Professors Rejecting Classroom Technology 372
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."
The funny thing at my university (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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I wonder if there is some element of job loss associated with it.
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Who else among academia are going to understand better that skills are usually made redundant by technological advance? Education is in high demand and salaries for professors have never been better. Why jeopardize that by replacing themselves with technology? After all, they know all too well that if they did it right a small board room of top tier professors could teach a whole nation with the right technology and eliminate the need for tens of thousands of workers drawing upper-middle-class salaries.
Re:The funny thing at my university (Score:5, Insightful)
You make a good point, but as a college instructor myself for about 10 years now I know the real reason.
It's extra work. End of story. Nobody wants to do extra work for nothing.
Re:The funny thing at my university (Score:4, Interesting)
This. I've been testing web education or whatever it's called this week. I did the same course with and without the "technology" addon.
For the students: I didn't notice a difference. No more or less success. Good students are good, lazy students are lazy, nothing will change that. And holding their hand will just make them take less initiative, which is not a good thing for society as a whole.
For the teacher (me): extra work, plenty. Also some waste of time (e.g. 4 hour meeting to brief us on how to keep a forum alive, wtf). No extra money, thank you. Also no taking this into account when evaluating my research (i.e. publications).
For the people setting the whole thing up: yes, they got paid for doing something absolutely useless and wasting my precious time. They were quite happy with themselves, being convinced that they did something useful. I even heard "35% of the students are happy with the online course, that's very positive". My reaction "wait a minute, doesn't that mean that 65% is either unhappy with it or doesn't care about it?" was met with silence.
My overall conclusion: thanks but next time I'll pass if I have the choice. And please, let the teachers do the teaching, not some guy from the I-have-to-justify-my-salary department who thinks that technology can solve all problems and that whoever doesn't agree just needs to open their eyes.
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Wow, 4 hours of extra work during initial setup. How do you stand it!? Of course with your course material online, getting setup for the next semester's course should take no time at all. Students are now able to access course material when and wherever they are, and can take their course work with them into the field. But let's focus on the 4 extra hours of work you had to put in
Re:The funny thing at my university (Score:4, Insightful)
Chemistry is also where computers can most effectively be used. Simulations are the best use of computers in education. Tweaking of the formulaes that are the basis of simulations, complicated outputs that are more readily understood by breaking them down into the component algorithms and how those outcomes are affected by altering those algorithms. A newer style of teaching that simply could not be done with pen and paper. Being able to work with large very complex models where more can be learnt, by having ready access to each part of the puzzle that creates the whole. Which part of group of parts you look at, analyse and learn, whilst being able to grasp them more effectively as parts of whole, better fundamental learning.
Get a Horse (Score:2, Interesting)
>>>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.
Re:The funny thing at my university (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The funny thing at my university (Score:5, Informative)
We are unimpressed *and* actively impeded by the University bureaucrats.
I want to post a lot of things in a web-accessible fashion for my students: most of that is static, so the assorted CRMs are overkill (not to mention the giant PITA it is to post static content via the CRM *without* bullshit CRM dressing all over it), and for the content that has a *real* dynamic component (not just "I blogged again, teehee" dynamic), the CRMs are a nightmare.*
Yet, if I want to just deal with rolling my own? Good luck with that. Uni. (and occasionally even Dept.) IT will not only be of no assistance, they will *actively thwart* attempts to do this sort of thing.
*Maybe people accustomed to having their hands tied can tolerate that sort of treatment long enough to learn it, but not me.
Re:The funny thing at my university (Score:4, Informative)
In other words (I finished too soon) any alternatives need to prove that they are superior solutions that are worth spending lots of time and money on.
Re:The funny thing at my university (Score:5, Insightful)
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They really should make Low capacity SD cards for really cheap so that people can us them for passing data around in cases where you might not get the SD card back.
There are still some [amazon.com] laying around. And I'm sure it wouldn't take much for any university to get their hands on a big pile of them and hand them out to students.
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The only problem I would really have with handing in hard copies is that nobody uses floppies anymore,
Floppies don't really count as hard copy [wikipedia.org]...
Re:The funny thing at my university (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the CS profs aren't really programmers, but true computers scientists, and really computer science has very little to do with computers, or programming. Also, most of the professors have probably been around for a long time, and know what works and what doesn't work. They want you to hand in hard copies of stuff so that they don't have to deal with any excuses about how the system lost your assignment. The only problem I would really have with handing in hard copies is that nobody uses floppies anymore, which is what I used to hand in my assignments on, and USB sticks and SD cards are a little too expensive to be passing around to teachers for assignments. They really should make Low capacity SD cards for really cheap so that people can us them for passing data around in cases where you might not get the SD card back.
I think you missed the point entirely. A hard copy is a paper copy. The point of the hard copy is that you "open" it instantly. No inserting a CD and hoping that the student wrote the CD correctly, that their CD writer is compatable with your CD reader, that their media isn't garbage. No juggling a stack of flash cards or USB sticks and trying to figure out whose is whose. No having to deal with that guy who didn't cough up the money for version X of the software, and your version Y has several small but annoying compatability bugs. No having to juggle dozens of emails with attachments for each assignment.
Printed paper. The student's name is somewhere on the first page. You can start reading it instantly. Unless they really screwed up and used tiny or unreadable fonts, it is compatible with your eyes. Paper size is basically standard, and you can stack up all the papers and keep them together easily. Everybody can spend their time more productively doing better things.
Re:The funny thing at my university (Score:4, Insightful)
No juggling a stack of flash cards or USB sticks and trying to figure out whose is whose.
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It's really hard to have a paper break. For programming assigments even 30 years ago we had to have printed program and output along with the program (floppy or online). It's not a bad model and nothing has really improved on it that I can see. Hard copy plus soft copy.
Re:The funny thing at my university (Score:4, Informative)
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.
In one of my classes with over 100 students, it's a month into classes and I still get questions about where the electronic class notes are, even though I explained it on the first day, it's on the syllabus (both on paper and on-line), and it's in the same location for almost every other course at the university. Although most students get it, some students are quite clueless. At least if you hand them a piece of paper in class they don't have the excuse that "they couldn't get it to work" or "my computer was broken", or "my interwebs aren't working from home". I treat it the same way as e-mail versus paper mail: if you want people to pay attention, send it to them on paper. It's harder to ignore or claim for technical reasons that you somehow missed it.
Re:The funny thing at my university (Score:4, Insightful)
Reminds me of my first programming class, many many years ago - before a lot of you were born. It was a pseudo-assembly course, with a make-believe assembly language with 13 instructions, including add, subtract, multiply and divide. 36 or 39 statrted the course: 13 of us took the final, and three of us thought it was a Micky Mouse course, while the other 10 were barely treading water.
We figured it was weed out for the folks who read You Can Make Big Money With Computers on the inside of a matchbook cover.
I'd be shocked, shocked I tell you, if a lot of folks taking the first computer class weren't there because a) they confused it with playing games, or b) you can make big money with computers, and it cost less and is less yucky than medical school.
mark
Re:The funny thing at my university (Score:4, Interesting)
I knew a student who graduated with a 90+% average with a CS degree and he had no idea how to use computers. When I asked him about this, he explained how he realized early on that the assignments where only worth 5-10% of the class mark in the few courses that required actual programming but took a significant amount of time so just skipped them to study/memorize for the exams. He should have gone for a Math major but he figured their was more money in CS :(
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I was going to mod you, but I couldn't find +1 Sad.
Re:The funny thing at my university (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that they aren't comfortable with computers, but rather that they know the computers' failings.
Sure, that online testing package is nice, but it can't prevent cheating like a proctored in-person test can. Posting syllabi is nice and all, but students use that as a way to just read the book before the exam rather than attend class. Having a real-time chat for office hours is a nice shiny toy, but it's not really useful for demonstrations or sketches.
Then, of course, to actually use any of those features, there's a time investment required to learn the specific mechanism the system uses. Your CS professors already know how to put a video online, should they choose to do it. Learning to do it through the fancy new system is just a waste of time. It's not a new capability to them like it is to professors in other departments who may not know how to set up their own content server. It's just the same old crap, with the same old problems, but now it takes longer to do it.
Last I knew, my alma mater's CS professors each just ran their own server, configured however they liked. Some used them extensively, and some didn't.
Re:The funny thing at my university (Score:5, Insightful)
> Posting syllabi is nice and all, but students use that as a way to just read the book before the exam rather than attend class.
And who is paying for the class? We're not in kindergarten anymore where you need mandatory attendance for mommy and daddy.
I've had my share of shitty teachers where it was more efficient for me to just read and do the exercises in the textbook then to waste my time listening to a prof that couldn't teach.
The better teachers find ways to engage students by asking them questions then to simply spew useless facts.
Re:The funny thing at my university (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, many undergrads act like they're in kindergarten, and mommy and daddy and/or the taxpayers who are paying appreciate a little bit of nannying. Most professors hate it.
If you actually don't need to go to class, then don't. I didn't, for certain classes. But don't expect the professor to go out of his way to help you. You've got the textbook, Google and the whole Internet. If you're so good why do you need the professor's notes and lectures online and packed up nicely for you?
Yes, better teachers find ways to engage students... in class.
Re:The funny thing at my university (Score:5, Insightful)
Better still are the teachers whose questions are spurred by the students' classroom experiences, who reinforce the knowledge while simultaneously encouraging curiosity, but that enriching experience will be lost on the students who decide in the first two sessions that participation isn't worth their time.
You the student aren't paying the professor to teach the class. You're paying the university for the privilege of learning from the class that they're paying for. It's not really the professor's problem whether you get your money's worth or not, but it is his problem to determine whether you've adequately learned the material or not. Sure, you might be able to answer some exam questions to cover university-mandated bullet points, but the exam can't really cover all the details of the course material.
The great lie of education is that the diploma means you know something. Rather, it just means you've demonstrated to a group of experts in a particular field that you should also be considered an expert in that field to a particular degree of mastery. Of course, each of those experts may set their own requirements for proof, within the limits upon which the group as a whole has agreed.
This is not to say there aren't shitty teachers out there, or even ones whose teaching style doesn't work for some particular student. That's no excuse for missing material out of one's own arrogance. The student who skips class isn't entitled to credit if they hate their professor, any more than an employee who doesn't show up at work is entitled to a salary if they hate their boss.
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And who is paying for the class?
Almost certainly not you. Pretty much the only people who go through university without aid from the institution itself or some form of help from the government are the wealthy mediocre kids of legacy Ivy leaguers. Almost every one else gets a break from someone.
Re:The funny thing at my university (Score:4, Informative)
At my university, the CS department are, counter-intuitively, some of the most reluctant to use our online capabilities and classroom presentation tech.
Why counter-intuitively? Dijkstra has been very vocal on this topic throughout his whole life. And you can hardly get more CS-y than him.
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Dijkstra has been very vocal on this topic throughout his whole life. And you can hardly get more CS-y than him.
Donald Knuth might be more CS-y than Dijkstra, but he doesn't even use email!
Re:The funny thing at my university (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't find that counter-intuitive -- the longer you work with technology the less you want to use it for the sake of using it. And there's lots of students who would simply read the syllabus and then show up for the exam thinking they've got it covered without knowing what the professor actually taught in class.
Supposedly, Donald Knuth had his secretary print out his emails.
If it helps the problem sure, if it's just busy work, not so much. Sometimes, technology doesn't really add anything but extra steps of little value.
I find at work someone always is pushing us to do all of our work in some form of social media like Sharepoint. And it's not something that helps me get my work done (in fact it usually makes it harder), it's something that the people in charge of these can point to and bray about the adoption of it. A discussion thread is more trouble than it's worth for most things I find.
Re:The funny thing at my university (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll say this as a cynical adjunct: the instructors who are the most integrated with CMS are the instructors who are likeliest to be replaced by a MOOC. Not to discount online learning, but since I prefer it the old-fashioned way I've changed my approach to emphasize the strengths of conventional classroom instruction. My IT needs are a lab, projector, audio system, LAN file share for course materials and submissions, and a whiteboard - anything more is likely to be more trouble than it's worth.
It's knowledge, not "comfort" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:The funny thing at my university (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a CS Prof and the online course support software we are supposed to use would get a very poor grade if any of my students wrote it.
I suspect the reason many of us prefer not to use such technology is because it impedes, not enhances, the student experience. It's hard to find information, damn difficult to edit it, tricky to make the marks add up right, and shows the wrong people information they should not see (like other students' marks).
Have you tried reading etextbooks as opposed to paper books? It is harder to find information when you do not know exactly what you want (no easy way to flip through material), and they also discourage prolonged reading of the kind necessary to develop sound understanding, as opposed to quick answers to a question on hand.
It reminds me of the old chestnut of the Americans spending $1m to make a pen that would write in space, while the Soviets used pencils. Not all new technology is better or makes a job easier.
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Is this about being uncomfortable about computers, or just being skeptical about the idea that computers and the web always make everything better? Yes, I know this hurts the people who just wish everyone would buy their expensive products and stop asking about whether it works or not...
Re:The funny thing at my university (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you answered your own dilemma there; at my university most of the CS professors equate programming with writing out algorithms on paper.
To some degree they're right. Computer Science isn't Software Engineering, just as Physics isn't the same as Mechanical Engineering. Its really about data structures and algorithms more than it is about software. You must learn programming languages but mostly as a vehicle to demonstrate concepts.
I think some of the confusion would be lessened if they called it Computational Science rather than "Computer" Science.
That said, in the modern world. I would expect some level of online precense from everything. I think a lot of the "collaborative learning environment" stuff like online discussion forums is a bit of a waste (people will just use existing communications technologies if they want to collaborate), but at a minimum putting a syllabus online isn't much work. Being able to check your grades isn't a bad idea either.
Re:The funny thing at my university (Score:5, Interesting)
The term "Computational Science" is the most spot-on clarification I've heard applied to computer science, in my 20+ years of academic and professional programming.
Re:The funny thing at my university (Score:5, Informative)
No, "how to manage programming projects" isn't software engineering. "How to manage programming projects" is IT Project Management.
Software engineering is how to design software systems (particularly, large software systems). The CS:Software Engineering relationship is loosely analogous to the Physics : Aerospace Engineering relationship.
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Granted, the audience for assembly is not what it used to be, and perhaps that's the "wtf" you're experiencing, but if you're teaching assembly, using MS-DOS isn't a horrible idea in and of itself.
research universities = only about research (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:research universities = only about research (Score:5, Funny)
"... 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.
Re:research universities = only about research (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:research universities = only about research (Score:4, Informative)
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In practice that's a horrible idea. You get MUCH better interaction by having an in-person conversation. Also, having to get out of bed, go to the lecture or office hours and actually talk to a person filters out a lot of the stupid questions.
Flipped teaching (Score:5, Interesting)
This is actually the core of a pretty significant modern trend, "flip teaching [wikipedia.org]" (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.
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How are students supposed to stay awake in class? Is most of your stock portfolio in energy-drink companies?
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small sample population? (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:4, Funny)
They're undergraduates -- you need to attract their attention before you can teach them
Rattles or mobiles work wonders on undergraduates.
It depends (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Features lacking in paper course materials... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Features lacking in paper course materials... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's okay if a person's goal in life is to be the equivalent of a factory race-car driver, taking the new software around the track, putting it through its paces, competing against others to determine which strategies and deployments and use cases are the most viable. There's a place in the world for that sort of talent, just as there's a place for people who want to occupy themselves with filmmaking or graphic arts.
But using a tool is not the same as engineering it, and engineering is not the same as science, and science is not the same as math, and math is not the same as philosophy. I'd argue that a substantial part of an undergraduate education involves developing an awareness of these distinctions. What's important are the ideas and modes of thought that support a particular discipline. So, for example, science undergrads are not exposed to number theory because it will have direct application in their careers. Number theory is a way of opening a conversation about the essential nature of abstraction.
Now, if someone wants to come along and make a really cool documentary about number theory, with powerful animations and interviews with contemporary mathematicians and a sound track to die for, more power to them. But please, let's not confuse the vehicle with the journey.
Re:Features lacking in paper course materials... (Score:4, Insightful)
Classically, we've found depth to be the critical dimension. This goes back to Plato and beyond, though reexamined by Kant, Fichte and Hegel. If you neglect to understand a subject in depth, you may well fail to capture some of its essential properties. Any interdisciplinary synthesis made on that basis will then be flawed. Therefore synthesis is a final step in applying knowledge, not a preliminary one.
For example, Ph.D studies - not just in the sciences but in all fields - are explicitly framed as exercises in depth. Thesis supervisors routinely have to point this out to grad students, in order to redirect their very natural tendency to go off exploring in all directions. I went through this stage myself. Probably everybody does.
Sure, specialization creates arbitrary barriers between disciplines. So does modularity create arbitrary barriers between components. So does all individuation of subject from object, agency from action, et cetera. All dualistic thinking has this particular shortcoming. We accept that because we gain a powerful analytical tool in return. And sometimes we forget that we have made such a choice.
The converse, I have to point out, is not "hard-earned wisdom" but the default way that people function when they impose no particular discipline on their studies. We don't need universities to teach that. It comes for free, as part of the human condition.
And so we come around again to the question of classroom technology. It's easy to indulge in endless fiddling with bits and pieces of technology in the name of education. Occasionally, such fiddling may produce a valuable new synthesis of ideas. Stephen Wolfram sincerely believes this about Mathworld - that there's no telling what might happen if you facilitate mathematical exploration and let human nature take its course. I have nothing against it, only against claims that undisciplined exploration is the best way or the only way to conduct a search for knowledge.
Look, everyone wants to be in on the synthesis part. But anyone can dabble in multiple subjects. What makes you think you're qualified to make any real contribution if you have no depth of experience?
Technology != Effective teaching (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
idiots don't know how to test it (Score:2)
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.
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English (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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And so
Re:English (Score:4, Insightful)
Not sure about English composition, but there are other subjects that can benefit from technology: visualisation, learning with feedback outside the classroom, gamification... and other than just improving learning effectiveness, could you think of a way where technology could help a teacher effectively teach a class of 1000 rather than 30 or so? Or reduce the cost of learning so you can justify the expense for a far larger group? I can... and I am not the only one. We're not there yet, though.
Teach a class of 1000 rather than 30? In a class of 30, a teacher can get to know every student by the end of the year. Students get to know each other. A class of 1000 is an assembly line. It's a mob. What's your measure of success? Students per dollar?
I took a class in modern poetry, and I still remember a guy who was a car designer, who was taking classes in his retirement. He would tell us obscure things about poems by Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound that in the news when the poems were written. In my freshman humanities course, one guy was an atheist. One guy was a Jesuit-educated Catholic. There were marxists and army veterans. After a while you could get to know how these people approached the world.
I also took lecture classes of 300 in physics. The teacher basically read his notes. He answered questions, but it wasn't the same.
Humans evolved in the last 100,000 years or whatever to deal with each other in family-sized groups of about 6 to 30. You can't have the same kind of communications and interactions in groups much larger than that.
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I sincerely believe that most of my classmates cheated, too. Is it really cheating when everyone does it?
YES.
How the conversation ended (Score:2)
The professor went on to say: "Now get off my lawn!"
Flash Cards (Score:4, Interesting)
I am a chemistry professor... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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So you have a syllabus. Is it handwritten or did you type it up on a computer?
If you typed it up on a computer, then you will have a file saved.
If you take that file and save it somewhere that can be easily accessed...like maybe some shared storage space on the department's webserver, then there is no syllabus for anybody to keep track of.
How hard is it to copy a file to a webserver?
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Considering the idiotic bureaucracy of some college IT depts, it might be pretty hard indeed...
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> 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.
I honestly hope that's really not what you believe. I have a few profs who don't post their syllabi online, and it's really infuriating. I don't have access to my notebooks 24/7, and the syllabus contains enough information that I can't simply copy without spending a significan
Re:I am a chemistry professor... (Score:4, Insightful)
Gee whatever did the professors and students do for all those decades of university courses before the invention of computer networks?
So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
OTOH (Score:2)
... 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. :)
Re:OTOH (Score:4, Informative)
No, that's actually more recent. I remember when I was a kid having to do a lot more work because my handwriting was much smaller than my classmates. The reason for the specificity is that students get rather good at using the largest margins, typeface and font size that they can get away with to pad their work. It means that if they want to pad out their work, they have to go to a lot more work than just adding additional points to their report.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Teachers need to change (Score:4, Insightful)
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"
True at GMU (Score:2)
Most professors aren't trained teachers (Score:2)
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
Not surprising at all (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Marginally better never sells. (Score:5, Insightful)
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"
The reason is simple (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
"old-fashioned whiteboards"? (Score:2)
On Point (Score:3)
Whiteboards are critical, you see the mistakes. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
They're half-right. (Score:3)
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.
I'm a classroom technology skeptic. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Faculty use IT when they need it (Score:5, Insightful)
I am an IT Director / CIO for a small liberal arts university, and I've discussed this issue on my blog [umn.edu] 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:
Soo many factors (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Get rid of them (Score:3)
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.
I teach Engineering (Score:3, Informative)
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.
This is a most provovative article (Score:3)
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.
Stupid Dichotomy (Score:3)
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.
I did my master's thesis on this. (Score:3)
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.
Re:The old college system is not cut out for today (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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+1, Insightful.
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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 inter
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If universities are so suited to the task of educating people, why do they routinely fail to do so? Because they're not, they're basically a "money for degrees" scam, even by your own admission. They are ill-suited to meet the needs of society today. You are basically staring at a mountain of evidence that proves this and saying "if only the students wanted to learn, this would work." It's the logical equivalent of saying "if only elephants were purple, they could fly." You can't prove it's false. Since stu
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It's a mix. Most students ultimately just do the minimum necessary to succeed in college. They'll never really stand out in their jobs, though sometimes they get promoted to management where they do the least harm. However there are students who get quite a lot out of their education and who do learn stuff. Even if it turns out they never use combinatorics on their job the fact that they took the time to learn it well has helped them train their brains (applies to just about every single class where the
Re:The old college system is not cut out for today (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:The old college system is not cut out for today (Score:4, Insightful)
Who built those toys? (Score:3)
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.
Re:The old college system is not cut out for today (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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 especiall
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