Information Technology in Higher Education Teaching
Much Ado about Nothing?
Gali Naveh
Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Shamoon College of Engineering, Bialik St., Beer-Sheva, Israel
Keywords: Information and Communication Technology, Higher Education, Pedagogy, Stakeholders' Perspective,
Garbage Can Model.
Abstract: Unlike nearly every aspect of our lives that has changed enormously in the past decades, academic teaching
has changed very little, and a professor walking into a classroom populated with dozens of students who are
trying to grasp the material presented to them, is relevant today as it was a century ago. To discern this
phenomenon, this paper discusses some of the most promising technologies which have emerged during the
last quarter of a century (accessibility to the internet, smartphones and Massive Open Online Courses) while
indicating their failure to facilitate a large-scale pedagogical change in academia, in contradiction to high
expectations and predictions. A perspective is suggested on the perception and motivation of the three major
stakeholders of academic teaching – instructors, students and institutes, signifying the lack of incentives on
their part for large-scale change. Finally the gap between the volume of research in the field of information
technology integration in higher education pedagogy and the little change in academic teaching reality is
discussed, and a course of action that may change this state of affair is offered.
1 INTRODUCTION
Finance, agriculture, commerce, manufacturing and
art, as almost all other areas in our lives, have
changed enormously in the past decades. Current life
in western countries does not resemble the life of
those who lived in the same places a hundred years
ago. Yet, teaching in higher education seems to be
almost frozen, compared to its ever changing
surrounding. The scene of a professor walking into
a classroom, populated with dozens of students who
make an effort to grasp the material presented to
them, is relevant today almost as it was a century
ago. The disciplines taught are broader and more
diverse, the material is much more scientifically
grounded, the accessibility has improved
tremendously and the magnitude of student numbers
has grown, but the mainstream of pedagogy
practiced has failed to change. Instructors present
facts, ideas, processes and methodologies, students
submit papers and take exams in a classroom, and
pass (or fail) the course with a grade, as they did
decades ago. This is especially surprising since the
technology that has transformed so many aspects of
our life beyond recognition, is relevant to higher
education teaching as it is to other domains.
Moreover, this technology is integrated in
administrative processes in higher education (such
as registration and payment) and has greatly changed
the way student administrative services are offered.
To discern this phenomenon, this paper discusses
some of the most promising technologies that were
expected to change the face of higher education, and
proposes some explanations to their failure to do so.
The paper concludes with a discussion of the
implications of this conjecture, and offers a path that
may change this state of affairs.
2 EMERGING TECHNOLOGY
AND THEIR IMPACT ON
ACADEMIC TEACHING
Perhaps the most significant technological change in
the past decades is the internet. The accessibility to
the internet in practically every house in western
countries (not to mention internet cafes, free Wi-Fi
in public places and later via smartphones), hyped
the hopes and dreams of many educators (e.g.
Woods, Baker and Hopper, 2004; Mason, 2000,
Benett and Bennett, 2003; Lynch, 2002; Harasim
1999). At the turn of the 21st century, predictions
were made as to the upcoming transformation of
450
Naveh G..
Information Technology in Higher Education Teaching - Much Ado About Nothing?.
DOI: 10.5220/0005486904500454
In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2015), pages 450-454
ISBN: 978-989-758-108-3
Copyright
c
2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
higher education, suggesting that the accessibility to
information will change the role of the instructor
from teacher to facilitator, that the technology will
provides opportunity to enhance students'
involvement in their study, generate students'
centred teaching/ learning, improve students'
achievements, enable a more active and personalized
learning process, etc. (Harasim, 2000; Norton et al.,
2005; Phipps and Merisotis, 2000; Wegner,
Holloway and Garton, 1999). But the numerous
projects materializing the potential of the technology
and making revolutionary integration of Information
and Communication Technology (ICT) into
academic courses failed to conclusively prove the
positive effect of the change, and remained in the
margin of academic teaching (Russell, 1999; Phipps
and Merisotis, 1999; OECD, 2005). Ten years after
more than 90% of academic institutes surveyed by
the OECD (2005) declared they have an online
learning strategy and over 70% adopted a Learning
Management System (LMS), these information
systems are used mainly as administrative tools (e.g.
the dissemination of learning materials and grades),
and meaningful pedagogical changes facilitated by
them are rarely found.
A few years later, as smartphone adoption
entered Rogers' (2003) late majority phase in
western countries (Nielsen, 2013), as well as some
third world countries (Deloitte and GSMA, 2012), a
new hope for change in academic teaching has
emerged – mobile-learning or m-learning – learning
using personal electronic devices. Educators talked
about learning any time and any place, consuming
small pieces of information, making good use of
available small chunks of time by learning on the
train on the way to work or to the campus, or while
waiting in line at the bank. Others talked about
situated learning or using phones in the classroom to
increase students' involvement (e.g. Corbeil and
Valdes-Corbeil, 2007; Liu and Carlsson, 2009;
Naismith et al., 2004; Cruz, Boughzala and Assar,
2014). Experiments were made, projects were
funded (e.g. Savill-Smith, 2002; Paletta et al., 2012),
but half a decade into the hype, once again the
results do not meet the expectations (Liu and Han,
2010), and the use of smartphones in academic
courses is very rare, to say the least.
The latest significant promising development is
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Courses
offered by the best institutes of higher education,
free of charge and available online were expected to
make real change by making education available as
never before. However, this year, as it was in the
past few centuries, most of the graduating students
took the majority of their classes in a face-to-face
format, with a professor in a physical classroom,
while the majority of students taking a MOOC
already holds a degree (Emanuel, 2013), and usually
more than 90% of them drop the class before it
reaches its ending point (Jordan, 2014). A few years
into well-organized blossoming activity of MOOCs
with hundreds of courses offered and millions of
course enrolments, the results indicate that this
wonderful idea will not change the face of higher
education. Contrary to high hopes, taking a MOOC
requires much more than an internet connection.
Students need to be fluent in English (only a fraction
of the courses are offered in other languages), and
have to hold distance learner skills, on top of basic
learning skills (Mackness, Mak and Williams, 2010).
All of these are not trivial for a large portion of the
population MOOCs were hoping to reach. It seems
that MOOCs, as many other resources, are much
more available to those who already hold resources.
The fountain of technological innovations with a
potential to shift higher education pedagogy gushes
with many more opportunities. Online virtual
worlds, social networks, wikis, podcasts,
gamification, augmented reality and many more,
kindled the imagination and dreams of devoted
educators, but none of them materialized the
potential to a degree of meaningful changes in the
mainstream of teaching pedagogy in academia. Even
when examining the accumulating impact of all
these technologies, the effect is not significant. With
all these technologies at instructors' disposal, they
walk into classrooms with their notes and
PowerPoint presentations (which are merely a
technical upgrade, with no pedagogical impact from
the projector slides used two decades ago).
This raises the question what is unique in
academic teaching to cause the shift generated by
technology to skip pedagogy in higher education
while transforming almost every other aspect of our
lives.
The answer to the this question should be three-
fold, as the number of major stakeholders in
academic teaching – instructors, students and
institutes (Wagner, Hassanein and Head, 2008), as
discussed next.
3 STAKEHOLDERS'
PERSPECTIVE
Most instructors, like most workers in every
profession, would like to do the best work possible
InformationTechnologyinHigherEducationTeaching-MuchAdoAboutNothing?
451
with minimum resources. However, the experiments
made with pedagogically meaningful integration of
technology into academic course has shown benefits
only at an anecdotal level, and meta-analysis shows
no obvious or outstanding value (e.g. Russell, 1999;
Phipps and Merisotis, 1999), while adopting
technology and making changes to hundreds of years
old practices requires tremendous effort. Moreover,
many experiences with technology facilitating shifts
in teaching pedagogy demonstrated that the
resources required do not level back to what they
were before the change, even after acquiring know-
how with the new methodologies, and remain higher
than in traditional teaching (Wallace, 2003; Hara
and Kling, 1999; Doughty, Spector and Yonai,
2003). With no consensus on the upside (better
learning) and obvious downside (higher effort) it is
only natural that instructor will not hurry to integrate
technology and make large-scale changes in their
teaching. This is even more probable when
considering that teaching is only one aspect of the
roles of higher education instructors, alongside
administrative tasks, and more importantly -
research.
The second, and maybe most important,
stakeholder in this issue, the students, support the
standstill as well. Students' perception and
expectation of the role of technology in academic
teaching is not often examined in research, and when
it does, it presents somewhat surprising views.
Putting aside anecdotal revolutionary
implementation of ICT in academic courses,
students don't expect nor wish for changes in
traditional face-to-face teaching. They would like
the technology to support the administrative process
accompanying studying, but show no desire for it to
function as an enabler of changes in traditional
pedagogy (Naveh, Tubin and Pliskin, 2012). For
students, the best use of technology would be an
easily accessed, well organized websites, abundant
with learning material (Naveh, Tubin and Pliskin,
2010). A more revolutionary pedagogy usually
requires more effort on the part of the students as
well (Hara and Kling, 1999; Doughty, Spector and
Yonai, 2003), an effort perceived by students as
superfluous since their objectives (learning and
acquiring an academic degree) are currently
achieved without it. This is not to say that students
are not enthusiastic about unique ICT-enabled
pedagogy, but they don't expect or want it to be the
mainstream of their study.
Last, but not least, of the dominating
stakeholders of technology integration into academic
teaching, are higher education institutes. They wish
to be cost effective on one hand, as budget cuts are a
constant threat (Green, 2009; Wagner, Hassanein
and Head, 2008), and on the other hand, be
perceived by potential students as leaders of
innovation in order to remain attractive in the
competitive environment of higher education. These
potentially contradicting objectives may explain the
current state of academic institutes, which purchase
the technology that could support a shift in
pedagogy, but deploy it only to a degree of
supporting administrative teaching processes (such
as posting learning material) (OECD, 2005). This
way, the institutes both save resources (e.g.
homework assignments do not have to be distributed
by the instructor but posted on the course website,
transferring the cost of printing and photocopying to
the students), and are perceived as innovative due
the use of emerging technology. This organizational
behaviour is in line with the institutional theory
which suggests that an organization might make
symbolic changes with no significant impact on the
organizational core activities in order to meet the
expectations of its surrounding environment (Mayer
and Rowan, 1977). Academic institutes have no
incentive to invest more resources in making true
changes in their pedagogy which is not guaranteed
to promote the effectiveness of the teaching process
on one hand, while already perceived as doing what
is best for their customers (the students) on the
other.
The combination of the perceptions and
motivations of all three major stakeholders of
academic teaching, as outlined here, generates a
unique outcome, as discussed next.
4 DISCUSSION
It seems then, that from the point of view all major
stakeholders, the current situation where academic
teaching pedagogy changed very little in the past
decades, as opposed to almost all other practices
inside and outside academia, is not an issue at all.
The majority of instructors are satisfied with the
current situation and do not wish to invest resources
in a process whose outcome is uncertain; students
would like the technology to be used as a supporting
administrative tool as it currently is; and institution
administrators are satisfied with the technical
efficiency LMS provides them and the image it
promotes of technology adopters. In other words, the
perceived usefulness of further integrating
technology into academic teaching and transforming
it, is rather low for all major stakeholders of the
CSEDU2015-7thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation
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process, thus hindering the adoption, as suggested by
the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) (Davis,
1989), which identified Perceived Ease of Use and
Perceived Usefulness as influencing factors on the
adoption of technology.
Thus, all key stakeholders are comfortable with
the current state and have no urging incentive to
change it. Perhaps even the contrary is true, since
making changes require more resources which are
always scarce. In this state of affairs, the rise of a
new technology is unlikely to generate a wide and
large-scale change, as past decades have
demonstrated. An ICT could facilitate a meaningful
shift in academic teaching only if it presents an
easily observed and proven benefit, i.e. clearly
perceived usefulness of adopting the technology,
such as apparent decrease in resource consumption
for one (or more) of the major stakeholders of the
process.
Alongside the relative standstill of the
mainstream of academic pedagogy in the past
decades, tremendous amount of research was, and
still is, conducted on the potential of pedagogy shifts
in academic teaching facilitated by ICT adoption, as
each novel technology ignites the imagination and
enthusiasm of educators as to new possibilities and
opportunities. Papers detailing researches focusing
on what can and should be done with technology in
academic courses and examining motivators and
inhibitors, facilitators and barriers, populate
scientific journals as they did ten and twenty years
ago.
With the continuous profusion of ideas,
thoughts, researches and discussions, with little real-
world change in the last quarter of a century, one
might wonder if this engagement with technology
integration into higher education teaching has been
Much Ado About Nothing.
One possible path that perhaps should be
explored in order to produce different results is the
decision making process in which integration of ICT
into academic teaching is being conducted. Higher
education institutes have been identified as
organized anarchies, suggesting that the decision
making in these organizations often follow the
garbage can model (Cohen, March and Olsen, 1972),
i.e., education institutes may be viewed as a
collection of choices looking for problems, rather
than a tool for resolving clearly defined problems. In
this perspective, technologies may function as
solutions looking for problems to solve. This
approach is present in countless studies, as their
starting point is the technology, not the pedagogical
problems faced by higher education institutes (e.g.
Liu, Li and Carlsson, 2009; Woods, Baker and
Hopper 2004). A more rational, well established
decision process, where the integration of a specific
technology, in a certain way, in defined settings, is
the outcome of a decision made after analysing a
problem, exploring potential solutions, examining
their impact on the problem and the environment,
and choosing the one that is most cost-effective, may
produce better results.
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