http://chronicle.comSection: Information Technology
Volume 54, Issue 30, Page B21
When it comes to how to use technology in the classroom, professors and administrators aren't always on the same page. Nor are professors themselves always in agreement. At The Chronicle's Technology Forum, a panel of faculty members from several Florida institutions spoke about their IT frustrations and successes. Jeffrey J. Selingo, editor of The Chronicle, and Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer, served as moderators. Following are excerpts from the discussion.
Examples of Technology in the Classroom
John Wayne Shafer, theater, University of Central Florida: I'm involved with convergent theater, which merges digital combinations of theater over large distances. Our latest work was a collaboration between Bradley University in Illinois and the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, where we took our three departments and merged them into one for the production of Alice Experiments in Wonderland. [Casts from the three universities, hundreds of miles apart, acted as one, connected by high-speed Internet lines that transmitted images in real time to audiences at all three institutions (The Chronicle, February 29).]
Ann Piccard, writing and legal skills, Stetson University College of Law: I teach research and writing. The research is taught primarily with technology but the writing is not, and I really do not use technology in the classroom unless I'm required to for some reason. But I am also currently enrolled as a student in a distance-learning program through the University of London.
Michael L. Barnett, business administration, University of South Florida: I use a moderate amount of technology in the classroom — document projectors, online stuff with Blackboard, the Internet, videos, and so forth. Probably right now my biggest challenge with technology is keeping it out of the classroom in terms of cellphones and laptops and things that distract.
Ellen S. Podgor, law (and associate dean of faculty development and electronic education), Stetson College of Law: I teach in the areas of criminal law, white-collar crime, and international criminal law. I do use electronic education in my classroom and outside my classroom. I use PowerPoints in my regular substantive course. I use vodcasts, podcasts, asynchronous learning. I do a blog on the White Collar Crime Prof Blogger. And I have taught students online on several different occasions. We use electronic education at Stetson to add on to our curriculum, not as the main basis.
Mary C. Madden, English, University of South Florida: I teach primarily in both a large composition program and literature course. I do use — and most instructors in our composition program use — hybrid classrooms. We have to check six different sites almost daily. I'm kind of in the middle in terms of using technology. Some of it has been strongly encouraged by the composition program, and this has helped to drive the involvement on the part of a lot of our faculty members.
Judy Nolasco, composition, Hillsborough Community College's Ybor City campus: I'm in the process this semester of teaching my very first totally online course, and that means that my students do not come to campus at all. I do my introduction online through a video; I do all my lectures through PowerPoint with my voice lecturing exactly like I do in my classroom. I use a lot of technology in my course on teaching diverse populations because, luckily, it came along with the textbook that I chose, and I find that it really adds a new dimension to a lot of my assignments. I like technology. However, from a teaching standpoint, it is a lot of work to integrate technology into the curriculum and into the way that you are used to teaching your courses.
Ellen Pastorino, psychology, Valencia Community College's Osceola campus: I teach in a "smart" classroom and have for the past five years, so I have the capability of going out onto the Internet or using PowerPoint, videos, YouTube. And I also have been using for the past five years a student-response system called the clicker system that is interactive, so that you can use it to ask questions or get attitudinal data from the students. And they can respond immediately, anonymously, and you can get feedback on either where they are learning material or what they feel about a particular topic.
Who Picks the Technology?
Jeffrey J. Selingo, moderator: For those who do use technology in the classroom, how was that technology selected? How much of a role did you have?
Nolasco: At our college, all our classrooms have been renovated to be what we call 21st-century classrooms. Every classroom has a data projector; some have whiteboards; we have PC's. I did not actually request it. I believe it was just one of our overall college initiatives to make sure that all of our classrooms were equipped for the 21st-century technology.
Pastorino: I would say it has been collaborative in some instances. Certainly there is a lot of software that is just handed to us, and we are expected to use it. On the other hand, if we want something that we think will help our students, there are forums where you can solicit that information and then work with your dean or administration.
Teaching Older Students
Goldie Blumenstyk, moderator: For those of you who teach adult students, do you have to change things along the way because certain students are not as adaptable as others?
Barnett: What is interesting is that if I post a requirement or something online, there will be a certain percentage who would claim ignorance. But when I post grades online, suddenly I get a million hits within 10 seconds. I think it is BS, mostly; they all know how to use it pretty much.
Piccard: When I started teaching at Stetson nine years ago, the older ones were completely unfamiliar with the Internet. A lot of them had never used a computer before. That is not true anymore.
Shafer: [Cites survey data that found different attitudes across age groups in some of his projects.] Generally speaking, if you were younger you were much, much happier with the attempts at converging the technology with traditional forms of theater, whereas if you were older, your general response tended to be significantly less robust. So I think the skill level of the older population has increased in general. But I still think that there is more skepticism.
Pastorino: But I think that skepticism is healthy because the one thing that the younger students are lacking is being able to evaluate the information that they get. Older students are more skeptical; they look more critically at that information.
Contact With Administrators and Training
Blumenstyk, moderator: How much training have you had? And what has it overlooked?
Madden: Although we are a pretty collaborative program, the technological end of it, so to speak, has been a little top down; many of us have not felt knowledgeable enough to participate in the choices. But we have been offered fairly extensive training. Sometimes it is a burden in terms of time — yet another thing we have to do. But it has led to some wonderful developments.
Selingo, moderator: We have a lot of CIO's in this room. How much interaction do you all have with your chief information officer? How much interaction do you have on questions of using technology in the classroom?
Pastorino: Once, at a party.
Shafer: We end up approaching our leadership when we need some kind of expertise that may not be natural to our discipline. I will walk into the office of just about anybody on campus, even though the chain of command is very long. So who I go to depends on the urgency of the matter and what kind of stakes we are dealing with.
Blumenstyk, moderator: Tell us what frustrates you the most about having to teach with technology, or wanting to teach with it?
Barnett: It is not big-purchase issues that directly affect me but, rather, when the light bulb burns out in the projector, or you cannot get the system to boot up.
Nolasco: I think tech support is a big issue with faculty because it's not that it isn't available; it's that it isn't available at that moment. When you have got a class waiting for you and you walk in and nothing works, it's not like you can just call somebody and they are there in five minutes. The other thing that frustrates me about using technology is that it's very time-consuming to integrate it into my classes. When you teach five classes a semester, you have a lot of prep.
Question from the audience: Could you tell me if your campus has both academic and administrative groups, or a single IT group?
Podgor: We have a separate IT department, and just within the last few months, I was appointed as the faculty liaison to the IT department, which I think helps enormously.
Pastorino: We have an IT group, too, and the difficulty is that they may have representation on a budget committee for the college. Then they make decisions, and it always seems like all the computers are refurbished between semesters. So you come back and there is a new updated version of some program, and training is not for another month, and now you already have to use that in the classroom. So a lot of times just the communication between IT and the faculty is not as stellar as it could be.
Teaching Online Courses
Barnett: I do not teach online courses, so what distinguishes someone who is suited for an online course versus someone who is not?
Nolasco: Well, I think they have to be highly motivated students. I think they have to be well organized. They have to have good time-management skills.
Barnett: But how do you assess that?
Nolasco: Well, we do not. The students have to assess themselves.
Pastorino: A lot of students may be working 40 hours, and they think that they can take 12 hours of online courses. Well, at 2 o'clock in the morning, they are not really prepared to do the reading or the thinking that is required of the material.
Podgor: We have no suitability [requirements]. Anybody who wants to take the class can take the class. We do require a certain number of posts each week so that we require the students to be up to a certain level each week. And that is one of our ways of knowing whether they are, in fact, online. They are required to actually answer questions and post and be part of a discussion.
Never Enough Time (or Credit)
Shafer: Any time an instructor is asked or volunteers to introduce new technologies in a classroom, the set-up time in advance of that course is much more extreme than for any other course. [In one such case,] I spent a large portion of my time trying to track down the hardware to teach the class. We all know it changes every two seconds.
And being given credit academically for the introduction of that technology is something that we hear about in every faculty meeting.
Question: We put a lot of resources into technology, both in terms of funding and in terms of human hours. Is it worth it? And how do we know that?
Barnett: Instructors should be able to save time and effort by using technology, but in fact we are doing a lot of the administration instead now, so we have to deal with posting materials and learning all the different software and posting grades online and so forth. So our jobs have expanded rather than been shrunk by technology.
Podgor: We do an extensive survey on our students using electronic education, and the students say they work a lot harder when they take an electronic class. They also love it. They think it is wonderful because their voices are heard. It depends on how you do it. It depends on what format you use, what type of interaction you might have online, how you present the questions, and exactly how you put it together. It takes a lot of time to do it right. It really does.
Nolasco: Teachers who actively engage their students in a face-to-face classroom can actively engage their students online. That is the bottom line, as far as I'm concerned.
Barnett: From an administrative standpoint, do you have a clue whether or not we [faculty members] are doing anything effectively, or we are just entertaining effectively?
Pastorino: Well, we do alumni surveys, so we follow students two, five, eight years out, and then ask them for feedback on what was most helpful.
Madden: We assess the writing program every semester using a tool developed by our testing-and-evaluation department. There is a whole week required for all composition instructors before classes begin, and they point out what percentage are weak in writing introductions, et cetera, et cetera. I'm surprised, though, that there is not more stellar improvement in the writing, which concerns me.
Barnett: We are reading a lot into this assessment stuff, especially here at USF, and what worries me is that we are being held responsible for outcomes when, in fact, we cannot control the amount of effort that they put into it.
Shafer: I was attending a function in which one of the leadership folks was saying, "Well, we need to develop a new assessment tool." And this is like the 14th or 15th time we have revamped an assessment tool in the college. One of my colleagues stood up and said, "I'm tired of being assessed. When are we going to start assessing our students?" I think there is imbalance there.
Interruptions in the Classroom
Blumenstyk, moderator: How do you handle classroom interruptions — texting, use of laptops?
Piccard: I tell my students, "If your phone rings, please get up, go outside to answer it, and do not come back." And this is the first semester in nine years at Stetson that I have allowed laptops.
Podgor: I'm the opposite. I welcome the laptops; I want students online in my class. I think they are capable of multitasking.
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