Why Professors Love (and Loathe) Technology

dougled writes "A survey of 4,500 college professors (and campus technology administrators) reveals what faculty members think of digital publishing (they like it, but don't do it very much), how much they use their campus learning management systems (not nearly as much as their bosses think), and how digital communication has changed their work lives (they're more productive, but far more stressed)."

Increases Revenue

[Anonymous Coward]

Buying books for class? You'd better buy the new book, with the online access code. That way you can access your online assignments and do your homework. God forbid you buy the used book and fail the class.

The book racket has reached a new level of thievery. How much for the access code you ask. That depends. It could be as little as $75, but is could be a real value at $150.

Policies, not Technology

[paleo2002]

I'm an adjunct professor at three local colleges, so I get to experience a variety of educational technologies and IT departments. My frustrations don't come from the technology itself, but from the policies administrators and the IT staff implement. All three schools have a campus email system for students, faculty, and staff. But two of them are web-based systems that do not allow auto-forwarding. I have to manually log in to the clunky web-based system and sift through a mountain of intra-spam. The feature exists on these platforms, according to my research, its just been disabled. I guess they want to make sure we're all using the outsourced webmail system they spent millions of dollars importing from the late 90's.

When it comes time to submit my grades, one school's system flips a coin each semester to decide whether it supports Mac users. Not whether it supports Safari, not "the Mac version of Firefox" or even "the Mac version of IE" but logging in from a Mac computer at all. When I call the registrar's office, they claim to have never supported Mac. Except, they did. Last semester.

One school has a laptop loan program for faculty and students. We can request to borrow a laptop to run our classes with. For one month. Then we have to return the computer and resubmit the request. The same school installed 3M Smart Boards in many of the classrooms. They have loads of cool features, but the remote controls and digital pen devices you need to use them all disappeared within months of installation. Now they serve as very expensive white boards.

The list goes on . . . None of these are failings of technology, but how technology is implemented. I often get the impression that the people in charge of acquiring, installing, and managing tech at my schools are being brought in from the business sector. They are attempting to implement methodologies and policies suited to smaller, homogeneous work environments. Classrooms aren't office buildings; faculty and students use tech differently from the office staff.