Perhaps IT employees already know how to use such tools. I am self taught but have been evangelizing wikis to my faculty colleagues. I have even voluntarily led a faculty workshop on wikis--just to help my colleagues learn how to use them.

I think there are at least three problems that might explain this "gap" between IT and faculty attitudes. First, for many faculty there is a learning curve: on top of structuring course material, they have to learn the vagaries of specific software or platforms. Second, there are so many options for tech tools many faculty don't know which are most appropriate for their teaching style. Who can guide them to the tools most useful for their teaching? Third, many faculty, at least at my institution, don't have enough technical support in the classroom. Let's say an instructor has prepared a class period on collaborative work on a wiki: the network goes down (too frequent an occurrence on our campus) or the data projector malfunctions. S/he calls computer services for help--no one is available to troubleshoot until it is too late.

The existence of technology tools is not enough. Faculty need help, training, and technical support before such tools can be used effectively.

The information-technology staff members provide support across all faculty members, so their answers probably would reflect the perceived needs across all faculty. Faculty are likely answering just for themselves. Faculty have to pay a lot of attention to what is going on in their own field, they have to keep up-to-date with what often turns out to be a moving target. For professors, learning, developing, and practicing applications of new learning technologies is a whole other work effort that goes on top of their existing full time job of being a teacher and a scholar (and often a researcher). Another factor is that a professor can get burned by investing a lot of time developing and learning tech applications if then, he or she turns out not to be teaching that course next year or term, or if changes in the text or field renders the tech application out-of-date. For IT, on the other hand, the technology is their bread-and-butter, so naturally ... (you'd better bet) it matters.

Bernard Schuster
Arrive2.net

At Queens College, where I teach, seven different sign-ons are required for students to have full access to the various types of computer systems they need: Account to Claim College System Account, College System Account, E-mail Account, Blackboard Account, Cuny Portal Account, MyQc Web Account, Portal Account for Library Access, Account for Remote Access.

Any of these tools: wikis, e-portfolios, blogs, add still another level of access issues and make teaching even more difficult with extremely limited resources.

In a recent survey, we found tht about 15% of students do not have adequate access to do their work in a Statistics class. About half drop out, and the other half jump through significant hoops to get them.

In the words of Van Holland (former UMICH Tech Guru) "No more miracles please."

You can easily fix the sign-on problem. Just use a student portal that supplies all needs in one place. A very simple aggregator of all contant in one place that is accessible 24/7/365. This is the problem. Just take a look at my site and see.
http://www.thecampuscenter.com everything in one place and for free no seat charges no cost.

I'll throw in an IT prefessional's point of view: It's our job to be futurists in this area. Pin one of us down and we'll admit that we don't know which of the tools we advocate for today will still be around in 10 years, but we also know that if they're not around, the functions will be subsumed into other things. We also know, from supporting our student populations, that the students are trending strongly towards a preference for online communications. Morningsider made the important point that many faculty don't know how to use, or are uncomfortable, with these tools. From experience I can promise you that they will get easier to use over time, but in the meantime we're here to help you, and if you want to reach your students, you'll find them online.

@beveridge - There are many single sign-on technologies that would help with that. Industry standards like LDAP and Kerberos are supported by most systems (email, Blackboard, etc.) and can be used to synchronize passwords across multiple login environments.

My school decided to bite the bullet and deploy a solution to mitigate this same problem a few years back. It's a fair amount of legwork, but not especially cutting edge or difficult for most environments.

(Oh, I forgot to mention - Blackboard does _not_ support LDAP authentication on their lowest tier product, forcing you to buy a huge and expensive bundle of additional services instead. They're an exception. We got around the problem by switching to another LMS, since our contract with them ended during this deployment.)

There are a number of problems, the usual budget issues, management by committee, lack of training, dated and overly complex systems and tools, poor direction, lack of faculty involvement in understanding IT and not feeling inclusion in IT decisions.

That all said I believe the biggest issue is digital immigrants teaching digital natives. The most digitaly enabled and accepting are the adjuncts, the aging faculty are frozen in the digital headlights. IT personel, like the younger students live with tech so they accept it.

I'm in computer science, and if anything, tend to be ahead of our IT staff when it comes to nifty online tools. My teaching is of course very dependent on technology. My problem is, I can't get IT to adequately support the tools that I need - software repositories, bug tracking systems, any IDE other than Visual Studio - so I have to spend a lot of time doing my own setup and support. I also find that IT is its own little closed world. They don't have much inkling of the teaching needs of faculty, so the applications they choose to promote are often not that useful.

At RIT, we have a strong ITS and excellent support services for using technology in the classroom. And while older faculty tend to be lass facile with technology, it isn't uniformly true. At age 72, I have pushed myself to stay current with technology. Of course, I teach in the computing disciplines. We have access to very high quality seminares and workshops for faculty on our campus. We have access to hi-tech rooms for recording lectures. Our major problem is the strong push for scholarly endeavors, a recent (past 10 years) in the direction our institution has taken.

Every IT department has its favorite platforms; every IT person has preferred programs and ways of accomplishing any given task; every administration has different notions of the place of technology in the classroom. And those favorites and preferences and notions keep changing. If you're an adjunct working for different institutions, as more and more of us are, it's tiring and time-consuming and ultimately counterproductive to try to adjust to them all. One thing's true across the board: those most enamored of technology are the first to lose sight of the fact that it's a good servant and a bad master, and that there's no substitute for the human connection necessary for good teaching.

The DynamicBooks platform is an e-book that enables instructors to upload online documents, audio and video and also to edit the text to make it more relevant for students. What do you think? Will instructors in 21st Century classrooms customize e-books for their students or use them as is?

#9 (csgirl) - I'm at a comprehensive state institution with 8500 students and 300 faculty. All of our general-use classrooms (appx 100) have a base level of technology with upgrades performed regularly and newgen technology implemented as budget allows. What we provide and support is a result of what faculty members request. And, we do it with 2.5 FTE.

Get off your high horse. You're not the only instructor on campus and you're not the only one we support.

From the title I thought this article would be about the classroom itself - i.e. what technologies need to be installed in a classroom, such as data projectors and smart boards.

In any case, from an IT / teaching support point of view, I agree with comment #2 above. If 25% (or even 10%) of our faculty need or want a particular technology, then that is 100% a concern for me. So I am not at all surprised that the numbers of IT people who find particular technologies to be "essential" is much higher than the numbers of faculty who say that about the same technology. I am actually surprised that the numbers for IT staff aren't higher than they are.

Reading through the comments so far, it is very clear to me that there is a great deal of variability in the kind of support that is provided to faculty. And by this I do not mean only the breadth of technologies available. I mean the support that faculty need to thoughtfully integrate technology into the curriculum. My office is dedicated to the concept mentioned by "interface" in comment #11 - namely, technology is a good servant but bad master. We try to focus on teaching & learning first and technology only when it will help. It's a difficult thing to do, as we are also bound to keep up with current trends and new technologies. We'd like to see adventurous faculty try out the new stuff so that we can gauge its utility in real life.

I wonder how many of the faculty members surveyed are teachers of foreign languages -- I'd be willing to bet that a very higher percentage of them use technology regularly (as long as they teach in institutions with the specific professional support they need) -- and not only in "labs", for doing homework, but as a constant presence in the classrooom -- if they have the kind of access they need.

Let me get this straight: The Chronicle publishes a free ad for CDW Government Inc., a private company with undisclosed interests, and there is a serious debate about the company's claims?

@alex369 Agreed. Why is this even posted here? According to the report you can contact Kelly Caraher CDW-G Public Relations for more information. Her title says it all.

As an IT guy, I couldn't sit here a "listen" to everyone saying how "easy" it is to do "single sign-on." (This is what IT folks call integrating things to the point that students -- and faculty -- don't have a separate account on each little fiefdom's system.)

Yes, the technology to do it is reasonably well-known (even if beyond the least expensive version of Blackboard and some other products). All you do it install, set up and populate a directory system (usualy LDAP), then make every system refer to it rather than its own database. But, because the various systems are, on most campuses, highly Balkanzed (at least in their ownership), many campuses, like many corporations, find it exceptionally difficult to get essentially every department to dedicate the effort (even if fairly small) to support the project, which is what's necessary to actually make it happen.

In corporations, the CEO or COO usually ends up "pushing" successful implementations, or else it takes literally years. On a campus, it often takes the President. The next person in line (on our campus, it's the Executive VP for Finance and Administration) may or may not have the necessary "pull" with some of the departments.

Don't forget, we're probably talking about everyone from the Rec center to the Religious Studies department to the Credit Union, not to mention Food Services, Computer Science and the LGBTQ Center. Did I leave out Middle Eastern studies and the repair shop behind the research labs? You get the idea.

Sure, you (or I) can describe what has to be done with one sentence. Getting it done? That's going to take a little more.

#13, you guys sound seriously overwhelmed, and I can appreciate that. I used to teach at a comprehensive state U that sounds remarkably like what you are describing. But that isn't what this article is talking about. The article seems to be discussing a gap between supremely knowledgable IT people and Luddite professors who won't adopt the wonderful technology the IT people recommend (at least, this is how the IT folks see it). This is the mentality I deal with at my current school, where we have armies of IT specialists. The problem is, our IT people are spending tons of time playing with whiz-bang technology that no professor has requested, congratulating themselves on how "advanced" they are, instead of educating themselves on the technology that we actually need and use.

Technology is sometimes useful, but hardly essential.

"For professors, learning, developing, and practicing applications of new learning technologies is a whole other work effort that goes on top of their existing full time job of being a teacher and a scholar (and often a researcher)."

Shocker, sounds like my job in the corporate world. I too have to learn new technologies in order to do my full-time job... why should professors be any different?

sorry clarification, that quote was from comment #2

And who decides if technology is essential? The professor who knows little about it or the students who use it in their other classes? Forget about the IT folks for a minute: The students' perceptions carry more weight (although ego-centric faculty will bristle at the notion that the universe does not revolve around their lecterns). If students think you're behind the curve, then it doesn't matter if you believe you're not. Perception is reality. I think we should ask our students what works and doesn't work with regard to IT, and then listen to the plurality view. It's how we make other important choices, and sounds like a way to decide about technology (assuming that students have a higher comfort-level with IT than their teachers, which is not always the case; your mileage may vary).

I work at an institution that has 47,000 students and around 5,000 staff. We have single-sign in for all centralised systems, although some faculties may have small teaching resources that students need to sign in separately for. We are presently constructing both staff and student portals so that all systems can be accessed from one page, behind the sign-in, which isn't possible at present. But everyone only needs one username and password to access financial, enrolment, HR, teaching and library resources.

I am now at the Campus Technology 2010 conference where the survey results were announced, having come to present a workshop on student-centered electronic classroom design. I read with great interest the survey questionnaire and the analysis of results. I thought the structure and wording of the questionnaire made it hard to draw clear conclusions from the responses, raising more questions than it answered.

Nonetheless, one finding seemed clear: most everyone - students, faculty, and IT staff - agree on this that *classroom* technology, at least, though essential, is not used as much as it should be. Respondents were given few choices for whom to blame, in the end pointing the finger at instructors who "can't figure it out" or "won't learn to use it," and an IT staff that "doesn't support it enough" to make it reliable. Yet rarely is any of these the real problem.

In the 15 years I designed and supported electronic classrooms at the University of Cincinnati, it became apparent that what instructors needed was not complicated, just technology that they feel is (1) useful, (2) reliable, and (3) easy to use. When it meets all three requirements, they use it a lot (80-90% of class sessions) and find it quite valuable (80-90% "essential"). The major cause by far for not using the technology (when pedagogically appropriate) is nearly always defective design or installation, most frequently in the user interface and/or control system. What our technician called "user error" is in my view actually a flaw in the system, usually the interface to the control system.

What technology supporters need to understand is that it is the instructor's perception that counts: she, not the technician or anyone else, must find the technology to be useful, reliable, and easy to use. If the system fails to consistently do what she needs and expects, then it is indeed unreliable, and we must fix it.

Malcolm Montgomery, President, EduTech Consulting Services LLC www.EduTech.US (formerly manager of electronic classroom planning and support services, Univ. of Cincinnati).

If you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Language labs and so forth have their place, of course, but I have always found that, from the wide choice of media available, the truly indispensible items for foreign-language teaching were a large, vertically oriented plane surface and a few cylinders of compressed calcium carbonate.

As others have said, the difference in perception is hardly surprising. IT people don't teach; those of us who do teach have tried many of the new, trendy methods. Some of them work well, some work okay, and some are worse than the old methods, compounded with many more headaches for the instructor who has to deal with students' technology problems. But without evidence that new technologies are better, why use them? Just because it's new, should we assume it's improved? A previous commenter referred to research on student preferences. I think most of us who teach would agree that students' preferences should not be driving the teaching process. So much wasteful spending flows from that ideological conflation of "new" and "improved." What about simply "improved"? For example, if universities were concerned about improvement, they would use their collective client power to pressure Blackboard for better design. When considering the costs and benefits, remember that more expensive technologies (and the large staffs that run them) are one reason for rising tuition and stagnant faculty wages.

#27: Our Honors Program often has classes in a Smartboard room. The student desks are always oriented so every student can view the Smartboard. Foreign Language also uses the room. After a F.L. class the desks are always facing away from the Smartboard, toward the back of the room - where the chalkboard is!

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