Models of Instructional
Technology Models of Instructional
Technology
This document is a working draft of the TLTR In-Classroom
Subcommittee at the University of Delaware. Send comments to fth@udel.edu.
During the past three decades, the field of instructional technology has undergone substantial research and development. So many studies of the effectiveness of computer-based learning have been conducted that Professor James Kulik (1985, 1986, 1991, and 1994) and his associates at the University of Michigan were funded by the National Science Foundation to use the techniques of meta-analysis to study the studies. Overall, Kulik's findings indicate that average learning time has been reduced significantly (sometimes by as much as 80%), and achievement levels are more than a standard deviation higher (a full letter grade in school) than when computers are not used.
These results have changed the ambiance surrounding the use of
computers in education. No longer do administrators question whether
instructional technology is effective. In his State of the Union Address,
for example, President Clinton (1997) called for every 12-year-old
to be able to log on to the Internet by the year 2000. But he
did not say why. In the midst of the nation's rush to technology,
it is important to reflect on what we're doing, and understand
why we're doing it. Otherwise, we will miss the opportunity technology
provides to make a positive impact on education.
Technology makes it possible for faculty to improve the manner
in which they present materials, both in class for face-to-face
teaching, and on the Internet for study beyond the classroom.
Communication is one of the most important factors in education.
Technology can improve how faculty and students interact.
Presentation packages free faculty from the physical limitations
imposed by traditional media. Consider the limitations imposed
by a slide tray, for example. A standard slide tray holds only
80 slides and requires that the faculty member show them sequentially.
Presentation software, on the other hand, imposes no limit on
the number of slides and provides instant access to any slide,
at any time. Physical slide trays require that the faculty spend
time locating and sorting slides into the order needed for a given
class. This can be self-defeating, however, because when the faculty
member removes the slide after class to use the image for another
purpose, the class preparation gets undone. With presentation
software, on the other hand, the slide resides in a digitized
form in which it can be pointed to by many presentation outlines.
Thus, any slide can be placed simultaneously in any number of
presentations. By eliminating the self-defeating need to undo
the class preparation, presentation software makes faculty more
productive and enables them to build upon their teaching repertoire,
instead of undoing it after class.
Discipline-based software enables faculty to run models that can
help students visualize complex phenomena difficult to present
with traditional media. In a sociology class about demography,
for example, demographic software enables the faculty member to
demonstrate the interaction of population variables. When students
ask questions about how the variables interact, the faculty member
can manipulate the variables and enable the students to visualize
the relationship. In economics, instead of teaching with overhead
transparencies that can only show one example of a graph, faculty
can run economics software that projects dynamic graphs in which
variables can be manipulated so the precise teaching example needed
at the moment can be presented. In music classes, MIDI software
provides instant access to any note in any song, displayed on
dynamically active musical staves that can play as well as display
musical notation. Virtually every discipline has software that
can help faculty improve classroom teaching, and our students
deserve faculty willing to use it and classroom facilities adequate
to present it.
As articulated by Brown, Collins, and Duguid (1989), skills and
knowledge are too often taught out of context, as ends in and
of themselves. Multimedia enables faculty members to bring into
the classroom real-life examples of situations that provide the
contextual framework so important for learning. Brown calls this
use of multimedia situated learning. Being able to interact with
students in a situated learning environment is one of the most
empowering aspects of multimedia PCs for faculty. Interactive
case studies are used extensively in teaching business and nursing.
Andersen, Cavalier, and Covey's (1996) interactive CD-ROM A Right to Die? The Case of Dax Cowart
is an example of an interactive case in philosophy.
Students need to be able to communicate with professors in between
classes. The Internet provides three ways for faculty to communicate
more effectively with students outside the classroom. Electronic
mail lets faculty and students exchange messages on a personal
basis. Listserv enables faculty to send a message simultaneously
to all members in a class. Usenet newsgroups provide a threaded
computer-conferencing capability that enables faculty and students
to participate in ongoing conversations about issues and topics
related to a class.
In the past, before the invention of graphical browsers like Netscape
Navigator and the Microsoft Internet Explorer, newsgroups
required more technical skill than one might reasonably expect
the average faculty member to acquire. The graphical user interface
employed in modern Web browsers now makes newsgroups easy enough
for all faculty and students to learn and use.
Regularly scheduled office hours are often inadequate for providing
students with an opportunity to converse with a faculty member
outside of class. Chat rooms offer an attractive alternative without
requiring the faculty and the students to travel physically to
the same location in order to meet. Chat rooms are places on the
Internet where you can go to talk with other users in real time.
By definition, scholarship requires collaboration, yet many classes
fail to involve students in cooperative learning projects. The
Internet provides faculty with a powerful way to encourage collaboration.
For each cooperative learning project in a class, the faculty
member can establish a listserv and a newsgroup. The listserv
provides a way for the students and the faculty member to send
e-mail messages to all students working on the project. The newsgroup
provides a multi-threaded communication environment in which the
project can be structured according to topics and subtopics. Graphical
Web browsers such as the Netscape Navigator and the Microsoft
Internet Explorer display the hierarchical structure of the newsgroup,
letting each member of the class participate in their part of
the project as well as inspect the progress of the project as
a whole.
Let us not forget why Tim Berniers Lee
invented the World Wide Web: to enable scholars to collaborate
on documents. Faculty should encourage students to take advantage
of the collaborative nature of the Web. Each student at UD now
has a Web site, but relatively few students have been shown how
to use them. The faculty should encourage students to use their
Web sites to mount their documents in progress, and use the Web
to foster collaboration and sharing of resources among students.
Special-purpose computer conferencing software combines the real-time
conversational capability of a chat room with the document sharing
capability of the World Wide Web. For example, Microsoft's NetMeeting
is a real-time communications client that supports multi-user
conferencing and application sharing over the Internet. In addition
to allowing users to chat with each other as in a chat room, NetMeeting
also supports the sharing of voice, data, and computer files.
NetMeeting is free and can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/ie/conf.
From Piaget and the constructivists, we have learned that the
aim of teaching is not so much to transmit information, but rather
to encourage the development of skills that enable students to
judge, organize, and acquire new knowledge.
The Chinese have an ancient proverb which states: "Tell me,
and I will forget; show me, and I may remember; involve me, and
I will understand." As articulated by Piaget (1969), students
learn better when they can invent knowledge through inquiry and
experimentation instead of acquiring facts presented by a teacher
in class. It is difficult for faculty to provide this kind of
environment for each student in a traditional classroom. Since
there is only one faculty member for many students, it is physically
impossible for the faculty to support each student's individual
needs. The Internet helps by providing students with a world of
interconnected knowledge to explore. Downloading enables students
to collect what they discover and construct a framework for organizing
and understanding. Thus, the student becomes an active processor
of the information, and knowledge is the by-product.
Faculty members know from experience that teaching is one of the
best ways to learn, because effective teaching requires that you
gather, organize, critique, judge, and construct a framework for
the content matter you plan to present. Involving students in
the teaching process can help students, not just faculty, develop
these skills in order to become truly educated, not just trained.
Technology provides many ways to involve students in the teaching
process. For example, students can be assigned to make brief presentations
as part of the faculty member's in-classroom lecture. Students
with multimedia skill can enhance the class by gathering and integrating
appropriate sound, graphics, and video. On the Internet, students
can be assigned topics to explore with Web search engines and
gather current information on the topic to enhance the class.
In addition to participating in the classroom presentation, students
can post their findings to the class newsgroup under the appropriate
topic or subtopic, and develop their projects into multimedia
term papers to mount at the class Web site, where fellow students
and faculty can meet virtually to peruse, critique, discuss, comment,
and learn.
Education is not a one-way street. It is at least as important
for students to have access to multimedia tools for learning and
communicating over the Internet as it is for faculty to be equipped
for in-classroom use.
During the past quarter-century, educational researchers have made substantial progress developing an understanding of how students learn. Their findings indicate that the teacher-dominated manner in which most college and university classes are taught is outmoded and inappropriate for educating students.
Much of what happens in the traditional classroom was influenced heavily by the behaviorist movement, which dominated American psychology from about 1920 to 1970. Chief among the behaviorists was Skinner (1938, 1953), who saw that human behavior is powerfully shaped by its consequences. Moreover, Skinner felt that psychology was essentially about behavior and that behavior was largely determined by its outcomes. While Skinnerian methods have been effective in learning how to train animals and helping human beings modify their behavior, the behaviorists fell short of what is most important in education for most educators. To educate, you must do more than modify behavior. To educate, you must help the student learn how to develop strategies for learning. Such is the goal of the cognitive movement in education as defined by Bruning (1995, p. 1):
Cognitive psychology is a theoretical perspective that focuses on the realms of human perception, thought, and memory. It portrays learners as active processors of information-a metaphor borrowed from the computer world-and assigns critical roles to the knowledge and perspective students bring to their learning. What learners do to enrich information, in the view of cognitive psychology, determines the level of understanding they ultimately achieve.
If faculty members can learn to shift their pedagogical paradigm
from teacher-dominated to learner-centered, students will become
more actively involved in the teaching and learning process. At
the end of a course, instead of having been trained in the digestion
of existing knowledge, students will have become able to continue
finding, judging, critiquing, synthesizing, and constructing new
knowledge. In sum, students will have become truly educated, not
just trained.
The Internet is the richest source of information on the planet. Just about anything you could ever want to know is available online. Search engines make it possible for scholars and students to find and download this information. Because researchers in most fields are using the Web to communicate about research in progress, students can find out not only what has been done in the past, but also study the latest findings of the top researchers in the field. Students can even search the ongoing conversations that current researchers are holding via newsgroups.
Some skill is required in using Internet search engines, however.
Unless the student knows how to use the Advanced Search Syntax
effectively, frustration will set in as tens of thousands of irrelevant
documents get found in response to a naively constructed search.
All faculty should become role models in the use of the Internet
search engines and show students how to make the most effective
use of the Web in their discipline. Text, graphics, audio, and
video are being used in virtually all subjects to provide an online
multimedia resource for teaching, learning, and scholarship. The
faculty should help students learn how to download this information
and manipulate it for use in classroom presentations and the writing
of multimedia term papers.
The new Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia permit students to include reasonable amounts of copyrighted works-including text, pictures, music, and video-in multimedia term papers. Every student at the University of Delaware now has a Web site, where multimedia term papers can be mounted on the Internet. The two major word processors that students use to write term papers-WordPerfect and Microsoft Word-both have Web page creation utilities that can translate term papers into Web pages automatically. WordPerfect's translator is called WP Internet Publisher, and Microsoft's is called the Internet Assistant.
Once again, all faculty should become role models for using the Web to create a virtual world of interconnected scholarship. When the day-to-day tools used to write scholarly papers take on the ability to create Web pages automatically, there is no excuse for scholars to delay joining the online community and mounting their research papers on the Web.
As mentioned above, every student at the University of Delaware
has a Web site. The faculty should encourage students to submit
their term papers on the Web, where the faculty can read and grade
them in a multimedia format. In addition to preparing students
for participating in the scholarly infrastructure of the 21st
century, Web-based submission of multimedia term papers has advantages
for faculty as well. It's easy to copy text from a student term
paper, paste it into an e-mail message, and send it to a student
along with critical comments for improving the section in question.
By requiring students to link bibliographic references to source
documents online, faculty can more easily check references in
term papers. If a term paper gets submitted with misspellings
and grammatical errors, the faculty member can send the student
a quick e-mail message requiring that the student run a spell-checker
and a grammar analyzer (the grammar analyzer built into Microsoft
Word 97 is fantastic) and resubmit the paper.
Web-based submission of multimedia term papers is a win-win situation
for students and faculty alike. The University of Delaware should
mount an initiative to encourage more faculty to take advantage
of this capability both for their own benefit as well as for their
students.
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