How to Find What Clicks in the Classroom

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By JUDITH TABRON

Three years ago, when I returned to university information-technology administration from teaching, I thought that I might have missed key developments in the uses of technology for teaching purposes during my two years away. Two years is a long time in technology terms. But most of the issues facing instructional technology are the same now as they were 15 years ago, when I started using technology to try to foster changes in teaching.

The tools are good — better than ever, in fact. People can now figure out on their own how to send an e-mail message or click on a Web link. Classroom audiovisual technologies are cheaper and easier to use.

Yet time after time, when I visit a campus, read an article, or talk to colleagues, I'm surprised at how low the adoption rates of technology really are. Colleges and universities have ended programs that rewarded early adopters for trying the latest gee-whiz thing. At the same time, many of my IT colleagues still give presentations on gee-whiz technologies that they built in the hope that someone would come.

And most higher-education administrators feel that they did their bit for instructional technology when they adopted course-management systems in the 1990s. Having saddled themselves with the costs, they are looking for ways to expand the uses of the systems without increasing the expenses.

The trouble is that it's going to take a long time for academe to figure out what to do with all the technology it already has — and we need time and money to do that. Teaching is a complex activity, an odd combination of creativity and planning. And not only are the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and creative arts different from one another, but every course has its own personality.

All too many tools facilitate less-desirable teaching methods. My IT colleagues often observe that what course-management systems like Blackboard do well is deliver material. Here's your stuff: Read it, absorb it, review it. What the systems do not do well is facilitate interaction. Here are your peers and teachers: Listen, talk, challenge, answer, try, fail, try again. Both the true liberal-arts curriculum and the online world are examples of revolutions in communication. We have to figure out how to use the latter in service to the former.

New social-networking software, sometimes referred to as Web 2.0, could be great for education. Communicating via blogs, or aggregating and sharing information with tools like del.icio.us or Digg, are all the rage among our students, and even if they don't want us interjecting instant messages about their homework into their networks, we need to investigate such tools just the same. We will teach differently only when we've tried a lot of different things, and we must expect to encounter both hits and misses along the way.

If an institution truly wishes to encourage innovations in its curriculum, it must devote resources to those innovations. I do not mean one-time purchases of glitzy software. The investments that have the greatest impact provide a physical space and put properly trained people in it, people who can help faculty members try new things in teaching. IT-staff members with teaching experience and an understanding of the mission of liberal-arts education need a place in which to demonstrate the latest technologies. And they need both space and time to help professors develop new types of lessons, assignments, and grading methods that can fundamentally change how teaching and learning happen.

Institutions also need to lower barriers to the adoption of new technology, and lower the risk involved in using it. Faculty members who try new teaching tools shouldn't be penalized by peers who think they're spending too much time "playing with toys" — unless, of course, that is what they are doing. Departments and schools need to take hard looks at their curricula, as well as at criteria for faculty evaluations and tenure. Student-evaluation forms ought to be flexible, and administrators ought to take into account students' resistance to learning in ways different from the ones they used so successfully in high school.

And IT departments have to resist the urge to reabsorb the resources set aside for such efforts. Sometimes even IT people newly assigned to the instructional mission would rather solve more-immediate problems like broken printers. The departments must learn how to build the market for their services among faculty members who are not early adopters — a task that takes years.

Of course there are always printers and other machines to fix, basic services to upgrade, and so on. It may seem frivolous to reserve even part of the time of part of the staff to keep looking into new tools, trying out podcasts or Second Life or wikis and figuring out how they might help students learn. It's easy to let the everyday needs push the longer-term wants into the background.

But that is how IT-staff members must help in the development of teaching methods for the wired world. They are the ones who should try out the newest technologies, winnow out the fads or the tools that can't be adapted for use by thousands or millions of students, and figure out how to align the best tools with the best teaching methods. Without that experimentation, the instruction we offer will never be truly innovative.

Colleges may feel that they can't afford to provide any space and time for improving teaching. They may blame faculty members, students, or even society for a lack of innovation in education — and those charges may well be fair. But colleges unwilling to plant the seeds for change shouldn't be surprised that they grow nothing.

It may seem that the seeds are too expensive, but we have a compelling reason to pay the price: Our students live online. They fall in love, they shop, they order pizza on the Web. Their iPods, TV's, and Xboxes are sophisticated technologies. They instant-message their blogs from their cellphones, and they can't picture college having a place in any of this, because we haven't shown them that it can.

It will be a dismal future if the only thing our graduates cannot do online is learn.

Judith Tabron is director of faculty computing services at Hofstra University.