Technology

Stimulated by concerns about costs, discussions about productivity and efficiency in higher education have turned increasingly to how new classroom technologies can be used for course delivery and archiving, research, and teaching innovation.(9) With every year, students and professors produce and transmit more digital course content, often using the easy informality of wikis, blogs, and a host of powerful Web 2.0 computing tools. Already, in fact, according to a recent report by The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Today’s high-school students, the so-called New Millennials, see their educational futures built almost entirely around technology.”(10)

Undergraduates travel—and continue to remap—a shared, collaborative world with a rapid and mobile access to information. They are able to collect, document, and reflect upon their learning with online portfolios, and they maintain ongoing discussions through the use of social networking tools, spinning longer and more interwoven threads of dialogue and exchange with informants known and unknown. They are excited by this world, which their technology has reduced to a community. In order for our teaching to be effective, we must understand how undergraduates obtain, share, analyze, problem-solve, save, and distribute these data and information.

To be sure, technology is increasingly transforming the once-hierarchical teacher/student relationship, in which the teacher now often assumes the role of a facilitator—“less an oracle and more an organizer and guide, someone who adds perspective and context, finds the best articles and research, and sweeps away misconceptions and bad information.”(11) As part of this community, then, we must gain a better understanding of changing student needs, given the new ways that students research, write, produce, and disseminate, or otherwise create, information. Clearly, we must be prepared to help our students look to the future and consider whether there are new methods of doing research and scholarship available to us and how the resulting information is saved, re-created, preserved, taught, and shared. As teachers, we must have meaningful conversations about our students’ digital creations and provide the proper rubrics for assessing them; we will need to be familiar and facile with the methods and technologies that are commonplace in our undergraduates’ culture and world.

Recommendations for Technology

  • Equip all classrooms to engage students with technology and tools.
  • Ensure that students graduate with both the existing and projected technological competencies that are required by their field of study.
  • Ensure that our classrooms enable the use of “lecture capture” technology, wireless devices, clickers and other hand-held response tools, podcast assignments, presentation software, and laptop computers.
  • Prepare faculty to use technology at the same pace as our undergraduate students through faculty seminars, information, and training.
  • Create online summary lectures, or modules, that will allow students to gain the foundational knowledge necessary to take a course in another college, outside their majors.

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9. Deans visiting our Committee, and, to be sure, many others writing in the recent academic literature, have warned of a growing nationwide concern over the cost of university education, and suggested that one strategy for survival would lie in the use of technology blended learning, or in learning modules. They are not alone in this concern, and there is persuasive data indicating that university education in the United States should be braced for a financial recalibration. As a recent Chronicle article has indicated,

  • “… over the past 25 years, average college tuition and fees have risen by 440 percent—more than four times the rate of inflation and almost twice the rate of medical care.”

  • “… enrollment at community colleges and other public institutions has risen by as much as 35 percent.”

The article concludes by recommending that universities consider technology as a cost-reduction measure, and cites an average 40-percent reduction in costs at universities that worked with the National Center for Academic Transformation to use instructional technology. The use of certain blended-learning modules could take the place of traditional prerequisites that often restrict students from taking courses in other colleges and outside their “comfort zone.” Indeed, learning modules will be used extensively as part of the curriculum of the new University Honors College, scheduled to accept its first class in Fall 2010.

10. “The College of 2020: Students,” Chronicle Research Services (June 2009), 7.

11. Ibid., 5.