64 IT Pro March ❘ April 2006

Why UsingInstructionalTechnologyEffectively is Tough

A few weeks ago,I was asked to view a videoin which a chemistry professor talkedabout the epiphany he experienced regard-ing his instruction.The video was for pro-

moting new instructional methodologies particularlyrelated to technology,for faculty who continued to usetraditional classroom lectures.As I watched the videoand listened to the group that had organized the view-ing, I had an epiphany of my own. I was shocked todiscover that practices we in IT regard as common arenot necessarily common in other disciplines. In fact,some of our common practices can be revelations toothers. But first, some background.

USING ALL THIS TECHNOLOGYIt will come as no surprise to academic readers of

this column that higher education has been expend-ing enormous amounts of money to build IT infra-structures that will, among other things, enable theuse of technology in teaching and learning.Examplesinclude encouraging ubiquitous Internet accessthrough campus-wide wireless technologies, invest-ing in learning management systems (LMS) such asBlackboard and WebCT (recently acquired byBlackboard) to promote distance learning, or licens-ing or acquiring content management systems suchas the open-source system DSpace to enable (con-trolled) sharing of campus community members’ dig-ital properties.

As such technologies come online, institutions arefinding themselves forced to develop and adopt newpolicies and practices to regulate and govern the useof these technologies.These include policies concern-ing e-mail, privacy, intellectual property ownership,and so on. In addition to new-policy development,most traditional institutions of higher education havehad to develop expertise to support these new tech-

nologies. Much of the required support relates totechnical or semitechnical issues, such as, “Whichbutton do I press?” and “How do I convert fromthis file format to that?”and so on. However,someof that support relates to the user experience.

For example, when a university decides to usean open-source LMS such as Sakaii, it is facedwith IT support of an open-source system.Moreover, if this is the first LMS ever deployedon the campus, the university must also get fac-ulty to use it effectively. The latter challenge isoften greater than the former. IT support of sys-tems, open source or otherwise, is usually some-thing campuses have experience with. But gettingfaculty to teach better and students to learn bet-ter has always been a challenge; now, doing thatand using new technologies, that’s a real chal-lenge!

TEACHING WITH TECHNOLOGYMany colleges and universities support faculty

development centers staffed by people with expe-rience in the best practices of traditional teachingand learning.The advent of new technologies cre-ates a requirement to bolster staff expertise to

Sorel Reisman

Why is it so hard to makefaculty understand thepower of interactivedistance learning?

The reason is logical, but not intuitive.

Continued on page 62

T H E I V O R Y T O W E R

include teaching with technology.The best way to accom-plish this is to hire graduates of educational technologyprograms that focus on integrating new technologies withestablished bodies of knowledge in teaching and learning.

Unfortunately, and for many reasons—financial, cul-tural, political, and so on—the expertise of many facultydevelopment centers has become bifurcated into thosewho “know about computers” and those who “knowabout teaching and learning” Consequently, manyinstructor-support activities promote using new tech-nologies to teach in the same old ways. For example, manydistance learning courses are more boring than their lec-ture equivalents, because faculty development centersonly show instructors how to move their lectures, lecturenotes, and PowerPoint slides to the new campus-sup-ported LMS. Instead, they should, for example, helpinstructors to integrate Internet and Web-based resourcesinto online courses.

Some so-called distance learning is now merely a distri-bution medium for traditional class handouts. Worse yet,such courses eliminate the potentially rich,classroom-baseddialogue between the instructor and the class. Instead, stu-dents must fend for themselves to meet online assignmentsand test schedules based on their timely retrieval of docu-ments from an electronic repository of old handouts.

And this takes us back to the moments of epiphany thatI described earlier. In particular, that chemistry professorexuberantly described his discovery that his students’ learn-ing experience was far richer than ever before because heorganized them into groups,and that his own teaching expe-rience was significantly enriched through personal interac-tion with each group. Somewhat surprised by the noveltyof what I have always considered a standard classroompractice, I interrogated the video’s promoters about theirown views on this “revelation.” I was astonished to learnthat the psychology,history,and English professors (one ofeach) in the group found the video very enlightening.Nonehad ever considered dividing their students into teams toaccomplish a task—a practice at the heart of how most ofus operate in the workforce when we graduate.

WORKING IN TEAMSIn the IT industry, the single most important skill set that

employers require is the ability to communicate and workwell with others.Today, as systems become more and morecomplex, it is rare to find a work environment in which sys-tems development is not a team effort. What does it mat-ter if someone is a brilliant coder or designer if the personis unable to communicate with other team members? Thisneed is so well-recognized that every accredited US busi-

Continued from page 64

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62 IT Pro March ❘ April 2006

ness school stresses that its students must have superiorcommunication skills and be able to work well in teamenvironments. My colleagues and I use team projects inalmost every class we teach. This is even true in my non-online programming classes, where every member of theteam project must understand the code of all team mem-bers and be able to present the project logic in formal classpresentations.

With the introduction of LMSs on our campus, and usingtheir synchronous and asynchronous communicationstools (chat and threaded discussion), it was a relativelystraightforward exercise for my colleagues and me toredeploy traditional classroom teams to online teams.Although students no longer benefit as much from theoral presentation requirement, they are experiencing anew-found benefit of improved reading and writing skillsthat will carry them farther when they find themselvesworking in industry.

A s a result of this experience, I began to think aboutwhy a practice so common in business schools andespecially in IT programs is not so common in other

disciplines. Most tenure-track instructors (as opposed toadjunct or part-time instructors who are also industry prac-titioners) have themselves been the recipients (victims?)of traditional instructional practices (lectures) with little

or no exposure to teamwork in their undergraduate pro-grams.This is truly unfortunate if you consider that kinder-gartners’ sandbox play is often “graded” on their ability toget along with others!

Nonetheless, as faculty members advance through theiracademic careers, the measure of success is personalachievement.Theses and dissertations are not team efforts.And when they enter the academy, faculty win tenure andpromotion, not through team teaching or through coau-thored articles (which many departments view as less valu-able than singly authored articles), but based on theirability to be successful individual contributors. Sad as itseems, there is a real divide between many faculty mem-bers’ own learning experience and the type their studentswill need to thrive in industry.Although higher educationhas made great strides in using technology to improveinstruction quality, it must be realistic about some of thebarriers to more immediate success—not the least of whichis the personal experience of those responsible for teach-ing and learning in our colleges and universities. ■

Sorel Reisman is managing director of MERLOT, the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and OnlineTeaching. Contact him at ivorytower@computer.org.

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March ❘ April 2006 IT Pro 63

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