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.

[David Richardson]

On-line learning gets hit by a double-whammy in a conventional university environment, in my experience. Firstly, teaching and learning itself usually takes second place to research activities, so any activity which isn't directly connected to research is going to be of lesser importance to the people running the university. Secondly, principals and vice-chancellors like saying to visiting firemen, "Look at our wonderful new auditorium/library/lab. It was built with money from [important corporate sponsor]. Do you know you can process 10,000 students at a time in that building!" What you won't hear them saying is, "We do some great teaching here and our students learn a lot."

There is, fortunately, a real world which is quickly catching with them …

[James Morrison]

Reference update: When I initiated this discussion, the only data that I had with respect to lecture being the primary instructional strategy in higher education was a 1993 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty by U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics that found that 76% of faculty across disciplines, institutions, and age cohorts use the lecture as their primary instructional method (as reported in Finkelstein, Seal, and Schuster, The New Academic Generation, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

This data may now be updated by a 2007-2008 UCLA Higher Education Research Institute study of some 22,562 faculty members at 372 four-year colleges and universities nationwide. As reported in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article (http://tinyurl.com/ygm9ogx ), the survey was conducted in the fall and winter of 2007-8 and covered full-time faculty members who spent at least part of their time teaching undergraduates. The data, statistically adjusted to represent the total population of full-time faculty members at four-year institutions, found that the percentage of faculty members who extensively use lecturing had declined from 55% in 2005 to 46% in 2008. The authors speculate that this trend may continue as full professors retire (i.e., assistant professors were more likely to use small group instruction whereas full professors were more likely to lecture.)

Unfortunately, the study did not include questions relating to the use of technology-enhanced active learning strategies.

[James Morrison]

Note: In my response to various participants in this discussion (below) I reference two Innovate articles: (1) My interview with Phil Long titled "The iCampus Technology-Enabled Active Learning Project at MIT" in the April/May 2009 issue and (2) an article by Ana-Paula Correia titled “Moving from Theory to Real-World Experiences in an e-Learning Community” in the April/May 2008 issue that described how she implemented a technology-enhanced active learning instructional strategy in one of her courses.

Unfortunately, Innovate URLs are no longer valid. Hackers repeatedly corrupted the archived version of the journal. Given the expense of repairing the damage, the Fischler School IT department replaced the HTML version of the site with PDF files that can be accessed by Volume and Number (see www.innovateonline.info).

Best.

Jim

[Jim Shimabukuro]

Jim, not a problem. The PDF files come up quickly.