to read the views that people attribute based on the slim evidence of this news report, which is not without its minor inaccuracies. Interesting too to observe how having a label ("IT person", “instructor", “faculty", “student") to work with generates all sorts of assumptions about the beliefs that a person might hold.

I think I could probably speak for my co-panelists in saying that none of us holds the view that technology for its own sake is of any value at all. Rather, the question we’re struggling with is how to ensure recognition for truly innovative teaching and research when the modes in which they are delivered sit uncomfortably with some of our more familiar categories. That is surely common ground for all parties to the conversation, however we label ourselves?

Joseph Vaughan, Director at UCLA Center for Digital Humanities, at 4:50 pm EDT on October 29, 2005

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