Traditional Schools Cannot Adjust
I’ve written about the adjustment to the new generation of students in the past.
A recent Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus Blog post highlighted this issue once again. One Cellphone, Gone but Not Forgotten told a humorous story of a professor smashing a student’s cellphone (it was a plant). But the story continued to tell a sad tale of how traditional professors and schools cannot make the change to engage this new breed of learners. Here is an excerpt that illustrates that point:
As Samuel G. Freedman notes in The New York Times, plenty of professors are considering drastic measures to keep students from spending lecture-hall time fiddling with cellphones, iPods, and laptops.
I find it sad that the Chronicle frames this sort of article by disparaging the use of technology in class, either for the purpose of class or non-class. The post continues:
One such tactic seems particularly interesting. A Canadian company called Smart Technologies has developed a program, called SynchronEyes, which lets professors monitor their students’ computers and freeze any machines that are not being used for note-taking. The software might be effective, but how many professors are willing to play the role of police in their own classrooms?
It is not the role of tech-police in the classroom. It is an issue of outdated, outmoded, and outgunned professors. The word, lecture, should stand out here. Do any reading on the net generation (Tapscott or Prensky, to name 2) and you will see a clear indicator that students today need to multiple sources of input, collaboration, and a non-linear format to learning. Sadly, the Chronicle is a traditionally focused journal that passes itself as the authority on higher education, without fairly reporting many issues. Perhaps a nice follow up to this Chronicle post would be how such professors are being trained to teach, trained to use technology, and how technology (not tech-limiting policies) are improving learning for a new generation of students.
The tide is turning, lock your anchors in place and your boat will sink.
Extending this post to University of Phoenix, there are certainly things that need to happen there to keep up with or be ahead of the changes in learning.
- Podcasted lectures
- Collaborative technologies
- Social networking of students
- New designs for searching out knowledge
To name only a very few. Not all professors or schools are tech-phobic but this is one example of one who is afraid that of technology. Not because tech distracts but because the professors fails to deliver a suitable and meaningful experience to the student.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
I LOVE the image you used for this post. I got a good chuckle from it.
While I love the idea of online learning, I have my issues with UoP. I selected them because I thought they were ahead of the curve with their online program. Now, after having completed an academic year and being a bit into my second, I don’t think that’s saying very much. It seems that my instructors are robots confined to a script and very little creativity is able to be applied to teaching. Actually, I don’t feel my instructors are instructors at all. It’s more like they are forum moderators.
Part of the issue is the OLS software. Frankly, it sucks. UoP is behind the curve with the types of software that could be applied to classes.
I think you’re spot on with UoP needing to incorporate podcasts, collaborative technologies, social networking, and new interface for collecting information.
Instructors should be given an opportunity to actually instruct, and students should be able to discuss, collaborate, and network easily. There seems to be a chasm between F2F schools and UoP. Available technology easily bridges this gap. UoP needs to do so to survive, and the sooner, the better.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0
Joel,
I agree. What I know of your level of schooling and UOP is that those courses, and a growing number of courses, are limited to the instruction given to the facilitator. Even at the doctoral level instructors are provided lectures. Some classes include them, some instructors write their own, some do a combination of both.
All in all, this is not the way it used to be. In my Master’s program the instructors had a tremendous amount of latitude to instruct and meet the goals of the course. That seems to have changed, and not in a good way.
I understand the need to standardize content when you have over 17,000 instructors. However, the problem is, as you stated, one of moderators, or worse robots. This movement at UOP will likely end up causing more problems. In the beginning it will be frustrated and confused students, in the middle it will be a faculty recruiting and retention problem, in the end it will be the recruiting and retention of students.
When I was an adjunct, I enjoyed the creation of the course, the instruction, and the flexible interplay of faculty and student. Moving forward into the Gen Y population, it will be more important to address this matter.
This whole issue is made worse with bad instructional design. You and I both know that there are obvious errors and some crummy instruction at UOP from time to time. This might be a problem with a homegrown instruction design team…I am not sure.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0
[...] A few weeks ago, I blogged about the inability of traditional schools to adjust to technology and the Chronicle of Higher Education’s bias against distance learning; Traditional Schools Cannot Adjust. [...]
Like or Dislike:
0 
0