Should Professors Be Required To Teach With Tech? 319
An anonymous reader writes "Are professors who don't update their teaching methods like doctors who fail to keep up with the latest ways to treat disease? Or are professors better off teaching old-school? From the article: 'It is tough to measure how many professors teach with technology or try other techniques the report recommends, such as group activities and hands-on exercises. (Technology isn't the only way to improve teaching, of course, and some argue that it can hinder it.) Though most colleges can point to several cutting-edge teaching experiments on their campuses, a recent national assessment called the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement suggests that old-school instruction remains the norm. Only 13 percent of the professors surveyed said they used blogs in teaching; 12 percent had tried videoconferencing; and 13 percent gave interactive quizzes using 'clickers,' or TV-remotelike devices that let students respond and get feedback instantaneously. The one technology that most teachers use regularly — course-management systems — focuses mostly on housekeeping tasks like handing out assignments or keeping track of student grades.'"
No. (Score:4, Interesting)
On a much more personal and anecdotal note, I have taken classes at a "modern" college that did everything using IT (*in an IT course no less) and I've also taken courses where they used a black/white board, and I learned much more in the latter. Further, I believe that a teacher who has a poor grasp of the technology they're using just should skip it - nothing worse than some idiot putting 100% of their course material into PowerPoint and assuming that is enough.
does tech help, or is it just a toy? (Score:3, Interesting)
If not, and if it doesn't make the teachers' lives any easier, what's the point?
Technology is only a tool, not a cure (Score:3, Interesting)
Whether technology can be useful depends entirely on the course and what it's trying to teach. I've taken courses that were taught very well with Powerpoint. Yet those same courses could be taught as well using traditional means. Some courses would really suck with Powerpoint, while yet others could benefit.
Wikis? Blogs? Again: Maybe. Depends on the course.
One thing I always hate about these discussions is the issue of students getting bored/falling asleep is always brought up. There are two sides to the coin: Yes, the professor should make all attempts to make the class interesting. And yes, the student should be flexible enough to learn from different styles. If he/she is falling asleep, it's not a given that the professor is to blame: Education is not a spectator sport.
More importantly, whether they fall asleep or not has virtually nothing to do with technology.
Finally: The article fails to mention the most important point: In today's (US) universities, professors have no incentive to become better educators, and are more interested in getting their next grant.
Been working in instructional tech for 15 years (Score:4, Interesting)
But simply moving your stack of notes to Powerpoint is beyond worthless- it wastes your time and adds nothing at all to the content of the course. Outside the classroom stuff like blogs and videoconferencing can be amazingly useful if you want to correspond with people around the world, but there's really not many good reasons to use stuff like discussion forums when you have a class of 10 people- why not just discuss face to face? We're spending a ton of time moving to a new course management system this year, but it's a plumbing application now- it makes doing routine chores easier and helps with distributing reserves and such, but there are very few serious pedagogy changes when using them. (We have a few exceptions, but 75% of the use is reserves, handouts and collecting papers)
Look at things that can improve the way you teach, to do something you *can't* do without tech. Don't just assume it's great because it looks shiny
A few observations from a real teacher (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Societal advances in technology have been largely an effort at efficiency.
2. Educational applications in technology are rarely about increasing efficiency in student learning, but are occasionally about increasing efficiency in materials management for the teacher. Think electronic gradebooks: the reason they are nearly ubiquitous has nothing to do with administrative mandate, but with making things easier for the teacher. It's nothing for the computer to average grades? Weighting by assignment or category? No problem. Doing this with a calculator is a much more complicated proposition.
Electronic whiteboards are catching on for preserving lecture notes, but the real revolution here has passed - it was the change from overhead projector to video projector, especially if accompanied by a document camera. I use my projector ALL THE TIME for lecture notes, video, audio, still pictures - and when I have something to show I haven't captured digitally, I use the document camera.
The web-based communication tools allow me to post assignments and lesson plans online for involved parents and absent students. Video would help this, I suppose, but my classroom thrives on interaction - being a spectator to my lectures without being able to ask questions isn't the riveting experience I wish it would be.
Email allows an asynchronous communication between all of us, as do message board style discussions. These can have value among inquisitive students.
Here's the point, though: really inquisitive students are already doing inquisitive things that eclipse their peers' knowledge without huge effort. Extraordinary students drive their own learning. If I help a student become excited about a subject, and perhaps provide some resources & guidance for their own learning and research, then I've made the most important contribution. After that, it's a different sort of guidance than the "you need to know this so you won't be stupid" sort of instruction.
Ben Carson, head of pediatric neurology at John Hopkins, wrote about figuring out that he learned best by reading, and once he did this, he stopped going to class except for tests and labs. Instead, he read books. He read the assigned material, then read the source material for the assigned material, and then probably read more on top of that.
He redefined the whole field because he knew his strengths as a learner.
Anything technology can do to help a teacher advance that sort of self-knowledge is helpful, possibly important, and maybe even essential.
But if we can't state clearly how a technology will help advance student learning (or even improve teacher efficiency), we have no business expecting teachers to use that technology in their work.
TL;dr: use the best tool for the Learning, not the best tool available.
Re:In short... (Score:3, Interesting)
My Fiance will be taking her senior level engineering classes remotely, because smaller schools don't offer all the classes larger ones do, and with the sate university system, it makes more sense for the one largest school in the state to offer the elective in biomedical engineering or even the required vibrations and controls classes than to attempt to have it taught for the 2 students a year who want to take it locally.
So there is a slightly less vague support of the argument.
Re:Writing code with pencil and paper... (Score:3, Interesting)
Several years ago, when I was taking an intro CS course at Stanford (106X), our exams were on paper and we had to code our responses by hand. There would be a problem to solve at the top of an otherwise blank page, and the rest of the page was where you could "code." Certain caveats were allowed (no declaring variables, etc.), but apart from that it had to be functional code. The point was to test your understanding of the elementary concepts, and how to implement them in a non-hackish manner. It was hard, but it was also a great mental exercise in design. To be fair, I think we could have done something similar by computer (take away the compiler, or something). I have no idea what they are using now.
From time to time, I still pseudo-code on paper. Helps to sort out an overall approach to a problem.
Re:No. (Score:4, Interesting)
I am an advocate of using technology in the classroom when it is appropriate. I think many popular uses are not appropriate. Clickers are of dubious value. Online tech often encourages bad forms of testing, but it's very useful for unevaluated, "low-threat" fluency-building writing--BUT the pressure is always on, from students AND administrators to offer grades for all work. Admins need to demonstrate teaching's impact, while students don't want to work that doesn't have "count."
Tech is useful when it's very careful integrated into a lesson plan and sparingly used. But the main focus these days is on using tech to increase the ratio of students to teachers and/or classrooms. And a lot of the people who want to use or advocate for tech either are a) somewhat over-enthusiastic people who want to use computers for everything, including dessert topping and floor wax, or b) older people who are doing it for appearances. You end up with a lot of people using class time to teach the technology instead of the subject, or (worse) older people thinking it's cool and useful to convert all their old lesson plans to PowerPoint slide with snazzy transitions (they then spend 15 minutes of each class trying to plug the video cable into the Ethernet port).
Finally, and here's the kicker for me: tech is costly, either to students or to the institution. If we're going to spend money, it would be better spend on teachers because we no without any doubt that students benefit from greater direct access to faculty. But that's so old-fashioned, and you can't say cyber this and 2.0 that on the fundraising brochures if you're just hiring faculty.
Note: Why do I initially write "tech"? Because we always mean electronics. The chalkboard and whiteboard are tech, and they're often under-utilized or poorly utilized by teachers. (I realize I'm sort of blowing my ethos because I'm too lazy to get real paragraph breaks. But it's Sunday, and I'm feeling entitled.)
One more thing, seriously, administrators, 1995 is calling; it wants "cyber" back.
Re:Yes. (Score:2, Interesting)
Hah. I don't know what YOU studied, but in most mathematics lectures I attended, students were finding it difficult enough to keep up with the subject as things stood already, even with the professor writing everything on the blackboard and explaining it as he went along.
The professors, FWIW, always seemed to be quite surprised at how students had difficulties grasping even the (to them) simplest and most natural things. Given that, anything that FORCES the professor to slow down is actually a good thing.
Re:Use iPads in the classroom, dammit (Score:3, Interesting)
There is huge advantage to ease of use. I can carry an entire library in that little slice of tech. Turning pages is a twitch of a finger, highlighting at least as easy as the paper version, and notetaking has potential (once I use a wireless keyboard and can get a copy of my notes as a single document, preferably with my highlighted passages included).
Even when I take notes by hand, it's much easier to stop tapping the screen, pick up a pen, and write than to get something to hold the book open or hold it open while I write.
We really haven't begun to recast the book as a text/video/interactive medium, but that time will come - we'll have embedded videos, connections to the bulletin board, and probably even connection to other resources and the author, all from the "book page."
The danger, of course, is that I also have some cool games and a web browser on my iPad.
TL; dr: only Apple could combine the White Magic of Endless Learning with the Dark Magic of Eternal Distraction.
Re:dumb (Score:2, Interesting)
"Clickers" (Score:4, Interesting)
My university started using them 7 or 8 years ago. They're the biggest boon ever to students who want to skip class.
You just bribe a classmate to bring it with and answer quiz questions for you, and you get all the credit and the teacher thinks you were there. I saw people running four or five clickers in a single class period.
Re:Bad analogy alert... (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree. There should be a difference in a professor embracing new information and embracing new technology. They are not the same thing.
Bureaucracy and liability. (Score:3, Interesting)
I teach at the university level, and would suffer sanctions or at least be spoken to if I just used:
- Blogs
- Websites
- Online tools
In class willy-nilly. I can't even create a discussion forum for us somewhere or email the students directly using their preferred email address (instead, I am stuck using school addresses that many rarely check). Instead, I am usually bound to a pre-determined, certified list of internal tools of which the most infernal is Blackboard, which seems to be the "technology tool" of choice at every campus at which I've taught. Too bad because its user interface is so absolutely poor that students who spend their days entirely online still can't figure it out; its compatibility is so bad that trying to use it in a course is a sure way to spend at least half of a class if not an entire class talking about required browsers and how to install them; and its stability is so bad that you'd better not rely on it for evaluated exercises, because half the students will say "it was down, I couldn't do the assignment" and a quick exchange with IT will reveal this to have been the case.
From the other technology tools that seem to make their way onto campuses, the electronic blackboard/whiteboard tools are cute but are so expensive that they tend to be locked away / disabled and require that you file in advance for access on the days that you're "planning" to use them, necessitating a visit from an IT tech before and after class. And predictably, half the time when they get there with the key and switch you on, you find out that the system is damaged in some way and doesn't actually operate, but nobody has reported it or performed maintenance / swap-outs in that room for ages and despite your need and reporting, their ETA for repair, once scheduled is sometime after the semester is over.
The one university I taught at as an adjunct that issued new ThinkPads to its students and had campus WiFi also locked them down completely with just IE and Office and not even Flash, meaning that many online applications and tools of various kinds couldn't be used.
Basically, I could just bring MY laptop and students could just bring THEIR laptop and we could use the WiFi and OUR OWN accounts and whatever software we wished, my classrooms would be FAR more technologically enabled. With all of the requirements, it becomes far more practical and easy to simply do a better job doing what good instructors have always done: stand at the front of the classroom, talk a lot and ask a lot of Socratic questions, and write on the blackboard with chalk or on the whiteboard with a marker. That, at least, tends to be accessible everywhere and very fail-safe.
Re:No!! (Score:3, Interesting)
- The lecturer reads the handouts.
- The lecturer tries to "interact" with a 60+ students room and ends up answering the dumbest questions and lose everyone's time.
- The handout is bad enough so that we need to copy what the lecturer says and it takes 2 or 3 years to have a student-made handout that is good enough.
Actually, there was a 4th kind : one teacher who had been a student of Feynman and apparently tried to imitate a lively form of teaching. I can't say that mimicking the behavior of electrons or declaiming propagation equations like a love song is not entertaining : his classes were full. But to learn about the subject at hand, we were lucky he was providing a good handout.
Face it : there is no way to have an efficient 60 to 1 interaction in the physical world. Small exercise classes with a lot of small 1 on 1 or 1 on 4-5 interactions are great and a teacher is necessary there. But teaching a 60 students class ? Surely not.
I went to university to get knowledge. Amphitheater classes were a huge waste of time in my opinion. I learned more from other students and books than from teachers. But hey, I needed a diploma. So please tell, if not for knowledge and for a diploma, what are the good reasons of going to a lecture ?
Re:No!! (Score:3, Interesting)
You missed out, Yvanhoe.
There was the "you and 600 of your closest friends" class. It was Psych 101, for me. It had one of the PhD candidates acting as an aid to give a presentation of what was clearly delineated in the book. The class was a waste of time.
There was the "watch the unintelligible professor mumble at the blackboard while scribbling stuff" class. I had the pleasure to sit through that for Calculus 3. I'm still not sure what all that scribbling on the board was. Very little of it looked like anything in the text book.
And who can forget the "professor is a complete moron" class. The class was supposed to be Argumentation and Logic, but I had to listen to racist dribble about how Nicole Simpson was a cheating whore and OJ should have cut her head off (Sorry for the US centric reference, but suffice it to say that it had nothing to do about argumentation or logic.)
Then there were the group project classes that were supposed to simulate real world working environments, except there was not project lead and no peer review. The result is that it was really a "big project for me, because I don't want these lamers busting my GPA" class.
All that said, like you I learned more from other students and books than from teachers. Giving more tech to the professors* will do nothing to increase the transfer of knowledge. It just gives the professors new toys to play with while continuing to ignore students.
*professors, not teachers. Teachers are a different animal, one that tries to convey rather than just present knowledge.