from Inquiry, Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 1999, 45-53
© Copyright 1999 Virginia Community College System
Abstract
McCartan explores what VCCS faculty are using technology for instruction, how technology is being used, the purposes for using technology, and faculty work issues related to the use of technology.
[Adapted from a paper presented at New Horizons Conference by Anne-Marie McCartan.]
Excited as we are by the instructional technology presentations, demon strations, and panels that surround us at our annual New Horizons conferences, it is important to reflect on the implications of this brave new world of computer-assisted instruction being used at our colleges. The description that British writer Barbara Ward offered about an earlier era rings true for higher education today: "We live in an epoch in which the solid ground of our preconceived ideas shakes daily under our certain feet." Nowhere have the foundations undulated for educators more than with the challenges of new media. Essential to this challenge is an understanding of technology, how and why it’s being used, and faculty work issues related to the use of technology.
Who is using technology for instruction
In the fall of 1998 as I update a talk I first gave last spring, the question "Who is using technology for instruction" is even more likely to be "Who isn’t!"
The first wave of users included primarily those for whom computers are the outcome of a program that focuses on computer literacy: information systems technology, computer science, and computer repair.
The second wave included faculty for whom computers have become the tools of the trade. Most of our technical areas have evolved into computer-based fields. Where once the students and professionals in such disciplines as graphic design, accounting, instrumentation, and even automotive never touched a computer, the work of those fields today is now based on % in some cases dependent upon % computer applications. As an example, in March 1998 the VCCS Drafting and Design Peer Group voted to rename their program area "Computer-Aided Design" in recognition of the transformation of that discipline from drawing boards to computers.
The third group includes faculty who integrated computers into teaching as a tool for teaching the subject. Just as computers have increasingly become the technology used by various industries, so have educators increasingly used them. Faculty in disciplines for which graduates are not required to have computer skills % particularly university transfer subjects % are using computers for instructional purposes. Examples include word processors and collaborative writing software in English classes, interactive modules for foreign language instruction, and multidimensional images of the human body in software used by anatomy and physiology faculty, led by Bill Hightower of SSVCC and his colleagues in the A.D.A.M. users’ group. Electronic mail and the World Wide Web have enlarged the circle of faculty using information technology to support and deliver instruction so that few disciplines do not incorporate computer applications into students’ experience.
How faculty are integrating technology into teaching
Faculty are using technology in four areas.
# Within the classroom: By now what teacher hasn’t at least seen if not used a PowerPoint presentation? Many colleges have retrofitted classrooms so that faculty can enhance their lectures and illustrate concepts and skills with computer-based presentations, instructional software and simulations. Some professors have scheduled their classes in a networked lab so that every student has access to computer applications to support learning.
# Outside class: Examples abound, as when faculty assign projects that require using a computer lab or the Internet. E-mail is used for communication outside class between the instructor and students as well as among students.
# As a whole class. There is an explosion in technology-based distance delivery: videocourses, Internet-based classes, and compressed video. In the VCCS in the fall of 1998, all but two colleges delivered or received at least one course via distance technologies. Colleges delivered 154 courses using the compressed video network and offered 406 courses asynchronously. Over 12,000 students took these courses % up 33 percent from the previous fall.
# As a teaching management tool. More and more faculty are using software to build class rosters and manage grading and other recordkeeping, to develop testbanks, to put handouts on the World Wide Web, and to receive assignments electronically. They are using their hard drives as virtual filing cabinets to store text and images.
And, of course, many faculty are doing all of the above, selecting the most appropriate technology for their classes and their students.
Why faculty are using instructional technology
What motivates faculty to use these complex and expensive new tools is probably the most interesting question of all and the one that has the widest variety of answers. When I have asked our faculty what motivates their use of instructional technology, I have found the following:
# Some teachers always try to integrate new instructional methods % pedagogy % into their teaching. For them, a new technology is another tool worth trying in order to assess its potential impact on student learning. These teachers are the same ones experimenting with learning communities, study groups, service learning, and one-minute papers to give students a variety of opportunities to learn and interact.
# Some faculty have found new technologies that fit their teaching philosophy. If their goals are not so much to transmit information as to help develop independent learners, then multimedia tools may foster the student-constructed projects encouraged by Randy Bass of the American Crossroads Project. If their goals are to promote active and interactive learning % to move from being the Sage on the Stage, to the Guide on the Side % then conferencing tools may facilitate collaboration among students with faculty as coaches or mentors. If faculty are committed to writing and reading as learning approaches, e-mail and web forums provide students with opportunities to write to each other and to read each other’s words.
# Some faculty are using computer applications because they have already seen an improvement in student learning and want to extend it, for example, to better understanding of content and concepts when approached from a variety of perspectives or more convincing arguments with multiple examples of students, teachers, researchers, and others available through CDs or the World Wide Web (WWW). Multimedia can be multisensory, communicating information in a wider range of ways than lecture or class discussion or independent reading assignments permit.
Faculty see new learning opportunities for students who previously might have been lost. Faculty might use applications that complement learning styles not addressed by the lecture method. About ten percent of students who never participate in classroom discussions may become active participants in a class e-mail discussion list or newsgroup or bulletin board where they have time to reflect before they communicate, where they don’t have to look anybody in the eye or be the object of another’s gaze.
# For some teachers, new technologies work because they help increase student time-on-task. Daniel Himes, who teaches physics at NVCC-Alexandria, sees students as task-oriented, not learning-oriented. He incorporates new technology tools to provide tasks for students . For instance, in addition to the time-honored hands-on lab, he has them use a computer simulation to better understand the principle of the behavior of masses attached to springs. The simulation allows students to change the parameters easily and quickly and to see how the principles manifest themselves under a wide range of circumstances. And no goggles required!
# In many instances, computer applications address a pedagogical problem a faculty member has long struggled with. For instance, teachers in the social sciences and humanities have always been frustrated with the lack of original source materials available at community colleges as a result of constrained resources. The WWW has minimized this problem. Now faculty and students have access not only to journals through VIVA but also to a wide range of discipline-specific materials at other colleges and universities. Shared resources are a hallmark of much Web-based information. As one faculty member has said, "It’s amazing the things you can do [through the WWW] to open up the world for students."
# Some faculty are attracted to new technologies as "the wave of the future." And let’s face it, there’s no longer any question that with computer technology, the future becomes the present at a faster rate than before, and the impact of the WWW on our entire culture, not just on education, is increasingly apparent to all of us.
# Finally, there are faculty like Bob Vawter of RCC for whom the new technologies make teaching fun. And, as one faculty member put it, "Learning should be fun." For Generation X learners, the more their own community college looks like MTV, the happier they are.
Faculty Work Issues
There are five factors related to using technology that I’ve called the five T’s: Teaching, Training, Time, Technical Support, and Terms (and Conditions of Employment).
# Teaching
Teaching is what the VCCS is all about. "At issue is the basic job description of the professor," reports the Chronicle of Higher Education (Oct. 3, 1997). It’s a very strong statement, but if you listen to faculty who are really using technology for instruction, you’ll start seeing the signs. I’m talking about faculty like Donna Reiss, who is on the English faculty at TCC. After a brief conversation with Donna, you will be convinced that technology has transformed her notion of teaching and of being a teacher. I’ve heard her proclaim that the possibilities for interactive computer-supported instruction "turn your thinking about teaching and learning inside out." We recently released the latest Request for Partners grant under the VCCS Courseware Project, and Donna asked me, "What’s a ‘course’?" She understood what she was asking me, but I’m not quite there yet!
With the proliferation of information in every field, the job of professor is no longer simply to provide access to information. Information % really too much of it % is out there in droves. It’s now more then ever the job of the instructor to help students learn how to find, analyze, and synthesize information. And the availability of the WWW as a giant virtual textbook allows professors to refocus their instruction on analysis and understanding, but at the same time it threatens to overwhelm them with how to get organized to do so.
Questions exist as to how far faculty can experiment with methods and formal and or informal assessment techniques. During a watershed period in education, are mistakes along the way acceptable? Do students become in some sense faculty’s guinea pigs? But if you wait to iron out all the bugs, might the tool you’re using be obsolete by the time you’re ready? Another question is whether or not faculty are ready and willing to give up the control that typifies the classroom setting. A faculty member teaching a Web-based course was quoted in a Chronicle article as describing the interaction taking place over the class listserv thusly: "It’s like we’re all in a cave, and it’s really dark, and we’re feeling around, saying ‘Are you there yet?’" He sounded profoundly uncomfortable that he and the students were equally in the dark.
Some faculty believe that their colleagues are jumping onto the bandwagon before they’ve adequately assessed what’s best for the situation. Sam Pincus, who teaches history at PVCC, wrote a wonderful paper in defense of the lecture to deliver before his PVCC colleagues. The best method of teaching, he writes, depends on the discipline, the topic, the instructor, the students, and the goals of the class. Simply dumping computer applications into the mix does not necessarily improve the outcome. We must give careful consideration to the ways any technology best serves students. And we must always ask what might be lost along the way: the importance of the spoken word, the inflection of the voice, the emphasis by a professor on a word or phrase, the fever pitch of excitement at a crucial point in a lecture, the face-to-face contact, the touch of humor.
Many fear that computers can do little to strengthen the bond that is the core of education, that is, the relationship between teacher and student. Faculty wonder whether or not they can really get to know their students as individuals through these new media.
Another fear is the loss of those things faculty deliver beyond "knowledge and skills." My dissertation looked at what most influences students in their career choices. Number one on the list was advice from faculty, from faculty the students knew and trusted because they had developed a comfortable relationship with them over time. Will this all be lost? Or might one assume that new methods will replace the old, that faculty will learn to read understanding into students’ on-line chats just as they once read their faces, that students who might have been reluctant to share thoughts in person will be more comfortable doing so over a data line?
Nancy Palumbo, who teaches psychology at GCC, says that in her on-line course, since students have to write into a forum, read each other’s comments, and respond to each other, they are definitely interacting and building relationships. And if you hear Karen Newtzie of RCC describe what happened between students on two campuses taking her speech class over compressed video, you’ll realize they developed an "esprit de corps," albeit one different from that which would have developed if they were all in a single classroom. Students in Web classes designed around interactive on-line communities regularly report that they’ve had more and more meaningful contact with each other and their professor than in many face-to-face classes.
# Training
I hope I’m being objective when I say that, at least in the VCCS, we have acknowledged from the beginning the need for training. All of the following initiatives have sought to address this need:
# New Horizons
# demonstrations of technology applications at almost every peer-group meeting,
# the Learning Technology Skills certification program,
# the requirement that each college’s technology plan address faculty development needs,
# the appearance of PODS (Professional Development Opportunities) at many colleges,
# and college-based programs where faculty mentor faculty. At some colleges the Teaching Learning Technology Roundtables have emphasized faculty and staff development.
All that said, we are not over the hump in attending to training. Until the technologies stop evolving-should we be so lucky!- training must continue to be accessible and affordable.
# Time
I attended a technology conference recently at George Mason University where a keynote speaker argued that the reason more faculty are not participating is the "fear factor." Jim Jackson, who teaches business at NVCC-Manassas, leaned over to me and whispered, "Wrong. It’s an economic decision. A faculty member asks him or herself, ‘If I invest the time, is it worth it?’" As Donna Reiss of TCC says, "Interactive Web-based classes are two to three times more work. You have to have lots of energy and enthusiasm and tenacity." And time.
# Technical Support
If you ask college administrators what their biggest problem is in technology, they will tell you it is providing the level of technical support necessary to satisfy faculty’s need for reliable, high-end computers in their offices and dial-in access from home to use their college network accounts, e-mail, and the Web; appropriate software for on-line course development; technical support staff that can be contacted with questions and problems about equipment and the network; and priority for attention to these problems. As the saying goes from the baseball movie, Field of Dreams, "If you build it, they will come." So we built high-end technology for our colleges, faculty cameŻand now who’s going to maintain the field?
For faculty as well as administrators, the technical support issue is becoming an increasingly visible problem. Faculty want to use technology, but they’re learning that they have neither the desire nor the capability of becoming "experts" in equipment. They are experts in content and need partnerships with the experts in hardware and software. This is unlike the Virginia Tech faculty member teaching a Web-based course on public health history who, when asked how she managed, replied that she had the assistance of a graduate assistant, an instructional technologist, and released time. Most VCCS faculty still scramble to obtain even one of these supports.
# Terms (and Conditions of Employment)
I do believe we are past the era where faculty worry about "being replaced by computers." But I see an analogy to courtship and marriage here. Faculty and computers are past the dating stage, and for all intents and purposes are married (or at least willingly co-habitating). But there are increasing signs that many are now past the honeymoon stage, where they could overlook their partners’ slight flaws and imperfections. Not a week goes by at the System Office that someone doesn’t buttonhole me and relate a concern about a worklife issue relating to faculty and technology such as:
# Science faculty wonder why their time in a lab setting counts as three contact hours per credit hour, when they see their colleagues in the English department facilitating class in a computer lab and receiving one-to-one credit.
# Administrators wonder why they should give full contact credit to a faculty member assigned as instructor for a pre-taped video course.
# Faculty wonder why they shouldn’t receive additional credit for teaching a compressed video course that doubles the enrollment in the usual section.
At this point, each college is seeking answers to whether it should use different calculations for different types of delivery, or whether, when all is said and done, a course is a course.
What about whether it can be made a requirement to use technology? Should on-line courses be taught only by those who volunteer or be required of everyone? Should they be required if there is a compelling rationale such as an on-campus class that didn’t make at a college that needs the enrollments or if the specialized course will only have sufficient enrollment if taught by compressed video to both campuses? Earlier this year the faculty at York University (Canada), through their collective bargaining agreement, negotiated that no professors would be forced to use technology against their will.
One might ask if pedagogy has ever been dictated! Is it someone’s responsibility to ensure that faculty are using the latest in teaching tools? If so, how so % by prodding, by examples or by incentives?
Then there’s what I call "The Dilemma of the Existing Rules." By Existing Rules, I mean such things as semesters, contact hours, credit hours, teaching loads. On the one hand, these rules are designed to assure order, predictability, and equity for faculty. For faculty concerned that administrators will use technology as an excuse to alter work rules, rules serve as protection. On the other hand, faculty who are pushing the edge of the envelope see some of these Existing Rules as constricting and a hindrance to innovation. In these cases, they view administrative concerns about required workload as missing the mark. Faculty question why if they’re communicating through e-mail every night from home with students, they still need to hold office hours for ten hours a week.
As we monitor the VCCS distance learning management model (which determines how FTES and tuition are split when one college delivers a course to another), faculty told us the major roadblock to their participation: It is their division chair’s insistence on meeting the productivity expectations for that course. Unless the model gets away from requiring that a distance-delivered class be as full as an on-campus course % or it will be cancelled % distance learning between colleges will never thrive.
More and more concerns are being raised about copyright and intellectual property. The scenario usually goes something like this. A faculty member receives a grant to work on a course using technology and begins to wonder if the product of his or her work will become the property of the VCCS. If he or she receives a grant for one course released time but end up spending considerable personal time developing the product, who actually owns the on-line lecture/course? If the faculty member decides to test the marketability of the product, who garners the profits? Our system, and presumably every college, has a written intellectual property policy. But a cursory examination of that policy reveals that it was not written with software and courseware development in mind.
Additional questions are whether or not those attempting innovation should be evaluated differently than other faculty and on what basis they should be evaluated: for trying something new , on whether or not it "works," or on the basis of outside security and quality control not required of other classroom-based courses.
Our excitement about the ways new technologies can enhance the learning experience of our students and reach students who might not have been able to take our classes otherwise is deserved as we look at the innovations of faculty throughout the VCCS, illustrated every year at our New Horizons conference. The New Horizons Conference provides one forum for sharing the results of our explorations and attempting to answer together the difficult questions surrounding technological innovations.
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Note: The author wishes to thank Ms. Donna Reiss, Associate Professor, English-Humanities, and Coordinator of On-line Learning, at Tidewater Community College, Virginia Beach, for her insightful review and careful editing of this piece.
Anne-Marie McCartan has had the pleasure of working with community-college faculty in Virginia, Massachusetts, and California. Currently she serves as vice chancellor for Academic Services and Research at the VCCS System Office. A native of Washington state, her undergraduate and master’s degrees are from the University of Washington in Seattle. She received her Ed.D. from Harvard Graduate School of Education.