Learning Technology in Higher Education

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My experience implementing technological solutions in higher ed has been striking: some college professors are surprisingly opposed to technological change. I see some overlap with why K-12 teachers don't want to implement technological education tools such as lack of training, lack of motivation, fear of change, etc. But a few things stand out for higher education specifically:

1. Professor status. Credentialed profs aren't exactly growing on trees. Small schools have a hard time attracting and retaining anyone with a PhD or anyone who has been published in big academic journals or anyone with millions of dollars in grant money. Professor status means that if the proff is breathing and credentialed they can pretty much do what they want with impunity. Their reputation in whatever obscure field they teach precedes them... and excuses them from such bothersome things as learning technology (or good pedagogy and instructional design, for that matter).
   
   
2. Student expectations. It's weird, but it really seems that a lot of freshmen in college still associate the experience with pouring over stacks of dusty paper books, frantically scribbling notes in giant lecture halls, cramming for finals and profs that use chalkboards, whiteboards and overhead projectors as they lecture. Obviously this really depends on the school and the program. My own undergraduate experience (at CMU) was entirely online.
   
   
   
3. Specialization. We have profs that do nothing but lecture. We have grading assistants that do nothing but grade. It seems to me that learning technology is ubiquitous, but mastering the tech is always someone else's job. In other words, with so many radical specializations in obscure subject matter areas, no one has time to really learn the best practices, learning theory, and educational psychology that underpins the learning technology. So we pick an LMS and SIS made by software engineers rather than by educators. Profs pawn off their online teaching responsibilities to grad students, throw up recordings of themselves lecturing, drag and drop some PDF homeworks and a syllabus and BAM... that's an online class.
   
   

The solution seems pretty simple to me. Make compensation and, yes, even employment contingent on the effective use of learning technology. Obviously, this "solution" isn't realistic. Most profs got tenure well before Al Gore invented the Internet. Maybe another solution is to make all higher education student centered, as recommended by a 2017 government whitepaper:
 

"What may be needed for the new normal postsecondary student is broader ecosystem opportunities to learn within both traditional institutions and new providers, underpinned by a digital infrastructure that allows students to create, recognize, and value quality learning experiences wherever and whenever they are most convenient, and that rewards the expertise they develop within and outside of formal institutions over their lifetimes."

The paper describes how diverse the "typical" college student has become in 2017. Some of the terms used in the paper include: middle aged, working, single parent, nontraditional, online, international, and first generation. 30 years ago these demographics were the furthest things from the minds of postsecondary educators. Today, colleges are leaning into technological solutions just to keep the lights on and for schools like CMU the campus has gone truly "global." I myself did two years of CMU from Thailand. 

Will recognizing this shift ensure that profs use learning technology to its full potential? Well, no. But a school that makes reaching the students described above a core part of their strategy must resort to learning technology for the solution. Nowadays, we do college on our smartphones, in the airport, on the shuttle bus to the next terminal. We do master's classes in Asia, Africa and South America. Postsecondary institutions risk irrelevance if they stick to the tried and true whiteboards and paper books. Just my opinion.

Sources cited:

U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology, Reimagining the Role of. Technology in Higher Education: A Supplement to the National Education Technology Plan,. Washington, D.C., 2017 https://tech.ed.gov/files/2017/01/Higher-Ed-NETP.pdf