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This post was written as an assignment for Module 1 in EDTECH 504, where we were asked to reflect on our current thoughts on educational technology. Comments are welcome.
I have been teaching at the college level since I started my first Master’s degree in French Linguistics in 1985. Over the last almost 30 years, technology has become an integral part of society, and as such, it is also an integral part of any educational curriculum. I now teach undergraduate classes in computer education--primarily office applications and computer concepts, so technology is an integral part of my courses, both as a learning tool and as the subject we cover.
While reading through the material for Module 1, I was struck by several concepts that I came across as being relevant to my experiences in teaching, past and present.
Koller, Harvey & Magnotta give several advantages and disadvantages of technology based learning (TBL), and I agree with most of them. On the advantages side, TBL makes education and other forms of learning more accessible over time and space, in that learners can access the material when they have time to do so, and from virtually anywhere. For children, this means that learning can happen in a wider variety of venues, and children who happen to live in isolated areas can have the same access to education as their peers in more populated areas. For adults, it means that it is no longer necessary to give up an existing career to return to school to continue their education or prepare for a new career. From the learner’s perspective, the learning can be more self-paced. Instead of having to sit through a lecture or watch a video containing information they already know in a classroom environment, they can fast forward through or completely skip that material to move onto new concepts. It also means that the learner can review material frequently, and take more time to acquire new understanding if they can’t always get it in the time frame that would be expected in a traditional classroom environment, where the class as a whole is expected to move onto the next module at the same time. I agree that all of these are definite advantages that TBL offers over classroom based learning. In fact, without these advantages of TBL, I would have had to quit my current position and move my family to a different location to get the Masters degree I am currently working on through Boise State.
Koller, Harvey & Magnotta also see a process of what they term “social loafing” as a disadvantage to TBL. They define social loafing as a condition “in which learners reduce their level of effort when they perceive that doing so will not have negative impacts.” (p. 9) They claim that social loafing is more likely to happen in a TBL environment because of a lack of interactivity with the instructor or other students, which can lead to the sense that no one is watching so it doesn’t matter if they put their full effort into learning the material. This is one point with which I disagree, at least to some extent. While I agree that in a fully online environment, a learner can feel like no one is watching what they are doing, I don’t think that it is the online environment that causes that perception--it is a lack of interactivity with others. I believe that what Koller, Harvey & Magnotta refer to as social loafing is a long-standing problem in mass education, where it is virtually impossible to ensure that each student learns material in the best way for that student. In my own experiences as a student, I certainly “loafed” through some of my classes in high school and college (in the 1970s and 1980s), even without the benefit of having technology to hide behind. I put forth the effort to get the grades I wanted, but I often did not put in as much effort as I could have to learn the material, especially when the subject was not interesting to me. I frequently sat quietly in the back row and hoped the teacher would not call on me. In other words, I sought out a state where my behavior was not monitored, even in the presence of teacher.
On the flip side, from an instructor’s point of view, I see lots of examples of social loafing on the part of my students, both in the classroom and online. I teach primarily courses that could be considered “gen ed technology”--courses that deal with technology but that are geared toward students in every subject except technology. It is obvious that many of my students do not want to take the class, either because they do not have any interest in learning the material, or because they feel they already know the material well enough that they shouldn’t have to sit through class. These are the students who sit in the back row of the classroom and surf the Web or do homework for other classes instead of engaging in the material we are covering. They do the minimum amount of work required to pass the course, and resent it when I pull them aside to recommend that they pay more attention in class or come to my office hours to discuss their grade outside of class time. In the online sections, these are the students who log in once a week, make a 30-second post to that week’s discussion board and submit a paper that they spent less than 30 minutes actually composing. They typically don’t check email at all, and if I try to call them to find out what I can do to help, they assure me that they know what they are doing, then get angry with me when they receive a grade lower than an A at the end of the quarter. Many of these students believe that they should get an A simply for showing up, but most are quite happy just to get a C so they can check the course off their list and move on to the next quarter’s classes. While technology may be one tool that encourages social loafing, I do not believe that we can blame technology for creating an environment where it happens.
I believe that the best way to reduce the social loafing is to design courses that have a strong expectation of interaction between students and with the instructor, and that technology can be a useful tool toward that end. I am currently redesigning one of the classes I teach online so that it includes short projects that will be completed in small groups of 3-4 students. I chose small groups because I believe it will enhance interactivity--it’s easy to loaf when there are others who will do the work for you. The projects are also short and designed so that they can be completed individually, which allows any student to successfully complete the projects even if their team mates don’t follow through. My plan is to assign students to teams at random as each new project starts, too, so that students will have to work with several other students over the course of the ten-week quarter. Technology is required for this if only because the students will have to communicate with each other to complete the project in an online classroom. I hope that by having students monitoring each other more closely, more students will be more engaged in the class as a whole. I believe that giving each student an active role in an assignment will improve participation in the course as a whole.
Another fact that struck me in this week’s readings is that technology is a moving target, as is technology-based education. Technology that worked well ten years ago simply doesn’t work with today’s equipment, regardless of how sound the basis for that technology may still be. The concept of being able to listen to an audio track or watch a movie in a setting where the learner can fast forward and rewind to cover the material at their own speed is not new--we had a multimedia lab at Indiana University where I taught French over twenty years ago, and students were given assignments that had to be completed on their own time outside of class time. They could choose to go to the language lab and use the equipment there, or they could request recordings to play on their own equipment at home. While the concept of audio and video technology is still used today, those tapes my students used in 1988 are obsolete because very few people have cassette tape players anymore.
This artificial obsolescence is apparent in North Central Regional Educational Laboratory’s Technology in Education page included in the materials for this assignment. While I’m sure that the information referenced on that page was very useful at the time the page was built, and may even still be relevant today, many of the reference links on the page are no longer valid. The page itself does not have a date listed on it, but the most recent page that opens from that page is Technology: A Catalyst for Teaching and Learning in the Classroom, which has a date of 2005 in the copyright, but which itself appears to be based on material published in the year 2000. I was astonished to see a link to the OAK software repository, which I used heavily during my first round of graduate school to find software that could help me as both a teacher and as a student, but which no longer exists.
A final point is a reaction to a statement by Koller, Harvey & Magnotta. Part of the article includes observations about the University of Phoenix and their centralization of the online classes that they offer. They point out that the practice of creating a single core class has the advantage of being easier to update (p. 6), and the fact that the core section can be duplicated and taught by many instructors means that the course content is more uniform across sections (p. 31). While I agree that centralization is important for classes that are typically taught by multiple instructors (especially adjuncts who may not have the time or training to develop a course from scratch based only on a syllabus and textbook), it does require that the core section be updated on a regular basis to ensure that links still work and that the information in the course is still relevant to the material the students are expected to learn. In the technology classes that I teach, we typically update the course sections about once every five years--it’s not really frequent enough, but we often simply don’t have the time or resources to update them more often unless we discover that something just doesn’t work anymore at all.
The university where I currently teach is at a stagnation point in the adoption of technology, both at the campus level and at the classroom level. On the one hand, there is a pervasive belief that if computers and similar equipment are available, then faculty and students will learn how to use them, with little emphasis on helping either group understand how this works. On the other hand, there are instructors who believe that technology--especially mobile devices like smartphones--is more a distraction than a benefit. I think, though, that many other universities are at the same point--knowing that technology can be useful, but mystified about how it can help without hindering. West & Bleiberg (2013) point out that “[t]he Internet has facilitated but not changed the standard teaching techniques: lecture, group work, individual reading, and slide presentation.” (p. 8) In other words, if the instructor knows how to teach by standing in front of a group of students, then the instructor will simply use technology to create a video of a lecture in front of a group of students, and think that she is using technology to improve what her students are learning. West & Bleiberg then discuss the use of Minecraft--an online game--as a teaching tool that allows students to experiment with many different concepts. While Minecraft itself may not be a universal teaching tool, I agree that we have to learn to think outside the box to find ways that technology can be used as an educational tool, and not simply translate existing strategies into electronic formats. For example, students can create videos instead of papers, or share written material through blogs or shared documents, which could improve interactivity between the teacher and the student, as well as between the students themselves.
The use of technology in education is not new to me, but I hope that through this class--and the MET program in general--I will gain insight into specific uses of technology that I can use to help my students be more successful. I have been a strong advocate for the use of computer technology in education since I was a member of my high school’s first Computer Club in the 1970s, and I hope to continue having an influence on how my current university uses technology both in the classroom and in online classes.
References
Koller, V., Harvey, S., & Magnotta, M. (n.d.). Technology based learning strategies. Retrieved from http://www.doleta.gov/reports/papers/tbl_paper_final.pdf
North Central Regional Educational Laboratory (n.d.) Technology in education. Retrieved from http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/te0cont.htm
West, D. M. & Bleiberg, J. (2013, March) Education technology success stories. Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings. Retrieved from http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Papers/2013/3/20%20education%20technology%20success%20west%20bleiberg/Download%20the%20paper.pdf.
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