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| From the issue dated August 12, 2005 |
Professors Give Mixed Reviews of Internet's Educational Impact
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Although campus computing is often touted as aiding education, many professors say the Internet has actually hampered students' academic performance.
When asked whether the Internet has changed the quality of student work, 42 percent of professors in a recent survey said they had seen a decline, while only 22 percent said they had seen improvement. But a majority of participating professors, 67 percent, said the Internet had improved their communication with students.
The nationwide survey, of 2,316 faculty members, was conducted in May 2004 by Steve Jones, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Camille Johnson-Yale, a graduate student in communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The researchers have been presenting highlights of their findings at academic conferences, and they have submitted a report on the survey to a peer-reviewed scholarly journal.
"What the Internet has done, judging by this survey, is increased the amount of communication and in some ways it's improved the quality of communication," Mr. Jones said in an interview. "But that, in and of itself, doesn't necessarily translate into increases or improvements in learning."
Student plagiarism emerged as a key concern of professors. Forty-four percent agreed that plagiarism had increased in their students' work since the Internet has emerged, while 23 percent disagreed and 33 percent were undecided.
A surprising number of the professors surveyed, 74 percent, said they were using the Internet or other high-tech tools to detect plagiarism.
Mr. Jones said he was not surprised to see professors reporting some negative effects of technology.
"The thing that I hear from faculty colleagues is that there's plagiarism and cheating going on over the Internet and that there's a worsening in the quality of students' writing," he said. "I hear complaints more often than I hear any kind of positive comments about how the Internet has affected students' work."
G. David Pollick, president of Birmingham-Southern College, said in an interview that the Internet and computer tools might be dumbing down student writing.
"The style of writing is changing -- it's becoming conditioned by models and forms," he said. Grammar-checker features of word processors, for instance, often mark flowery phrases as mistakes and suggest bland alternatives, he said. "You start to lose a lot of artistic and aesthetic quality."
"It increasingly makes the language a dead language instead of a live language," he added. "If a computer model starts to become the form of communication, then what you end up with is a language that is dying instead of one that gets richer and richer through use."
Staring at the Screen
Despite their complaints, most professors surveyed, 82 percent, said that the Internet had had a positive effect on their teaching.
The survey shows that most professors log plenty of hours in cyberspace. Forty percent of participants said they spent 20 or more hours each week online, while 60 percent said they were online 4 to 19 hours per week. The survey was conducted online, however, which could have skewed it toward tech-savvy professors.
"That's an enormous amount of time but not surprising," said Mr. Jones. "The Internet has become as much a professional tool as a book or a journal article. It is hard to imagine managing one's professional life without using the Internet."
About one third of the professors said they checked their e-mail almost continuously while online, while only 7 percent said they checked e-mail once a day or less.
Ninety-eight percent said they used e-mail to communicate with students, and 73 percent said that their communication with students had increased since they began using e-mail. Professors reported that the most frequent purposes of student e-mail messages were to discuss or find out a grade, to clarify an assignment, or to set up an appointment. More than half of the professors, 55 percent, said they used course Web sites or online discussion forums to interact with students.
Even with all that online communication, some professors said they felt pressure from students to be even more responsive online. "I notice that my students just expect me to be available 24-7 via e-mail," wrote one survey respondent.
Less Time in the Library
Browsing library stacks could soon be seen as old-fashioned. Most of the professors surveyed, 83 percent, said they spent less time in the library now than they did before they had Internet access. But professors said that online journals, e-mail lists, and other Internet tools had become critical for keeping up with news and research in their disciplines. Ninety-four percent said they allowed their students to cite Internet sources in their papers.
Sixteen percent of the professors who responded said they had taught at least one online-only course. Of those who had taught online, 43 percent said they thought such courses took more preparation than did face-to-face courses.
Mr. Jones said that the survey suggested differences in technology's effects on different disciplines, though he said he would like to examine that issue more closely in a future study. "We need to be much more precise at how we deploy" technology tools, he said.
He suggested that college technology leaders offer discipline-specific workshops on how to teach with technology, rather than general workshops for all disciplines. "I think we have some real need for that sort of specificity when it comes to getting technology out there for teaching," he said.
Even after many years using the Internet, Mr. Jones said, many faculty members "are still struggling to find ways to integrate these technologies into their teaching."
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A nationwide survey of 2,316 professors conducted in May 2004 found that today's faculty members log plenty of time online, increasing their contact with students.
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http://chronicle.com
Section: Information Technology
Volume 51, Issue 49, Page A32