IT Ed: A Way Forward
September 19, 2003
Stephen C. Ehrmann, Ph.D.
http://www.tltgroup.org/poly.htm
© 2003, The TLT Group.
All Rights Reserved.
1
Acknowledgement
The Education and Manpower Bureau
would like to offer special thanks to
Dr. Stephen C. Ehrmann for his powerpoint
presentation on
IT Ed: A Way Forward
Name of Presenter, Title, Institution
© 2003, The TLT Group. All Rights Reserved.
2
Thanks To:
• 180+ institutional subscribers around
the world
• Annenberg/CPB and the American
Association for Higher Education
• Washington State University, St.
Edward’s University, and Notre Dame
• TLT Group Founding Sponsors
• Blackboard, Compaq, Microsoft, SCT, WebCT
Name of Presenter, Title, Institution
© 2003, The TLT Group. All Rights Reserved.
3
Outline
I.
Past cycle of failure; lessons
learned
II. A process more likely to succeed
•
•
•
Options for where to go
Suggestions for how to get there
Problems that should be researched
III. Further reading
Name of Presenter, Title, Institution
© 2003, The TLT Group. All Rights Reserved.
4
Discredited Assumptions
• Educational progress can be driven by
technological progress
• Therefore plan the future of education by
spotting the next hot technology and
suggesting its most potent educational
use
• Forty years of experience indicate that
the first proposition is untrue, which
is why the second is self-defeating
Name of Presenter, Title, Institution
© 2003, The TLT Group. All Rights Reserved.
5
Some Earlier Generations
• Learning Fortran (so learn by programming)
• Mainframe custom courseware (so learn by
tutorials and simulation)
• Videodisc (so learn by using images)
• Word processing (so learn to use software)
• Stackware (HyperCard, etc.) (so learn through
teacher-crafted courseware)
• Computer conferencing systems (EIES, Caucus,
etc.) (so learn through conversation)
• Gopher sites and early Web (so learn by reading)
Name of Presenter, Title, Institution
© 2003, The TLT Group. All Rights Reserved.
6
Rapture of the Technology
Helps Drive a Cycle of Failure
• Buy the “new thing” the vendors are selling, to get there
first -- it’s great, fast, powerful, visual (etc.)
• Get it installed (takes time)
• Pilot efforts by enthusiasts, with special support (often
create great outcomes, but more time passes)
• Offer training in using the new hardware and software
• But most teachers aren’t interested in the new technology
for itself
• Meanwhile, scaling up encounters other unexpected
difficulties,
• And, by now, vendors, pioneering teachers and funders
are already shifting focus a newer “new technology”,
which suggests a different set of educational priorities,
and
• Most have already forgotten the last initiative or blame its
failure on the inadequacy of its technology
Name of Presenter, Title, Institution
© 2003, The TLT Group. All Rights Reserved.
7
Learning Our Lessons
Name of Presenter, Title, Institution
© 2003, The TLT Group. All Rights Reserved.
8
1. Yeast and Bread
• Bread = Better
learning outcomes
• Yeast = computers
• Doubling the yeast
doesn't double the
bread, or even
improve it, if you
don't supply the
other ingredients of
the recipe, too.
Name of Presenter, Title, Institution
© 2003, The TLT Group. All Rights Reserved.
9
1. Budget $$ and Attention for
the Whole Recipe…
• Successful improvements in educational
outcomes require many ingredients; even
technology-dependent improvements
usually require that the majority of funds
be spent on non-technology items.
• For example, if the goal is to educate
students to be much better at selfdirected learning than students a decade
before, what kinds of changes in schools
or colleges are needed, in addition to
computers?
Name of Presenter, Title, Institution
© 2003, The TLT Group. All Rights Reserved.
10
A Few Other Ingredients
• Teacher training should focus on the goal, not
just the technology (e.g., on teaching research
skills, or on intercultural learning, not just on
IT skills)
• Prepare teachers for likely problems
• If I’m accustomed to lecturing and am now working with
project-based learning, what might I do if a few students are
doing well while many are floundering?
• How can I assess these new kinds of learning?
• Redesigned physical facilities
• Colleges - recruit the kinds of students (and
faculty) most likely to be interested in the new
possibilities
• (etc.)
Name of Presenter, Title, Institution
© 2003, The TLT Group. All Rights Reserved.
11
2. “Things Take Time”
• Technology changes quickly but
education changes slowly
• Therefore technology-driven
agendas are self-defeating because
the technology-driven energy
usually disappears long before the
improvement has time to become
large-scale
Name of Presenter, Title, Institution
© 2003, The TLT Group. All Rights Reserved.
12
2. Patient Focus on Goals,
Activities
• Pick a goal that’s worth focusing on long
enough to be achieved (5-10 years?
More?)
• Also a goal where technology and
technological progress will be more
helpful than disruptive
• Then use strategies to help maintain
attention on the goal long enough to
achieve it
Name of Presenter, Title, Institution
© 2003, The TLT Group. All Rights Reserved.
13
3. A Few Examples of Such
21st Century Goals
• Inquiry, inquisitiveness, and self-directed learning
• Community and interpersonal skills, learning to teach;
• Creative, design, composition skills (when and how use
the Web and multimedia for communication; when and
how use print?)
• Intercultural skills and insights
• Regional competitiveness and entrepreneurship
• Discipline-specific outcomes (e.g., new approaches to
learning science or music)
• Each such goal implies very different patterns of funding,
development and assessment
Name of Presenter, Title, Institution
© 2003, The TLT Group. All Rights Reserved.
14
4. Yesterday's Technology
• Build cutting edge education on selected
technologies of yesterday, especially IT
that's already been rapidly, incrementally
improving for more than 5 years
(technology of communications, of
calculation, of library…)
•
•
•
•
Reliable
Cost-effective
Change is less likely to disrupt progress
Brands that are somewhat interchangeable with their
competitors
Name of Presenter, Title, Institution
© 2003, The TLT Group. All Rights Reserved.
15
5. Roles for Evaluation
• Tracking and guiding the unfolding
strategy
• Helps maintain focus over the years
• Helps attract new resources to reward
achievement and fix problems
• Scholarship of teaching
• “Unstretch resources”
Name of Presenter, Title, Institution
© 2003, The TLT Group. All Rights Reserved.
16
New Shapes for Strategy
• Technology suggests some fresh
goals
• IT also suggests redefining our
thinking about strategy
Name of Presenter, Title, Institution
© 2003, The TLT Group. All Rights Reserved.
17
Useful Parallels
• Shift at time of Socrates to higher
learning that was partly dependent on
reading and writing
• Shift from independent scholars and
learners to organized universities
• Shift from traditional site-based
universities and schools to distributed
learning
Name of Presenter, Title, Institution
© 2003, The TLT Group. All Rights Reserved.
18
Common Elements
• Each participant gets access to many
more choices, many more resources,
many more people
• Spanning space and time
• Bursting from smaller, well-ordered
intellectual world to larger, more
complex, less accountable, less orderly
world
• What had been the whole now becomes a (changed)
part
Name of Presenter, Title, Institution
© 2003, The TLT Group. All Rights Reserved.
19
*Examples?
• Worcester Polytechnic Institute
• Project-intensive curriculum
• 70% of students do projects off-campus; 60%+ outside
the US
• Small college in western Massachusetts
• University of Saint Thomas
• Health care MBA with faculty and students scattered
across the United States
• Offered in association with professional association
• Offered by relatively small college outside Minneapolis,
Minnesota
Name of Presenter, Title, Institution
© 2003, The TLT Group. All Rights Reserved.
20
Strategic Options
• Many more types of specialized
instruction?
• Enrich courses working with more kinds
of learners? (e.g., language learning with
people from that country)
• Engage new kinds of organizational
partners to accomplish new goals?
• Sharing of resources (and new kinds of
accountability to assure quality, equity)
Name of Presenter, Title, Institution
© 2003, The TLT Group. All Rights Reserved.
21
…Bring New Challenges
• New goals raise new questions
• How learn skills of working with people from other
cultures, online?
• When do traditional writing, when use new forms?
• Changes in strategy also create questions
for R&D
• How create and maintain distributed educational
programs (Skills for teaching and administration? How
maintain program quality if teachers are more different
from one another, and see less of one another?)
Name of Presenter, Title, Institution
© 2003, The TLT Group. All Rights Reserved.
22
Bottom Line
• Past mistakes were made for
powerful reasons – will we repeat
them?
• Tempting to ask for predictions of
future of IT Ed,
• But what happens next is more a
matter for choice than for prediction
Name of Presenter, Title, Institution
© 2003, The TLT Group. All Rights Reserved.
23
Further Reading
• “Using Information Technology to
Improve the Outcomes of Higher
Education: Learning from Past Mistakes”
• Access and/or Quality: Redefining
Choices in the Third Revolution
• Grand Challenges Raised by Technology:
Will This Revolution be a Good One?”
Name of Presenter, Title, Institution
© 2003, The TLT Group. All Rights Reserved.
24
The Teaching, Learning, and
Technology (TLT) Group
www.tltgroup.org