Teaching with Technology

http://mcel.pacificu.edu/jahc/2006/issue1/articles/vess.php

I finally found an article with a title I could keep for my entry this week.  The article is well written and tells the tale of a History professor teaching a survey course in World History and surveying how the students in two different formats of the course used the technology associated with the course.  If this were a movie, it would contain a legend “viewer discretion advised.”  If you are a teacher, excited about teaching with technology and eager to explore learning with motivated students who are “thirsting for knowledge,” don’t read this note! Skip to the next one. The results of this study will probably depress you.

Professor Deborah Vess teaches History at the Georgia College and State University and wrote this article in the Journal of the Association for History and Computing in the April 2006 issue.  By the way, you may recognize the name of the university because it has been in the news lately related to the sexual assault scandal involving Pittsburgh Steelers’ quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger, and a female student from this university.  

In the study, Dr. Vess compared the patterns of technology use in two sections of a course – World History to 1500. The first use was in an asynchronous class using specially developed course materials  as part of  an electronic curriculum eCoreTM, adopted by the University System of Georgia. The course materials were technologically state of the art, employing advanced Flash applications such as interactive maps, timelines, and images as well as audio, Quick Time movies, and VR files.  All of the modules of the course were accessed on line. These materials were to supplement a hard copy textbook.

The second use was a hybrid class on the same subject with regular face to face class meetings, but online access to the same eCoreTM materials. Assignments were similar in both. Dr. Vess used WebCT to track student usage and followed up with student surveys to determine how the students used the technology in both courses. Her findings were a little disturbing.

In summary, she concluded: 1) both online and hybrid class students see the internet as a place to quickly gather information needed for course projects rather than an area for scholarly exploration, 2) “usage patterns analyzed here provide little evidence that traditional narrative text transplanted into the digital environment serves the interest and needs of most students nor the general aims of the profession,” 3) the more complex the technology the less likely the students were to explore it online, 4) the online quiz feature of the materials was the most heavily accessed area, peaking during periods of study for the tests, 5) the timeline features were favored by students because they did not have to search for material in many places and the timeline feature supplied the information quickly and in small segments, 6) younger students (hybrid course had an average age of roughly 19) were less attuned to the multimedia resources than the older students (asynchronous course had an average age of 33), and 7) time spent on the pages of the computer modules was too short to gain any real insight from them.

In general, Vess writes “applications that demand large amounts of time, a willingness to explore, and the need to integrate vast amounts of material generally do not attract student interest.” She goes on to state “unless we design creative environments and assignments that prompt students to transform their online explorations into something beyond the fact byte, students will continue to see our most sophisticated multimedia applications as mere toys.”  She concludes that students want to find only the information that is absolutely needed (for a test or quiz or specific question), find the easiest way to get to it, and find it in the simplest form.

So much for the myth of students “thirsting for knowledge!”

A few observations come to mind. First, it could be that the assignments and course assessment approaches  that  Dr. Vess used (tests, etc) encourage the students to seek only the facts, not the analysis which requires a more in depth use of the materials. A solution to this would be to orient student assessment to assignments requiring more in depth use of the materials.

Second, I believe that teachers must keep in mind that students are not always the idealistic truth seekers that they, the teachers, are. Teachers are generally life long learners who seek knowledge and like to spend time exploring and, in some instances, using new technology. Many students are not. By the texts we have read, we know students in general have short attention spans, are addicted to social networking sites, texting, and gameplaying, and generally lack the ability to think critically. It should not be that much of a surprise that sometimes the technology related to higher education  still doesn’t change that student profile or their response to a more indepth analysis present in higher education oriented technology.

Third, just because the teachers and the higher education authorities think that certain methods of teaching are exciting and that students will use them, doesn’t mean students are interested in them. My experience in an advisory body where we developed a two day seminar every year on technical tax topics to update practitioners comes to mind. Our advisory board always came up with what we thought were marvelous ideas on what would be neat topics to cover. Inevitably, the attendees wanted the nuts and bolts they could use in their practices, not the theoretically challenging, but relatively impractical sessions that the board sometimes came up with. This doesn’t mean that teachers should dumb down their courses and not experiment, it just means that students are going to act like students and fit the profile that has been defined by a number of the writers of works we have read for class.  Teachers need to be sensitive to this profile and structure their courses appropriately.

Unfortunately, in this study, Dr. Vess was disappointed by the results and concluded that even though the technology was really neat, the students didn’t want to use it, except to meet the course requirements and pass the tests!