1. Be the First to Buy Hot New Technology (#1 of Ten Things I No Longer Believe)

(Revised November 22, 2009)

This series of posts begins with five goals for programmatic change, each of which can be advanced by some use of technology (e.g., digital technologies, new buildings, academic resources -- in this series we focus mainly on the digital technologies but the logic will often apply to other facilities as well.) Those five goals are using technology to:

1. Attract outside attention, good people (students and faculty), and money to the program
   
2. Improve learning outcomes (results)
3. Enroll more (and more kinds of) students
4. Save money
5. Save staff time
   

We begin with using technology to attract attention, good people and money to your program. The old strategy for doing so: Be the first. Your program should leap to spend big bucks on the hot new technology that everyone has just started talking about. Be #1 before your competitors can claim that honor. Use the purchase to identify your program with that technology in order to make your program more visible and thereby attract good people (students and staff) and gain financially (grants, gifts, discounts from the vendor of that technology).

For example, promise that every new student or staff member will get popular technology X, or have access to service Y. Or, if technology Z is in hand, publicize how many of your people or courses use it. Cite the amount of money spent on the technology to dramatize your program's commitment. Use the name of the technology or its vendor in conjunction with the name of your program in recruitment and grant proposals (e.g., "We are the Z University").

Obviously, programs also hope to use their technology somehow for educational gains. But what distinguishes this strategy from the four I'll describe in coming weeks is the hope that the acquisition of the technology will itself lead to visibility and thereby to material gains.

More often than not, this strategy seems to be associated with an educational theory that might be labeled, "Technology is magic." Advocates might simply assert, "This technology is so exciting in its potential and is easy enough to use that faculty and students are bound to embrace it and do any number of good things with it!!!"

HOW TO EVALUATE THIS STRATEGY'S SUCCESS: Did your program actually achieve lasting gains in visibility and thereby material gains, relative to its competitors? (Each of these posts will include brief notes about how to evaluate its strategy.) That's strategy #1.

Think back five or more years ago; do you know of an academic program that has followed this strategy? Did they achieve the results they sought? To write about it (and feel free to leave the program anonymous), click the 'comment' button below and respond to any of the following questions:

• Were there gains in visibility, staffing or money? Did those gains diminish quickly as some competitors waited for prices to drop and then bought the same technology? Did other competitors wait until the buzz about technology X faded, and then buy hot new technology Y?
  
• Worse, were their efforts to use technology X for programmatic improvement sabotaged by technological change itself? For example, if hot new technology X was great for visualization, two years later did the program's innovative staff shift focus to a newer technology Y, a technology that promised a very different educational improvement? Did each of these promises whip by so quickly, each new one distracting attention from the last new one, so that none were ever fully realized?
  
• Once the program bought into the new technology, was it difficult to find enough qualified support staff who also understood education well enough to help staff learn to use it effectively for teaching?

In most programs I've seen over the last thirty years, these big investments in a hot new technology often failed to produce the material or educational gains that been the topic of such much hype a few years earlier. My next post in this series suggests an alternative way to use technology to increase a program's visibility and thereby to attract people and resources: a strategy much more likely to produce lasting gains.

Ten Things I (no longer) Believe About Transforming Teaching and Learning with Technology: Introduction

(revised November 23, 2009)

Working on a curriculum committee? planning a new academic building? are you a chief information officer? director of a teaching center? Welcome to this discussion!

I've been writing a series of posts about how to improve (or even transform) college education.  I'm 60 now, and I've begun to realize that I've changed my mind about a lot of things I used to believe in that area.

I first heard about an imminent technology revolution in higher education when I was a senior in high school.  Initially the change was to affect how people learned and what they learned (e.g., programming). Later the hopes also grew to include who could learn (e.g., distance learning) and a reduction in the costs of instruction.

I heard more about this coming transformation when I was in college, in graduate school, as a program officer for the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (1978-85), as a senior program officer with the Annenberg/CPB Projects (1985-96), at the American Association for Higher Education (1996-97), and since Steve Gilbert and I founded the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Group (1998- ), a non-profit that supports over 100 colleges and universities around the world.

The buzz continues, continually changing its details. The catalyst would be mainframe engineering analysis and design programs. It would be simulations, computer-aided instruction, microcomputers, computer-aided design, videodisc, email, distributed laboratories, hypertext, Gopher servers, math tools, the Web, asynchronous learning networks, national learning infrastructure, streaming video, ePortfolios, eLearning, blended courses, course redesign, iPods, clickers, lecture capture, smart phones, digital cameras, social networking,...

Each new technology changed important elements of the direction -- students learning to program in BASIC on microcomputers would learn to think logically and creatively for themselves, videodisc would make education more visual and interactive, HyperCard would trigger a wave of hypertextual, interdisciplinary thinking...

There are common threads to this rapidly flickering vision, ideas that I've heard repeatedly over the decades:

• Education will shift the student's role from passive to active. 
• Education will become more self-paced. 
• Many new kinds of students will be involved. 
• As more of the explaining function of education becomes embodied in technological materials, the faculty role will shift from always being the 'sage on the stage' toward spending more of their time coaching and managing the learning process("a guide on the side"). 
• Although the upfront costs would be large, there will be cost savings, too. 
• And the exponential improvement in the power and efficiency of computer chips will help assure that the wave of change that we could already see would soon accelerate. 

Those are frequently repeated hopes.

THE BAD NEWS

Since 1966, most predictions I've heard for technology-driven, paradigm-shifting change in the "how" of learning have not come true - not pervasively, not yet.

For example, most of today's students still seem to do most of their learning through what instructors and textbooks explain to them, for example. The students' job is still mainly to take notes, preparing to verify on the test that they have understood what they have been told. (Do you agree that this was, and is, the norm in colleges? If not, what was the norm 20-40 years ago? has the norm changed?). I think the norm has changed a little, but not in the ways most people predicted years ago.

Please add your own observations (click the 'comment' button below.)

What claims for technology-driven change in learning did you hear, 5-10 years ago or more?

What did you think that academics would need to do in order to achieve that improvement in learning on a programmatic scale?

Have any of those hoped-for improvements in learning actually happened across your program?
Which predicted changes in learning have not yet occurred on that scale? Why not?

• Were those goals for changes in learning actually unattainable or over-valued?
• Were there problems with the proposed strategy for achieving those changes?
• Was the new technology of the day inadequate to the task?

Link to: The first thing I no longer believe: to attract attention, people and resources, be the first to buy into the hottest new technology.