Addressing the problem of faculty resistance to using IT tools in active learning instructional strategies

[James Morrison]

Earlier this month I attended a UNESCO Educational Leaders Forum sponsored by Microsoft. The forum’s theme was thinking through the challenges that lie in the future of higher education and to focus on the vision, barriers, and strategies to address these challenges as they develop.

The vision discussed by a number of panelists (see http://blogs.msdn.com/elf08/default.aspx ) was that we should be using technology enhanced active learning strategies to improve student learning. One of the primary barriers to doing this was a traditional faculty and organizational culture that relies on the lecture method as the primary instructional strategy.

Current approaches to broaden the instructional repertoires of faculty members include faculty workshops, summer leave, and individual consultations, but these approaches work only for those relatively few early adopter faculty members who seek out opportunities to broaden their instructional methods. The major problem is how to affect organizational culture as a whole so that most professors will be receptive to adopting active learning methods and using IT tools to enhance the effectiveness of these methods in their classes.

The purpose of this forum is to discuss how to encourage faculty members to expand their range of instructional strategies and enhance them via the creative use of educational technology.

To get the discussion started, the approach that I advocate to this challenge is to engage faculty members at the departmental level in thinking about the future and its implications for their institution, their curriculum, their students, and their careers. See “Using A Futures Approach to Organizational and Faculty Development” at http://horizon.unc.edu/projects/seminars/ELME.html for the complete argument.

[Phillip Long]

Hi everyone: I've been lurking in the background reading with interest the variety of perspectives and thoughtful posts that have been generated by Jim's intriguing question about active learning and faculty resistance to technology enabled learning activities. Some thoughts:

Ed Neal noted that faculty look very carefully at their return on investment when it comes to "mastering technological methods to accomplish the same goals". Of course, the issue is the goals themselves. Adopting active learning is generally accompanied by a reassessment of what students should be learning in the first place. Usually this involves reconsidering the focus on content to the include the reasoning that goes into the produced answer (that is, not just the answer alone). This reflects a shift from an ontology of content to an ontology of process given that the reality today is that content itself is rapidly growing in all disciplines. Where once "education: was measured by whether you were able to recall, describe and manipulate a fixed body of facts, today there is simply too much to consider making such a measurement of education rather pointless. We now are equally or even more concerned about how we know what we know and where we need to turn to find contemporary findings on which to base our thinking about a particular subject.

Much has been made of the TEAL (Technology Enabled Active Learning) approach to physics that reflects MIT's take on studio-based science instruction. Someone (I'm sorry, I forgot who made the comment) wrote of TEAL , "Is that really how to use technology to bring high quality physics instruction to our poor communities and institutions, and to the poor countries of the world?".

Delivering a learning experience to the poor communities and institutions of the world was not the goal or intent of this redesign of physics teaching and learning environment at MIT. It's critical to remember what the drivers for any given project are and not to inappropriately transpose them onto entirely new settings. We often trip over this in our attempts to adopt new teaching approaches or even physical designs of learning spaces. We see what looks good at institution "X" and say, "I want one of those at my institution." It rarely works. Localizing teaching practice to recognize and adapt to the local culture of one's institution is crucial to successful adoption of pedagogy, technology or learning space design.

MIT is a very emphatically place-based institution and the physics curriculum redesign was intended to address a local need based on local cultural requirements identification of things we weren't doing as well as we'd like. Physics at MIT had a high failure rate (14%) - other science courses at comparable levels did not (5%). Physics had a well documented attendance attrition rate (the number of students attending lecture at the beginning, middle, and end of a semester declined to a steady state of 40% or less). Physics had no lab component in the first year at MIT - it got lost somewhere over time. Finally, there was a sense that the conceptual understanding of difficult ideas in physics, particularly in the electromagnetism component of the first year, weren't being learning as well as they should. Students were good at the instrumental side of learning but less sanguine about the concepts they applied to.

These were all local drivers for reconsidering how we should be teaching physics. The bottom line was these were MIT students - they shouldn't be failing at significantly higher rates in physics compared to other hard sciences. If we already have selected an highly regarded student population to get into the place, the problem is likely NOT with the students. Ahem..

Steve Eskow noted the juxtaposition between the leading edge open source innovation and practices emerging from MIT and then presents what he sees as the peculiar prominence of Walter Lewin's Physics 8.01 lectures on YouTube. He notes it's the "same old technologies:the talking head, the chalkboard, the lecture hall. Nothing Cardinal Newman wouldn't recognize and admire."

Well, yes - it's a reminder that a gifted lecturer is likely to always have a place in the teaching ecosystem. I'm not sure that's a bad thing. I don't believe that active learning means that all vestiges of prior teaching practice needs to be eradicated. It is more a matter of sustainable balance.

But more to the point, videos of lectures travel well on the web. They can be packaged up as entirely digital objects, and using the wonderful frictionless quality of web distribution, shared effortlessly across the planet. Sharing the attributes of technology enabled active learning pedagogy is much harder. And, it should be noted that the very course that Walter's lectures present have been replaced at MIT by the Technology Enabled Active Learning physics program (http://icampus.mit.edu/teal). At MIT lecture is NO LONGER the default mode by which first year students learn physics. Yet the TEAL website doesn't travel nearly as well as the engaging Lewin lecture recordings on the web. And, it's worth noting that the learning outcomes of TEAL are significantly better than even Walter's students' outcomes (e.g., http://web.mit.edu/edtech/casestudies/pdf/teal1.pdf)

Steve also noted the quite accurately the arithmetic of active learning- broadcasting a lecture to 500 students is ALWAYS more efficient when the measure of efficiency is faculty time. It may well not be as 'efficient' if the measure is student learning. Therein lies one of the conundrums - by what are we measuring 'success'?

It's probably worth mentioning that the costs for comparing teaching methods for physics at MIT were, on an on-going basis, 'fixed'. The redesign of the first year physics teaching approach had a baseline that it couldn't be more expensive than the former lecture driven approach. That was a criteria that had to be met to consider the change in pedagogy from lecture to active learning. The real costs, and they were significant, were in the costs incurred for the conversion of the former teaching approach to the latter - that is, the cost to build the new curricula, pilot it, refine it, and then develop all the new materials that it required. That cost, the transition or development cost, is where the real challenges lie.

Steve also noted that "in the case of MIT no costs are eliminated; the instructor who lectured to 300 students now works with 117; and expensive ICT is added: dramatic increase in costs." As I mentioned the big issue was the cost to develop and transition to a new way of teaching.

That said, we have to be clear that the cost neutral steady state of TEAL is in part based on an anomaly in the MIT practice of teaching - namely that all recitation sections of courses in TEAL were ALSO taught be full-time faculty. Graduate students help, but they aren't the primary instructors even in recitations. Hence, when you're doing the accounting, 30 sections of recitation a week for one hour each is still 300 hours of faculty professorial time. That's likely not true many places but it is part of the commitment to education at MIT that students should receive faculty attention in all the aspects of their courses. Perhaps it's an extravagance, but it is one of the ways that a commitment to quality is assured.

Sorry for the extended length of this contribution - there was so much in the discussion that I was drawn into addressing. Other themes in here that might be worth further discussion include the degree to which teaching and research should be integrated at research-intensive universities; the value of a place-based institution in today's learning environment, and more. But enough from me. Thanks for challenging my thinking. Keep the discussion flowing!

Phil

[Steve Eskow]

Thanks, Phil, for the good natured response--as well as a complexly profound response. I hope we can go at the issues you've raised for few exchanges. Those issues take us in some new directions, well beyond the usual level of "resistance to change."

Can we start with "ontology"?

You propose that the ontological shift is from "content" to "process." I'm not sure. For one: in the US, that shift goes back at least to the early pragmatists: Peirce, James, Dewey. For another: probably much of the "content" in the TEAL version of Physics 1 remains, despite the shift in process.

Or: TEAL represents an epistemological shift, not an ontological shift.

What the new technologies raise --perhaps!-- is the possibility of a shift from an ontology of "presence" to an ontology of "absence."

Or: a shift from an ontology of "physical presence"--Phil and Steve must be present to each other without the intervention of technologies--to an ontology of "mediated presence": Phil and Steve can "see" and "hear" and "read" each other via the new communicative media.

As you indicate and TEAL demonstrates, MIT is committed to the ontology of "presence": whatever the powers and possibilities of the new technologies, instruction must take place in a milieu that brings students and professors--and not adjuncts or the like--together: they must be "present" to each other.

Derrida and the deconstructionists have a vocabulary for this commitment: it includes such terms as "logocentrism" and "phonocentrism" --the belief that speech is the primary and richest form of communication-- and, importantly, the "metaphysics of presence."

The "metaphysics of presence" leads to the commitment--faith?-- that whatever the powers and possibilities of new technologies they must be used within the structure of presence, which means that students, as always, must come to a particular geography to study with particular scholars face-to-face and with the technology not inhibiting the possibility of talk between professor and student.

Thus, not distance learning but presence learning, with technology supplementary and enhancing but not replacing the spatial and temporal commitments of the ancient university.

Right so far, Phil?

Thanks for this opportunity.

Steve

[James Morrison]

This past June I gave an invited presentation to the ED MEDIA 2009 conference in Honolulu titled "Addressing the Problem of Faculty Resistance to Using Educational Media in Active Learning Instructional Strategies." After setting the stage for the session, I said, "It occurred to me as I was preparing for a session on technology-enhanced active learning strategies that I was preparing a lecture, which seems not only incongruous, but perhaps a bit hypocritical. :-) Consequently, let’s use an active learning strategy to explore this issue, which surely is one of the most critical ones facing us as a profession." With that introduction, I asked participants to form five or six person groups, introduce each other, elect a spokesperson, and address the first of two questions: "Why do so few faculty members use technology-enhanced active learning strategies in their instruction?" After eight or nine minutes, we began report backs (the session chair carried around a portable microphone; the session was in a large ballroom). The responses to this question included the following:

1, Fear of using technology, which may not work
2, Faculty members are busy as is; they see no need to expend time and energy on learning technology or new pedagogies
3. Perception of a lack of institutional support/rewards (little technological or pedagogical resources; no incentives or recognition for using technology)
4. Perception of lack of cultural support from peers
5. Perception that developing online courses threatens jobs
6. Perception that using technology takes too much time (to learn, to set up, to use)
7, Fear that incorporating technology will detract/ distract from their lecture/teaching (technology will become an end in itself rather than being a means to educational ends)
8, Faculty members don't think that technology is relevant/helpful to teaching in their particular subject area
9. Faculty members are unaware of the degree to which students might enjoy/gain from technology-enhanced active learning strategies
10. Faculty members view their role as experts/information providers, not teachers designing experiential education
11. Perception that face-to-face classroom instruction is the most instruction

I then asked the groups to respond to the second question: "What can institutions do to encourage/assist faculty members to at least consider using technology-enhanced active learning strategies (TEALS)?" Their responses included:

1. Provide faculty members training (and incentives to under training) in technology and in using TEALS incentives and rewards
2. Provide incentives for faculty members who use TEALS Institute a career teaching (and service) track and a career research track)
3. Develop policies whereby faculty members who develop online or blended courses “own” the courses
4. Provide stipends for students to assist faculty members to use technology in their courses
5. Foster professional learning communities within departments whereby faculty members collaborate with others in their discipline who are using technology 
6. Provide appropriate hardware and software along with 24/7 tech support (including workshops)
7. Identify faculty members who are savvy in using TEALS and provide them with release time/stipends to work with departmental/school colleagues on using technology to enhance learning
8. Recruit faculty members who have the orientation and skills to use TEALS
9. Designate “technology rich” classes whereby students who take these classes get free hardware (e.g., an iPod like in the Duke iPod program; see http://tinyurl.com/ly4rub).
10. View the problem as related to organizational culture that can be addressed using a futures approach to organizational development. This technique is described at http://tinyurl.com/6nmm3b

The latter two items were added by me after the groups had reported. The PDF file of the presentation and speakers notes are available in the attachment.

.

[Jim Shimabukuro]

Jim. thanks for continuing this dialogue. Resistance is definitely an issue at the heart of the movement toward change. And your approach in this presentation is an excellent example of active learning which has, at its base, participation by learners in developing the knowledge base and discovering the conclusions and implications. Given the circumstances, a traditional lecture hall(?), however, I realize that you couldn't have included in your demo perhaps the most important element in your topic -- technology itself.

Consequently, the lists of responses, although interesting and useful, seem to reflect and repeat many similar lists as well as posts in this thread. I believe this refraction occurs because participants don't have actual examples of technology to address. In other words, you'd probably get a better focus if the questions zeroed in on a specific instance of enhancing technology. Discussions could then revolve around why faculty might resist this particular tech practice and what could be done to overcome this particular resistance.

This specific demo might be considered too narrow to allow for useful generalizations, but my guess is that the narrowness is a plus rather than a negative in that insights can be discovered in the particulars, leading to useful generalizations.

Returning to your presentation: To include a healthy dose of enhancing tech, an alternative might have been to work with the ED MEDIA 2009 planners to use virtual tech to demonstrate how it might be used to enhance your presentation, "Addressing the Problem of Faculty Resistance to Using Educational Media in Active Learning Instructional Strategies."

There are many possibilities. One would be to create a social networking (SN) site that would run the duration of the event (June 22-26). Participants could be asked to self-select into different small groups (SGs) to discuss the question "Why do faculty resist using technology such as this to promote active learning?" They would be free to meet asynchronously, synchronously, or both on the first day to discuss question 1. On day 2, they'd share the results with the large group (LG) in the SN discussion forum. On day 3, the SGs would address the second question, "What can institutions do to encourage/assist faculty members to at least consider using technology such as this to promote active learning?" On day 4, they'd share their results with the LG. On day 5, you could lead a closing discussion in the forum that would allow everyone to have input in a summary report of the 5-day activity.

Once again, thanks for resuscitating this discussion.

[James Morrison]

Jim, you are a creative soul! I appreciate your suggestion. Perhaps a risk taking conference organizer might entertain having one session weave throughout an entire conference.

The lesson I learned in this session is that I should have summarized the reasons for resistance in my overview and focused the small group work on approaches to addressing the resistance. As it was, we didn't have enough time to present and discuss various approaches. Too, I had only a few minutes to present the approach that I would very much like to try in a department or institution as it addresses modifying organizational culture.

I do appreciate and consider your suggestions, Jim. Perhaps I can find a receptive organizer.

Thanks!

Jim

[Steve Eskow]

Jim, I'm not nearly as creative pedagogically as Jim Shimabukuro: all I have a for you now are a few scattered thoughts and unsubstantiated hunches.

First: is Don Tapscott's analysis of what today's students want supported by any substantial research? Isn't there some support for the notion that what many of today's students want is a curriculum that asks very little of them? Perhaps the evidence suggests that today's student want to text message each other, and want a pedagogy and a curriculum that leaves them alone to lead their technologically-full lives.

Second: consider another reason for faculty resistance: blended learning. Some faculty, e.g. Steve Eskow, tend to believe that the spaces and curricular routines of the walled educational system were designed for oral instruction. The lecture hall, for example, lends itself well to the one-way oral and visual technologies of the microphone and the motion picture--and thus generate no faculty resistance-- but does not seem well suited for the computer or the cell phone. Thus the ICT devices either need special rooms and schedules for their use, or they are to be used at home or in the dorm, and instructors might feel making all of this geography and new and old pedagogies coherent is a game not worth the candle.And instructors might feel that they are leading a double pedagogic life, rather than that the old rooms and instructional strategies and the new times at the computer make for a comfortable and seamless instructional life.

If this is at all true, it would follow that it is easy, or easier, to recruit campus-based faculty for all out online learning, while the same faculty would resist blended learning.

My hunch is that for many/most of those students who choose the campus experience Don Tapscott is wrong. Students on campus, I suspect, would be happier if their instructors lectured and encouraged live dialogue, and left them alone to use computers and cell phones for their very full and active ICT lives.

Is there any solid research on these issues?

Best,

Steve

[James Morrison]

Steve, there most likely is research on these issues, but I have not searched the literature for it.

In my case, I was most comfortable with the blended classroom, and was fortunate that we had Internet access from the classrooms in my building during the latter years when I was on the active faculty. I took the position that my role was to assist students construct knowledge and to gain competence in using IT tools to do so. However, this was some 15 years ago when very few faculty members used this approach and when relatively few people had personal computers or access to the Internet. For example, in the first class in which I tried this approach, only a third of the students (graduate students in educational administration) owned a computer and only one had a modem and access to the Internet at home. A few years ago I published a piece on my own experience with technology-enhanced active learning strategies, with mixed results. The reference is as follows:

Morrison, J. L. (2005). Experiencing the online revolution. In Online learning: Personal reflections on the transformation of education. ed. G. Kearsley, 248-261. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications. Available online: http://horizon.unc.edu/courses/papers/Experiencing.html and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5ewZSj7Dp.

Best.

Jim

[Steve Eskow]

Jim, my hunch is this:

The resistance is to blended learning, not active learning, or online learning.

Many of those resisting technology are involved, heavily involved, with non-technology active learning pedagogies, including the ancient ones of classroom conversation and the active writing of research papers.

Those teaching all online are almost by definition involved with "Technology Enhanced Active Learning."

It is needing to teach in the old rooms and with the new technologies that gnerates the resistance.
for many of us the old and the new are not really a blend, but an uneasy mixture. Or that's my hypothesis.

Your experience is that of the excitement of the discoverer, the innovator. Those you are hoping to ignite just feel the pressures of trying to "blend" two ingredients that don't seem to them to blend easily.

Might the classroom and the computer feel to the resisters like oil and water?

(I'm assuming that to get deeper into an understanding of the resistance we have to get beyond the initial categories of "insistence on change" and "resistance to change.")

Cheers,

Steve

[James Morrison]

Steve, I disagree with your premise that the resistance is to blended learning, and not active learning or online learning.

A recent survey, fairly large in scope, found that over 80% of faculty members in higher education in the US used the lecture method primarily in their instruction. Their instructional paradigm regards a curriculum is a series of packaged knowledge in courses, often sequential. The faculty is responsible for developing the curriculum and teach it to their students, usually via lecture and/or lecture/discussion pedagogy. An active learning pedagogical paradigm, based on student engagement/student construction of knowledge, is not regarded as legitimate.

Faculty members who believe in the active learning paradigm do not have to use IT tools to implement this paradigm, but if they don’t, they may resist technology-enhanced active learning because they do not have competency in various IT tools.

It is perfectly possible and reasonable to use technology-enhanced active learning pedagogies in a blended learning classroom; all one needs is software and Internet access.

You may be interested in an article I published several years ago titled "US Higher Education in Transition" at http://horizon.unc.edu/courses/papers/InTransition.asp

Best.

Jim

[James Morrison]

The ED MEDIA 2009 conference posted the audio version of this presentation at http://editlib.org/view/32141

Best.

Jim

[Steve Eskow]

Jim, a small puzzle about your presentation.

Your pre-group discussion talk emphasized "active learning strategies." I did not hear you mention "technology." Yet almost all of the group reports focused on technology. Why is that?

There is, as you well know, a long tradition in the university of non-technology active learning, or active learning using early technologies, such as the library and the card catalog and the book.

When I taught freshman comp the students had to read on topics and actively write and submit papers. and they had to learn active research techniques, and spend much active effort selecting an major research topic; researching that topic; and actively constructing their final research paper.

Would you consider that ancient pedagogy active learning?

And: isn't much use of the newer technologies, e.g. television, a newer version of passive watching and listening?

Steve

[James Morrison]

Steve, the title of the session was "Addressing the Problem of Faculty Resistance to Using Educational Media in Active Learning Instructional Strategies." The slides that were on the screen when I introduced the interactive parts of the session said, "Why do so few faculty members use technology-enhanced active learning strategies in their instruction?" and "What can institutions do to encourage/assist faculty members to at least consider using
technology-enhanced active learning strategies (TEALS)?" Unfortunately, the slides and the audio are not together (the session was audio recorded, not video taped). However, the slides and my notes are available at http://horizon.unc.edu/conferences/addressing.html

Certainly one can use active learning strategies without using technology, but this was not the focus of my session. And certainly one can use technology in traditional pedagogical strategies. In fact, most professors use technology only for lecture support (e.g., Power Point), to post a syllabus, and to maintain class rolls, and, perhaps, a discussion forum.

BTW, one advantage of technology-enhanced active learning strategies is that these strategies can be used in global education (e.g., a political economy class in the University of Cairo and join with a similar class at the University of Chicago where students in both universities work in combined teams on projects). Global education is a good tool to prepare students for working in a global village and is most helpful in developing greater cultural awareness relatively inexpensively.

Best.

Jim