Most Faculty Upbeat about EdTech

The majority of college and university faculty members feel positive about the impact of technology on education, with nearly three quarters saying it’s made their job “easier” or “much easier,” according to the results of Campus Technology’s second-annual Teaching with Technology Survey.

Even though that total remains high, it’s down four percentage points from the inaugural survey last year. The number of educators claiming tech has made their job more difficult remained consistent, but those who say it hasn’t affected them either way grew from 6% in 2016 to 10% this year.

Whatever its effect on their own work, more than 80% of faculty say they see technology having a positive impact on student learning, and about the same percentage view it having a “mostly positive” or “extremely positive” influence on higher education overall.

Individual respondents did point out that any classroom tech is only as good as the instructor using it and that faculty need to be provided the time to properly understand and adapt technology to their courses.

The complete results of the survey, which polled more than 230 faculty from across the country, are available in the July digital edition of Campus Technology.

Faculty Not Sold on Ed-Tech

College instructors still aren’t that impressed with technology in the classroom. In fact, faculty responding to the 2016 Inside Higher Ed Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology said they thought the quality of teaching and learning hasn’t been helped by data-driven assessments and accountability efforts, other than to keep politicians off their backs.

Just 27% of faculty members said technology has improved the quality of instruction at their institutions, while the percentage of respondents who said using ed-tech helped to improve degree-completion rates was about the same. On the other hand, 65% agreed that efforts in ed-tech were meant to pacify outside groups.

The survey found that fewer administrators and faculty members said that technology led to significantly improved student outcomes, making it hard to justify the investment. Both groups think institutions are taking the right steps to protect personal information from cyberattacks.

“Faculty members are still worried that online education can’t deliver outcomes equivalent to face-to-face instruction,” wrote Carl Straumsheim in an article for Inside Higher Ed. “They are split on whether investments in ed-tech have improved student outcomes. And they overwhelmingly believe textbooks and academic journals are becoming too expensive.”

Study Looks at Classroom Tech

A new survey from Campus Technology found that traditional laptops and desktops are the most common forms of instructional technology used in the classroom. Both devices were used in 82% of the time, according to a poll of faculty members from across the country.

More than 500 instructors participated in the study, including 49% who worked in the field of higher education for 21 years or longer. Nearly 70% of the respondents worked at public institutions, with another 23% teaching at private, not-for-profit colleges.

Laptops were ranked as either “essential” or “valuable” by 95%, followed by high-end computers with faster processors, more storage, and dedicated graphic cards by 76% of the respondents. Instructors said they used tech for instruction about 62% of the time, while one in 10 reported using it all the time. A quarter said they used it at least 75% of the time.

Instructors are less thrilled with mobile phones in the classroom. About one-fifth allow their use and 57% allow them with limitations. Another 22% forbid the devices completely.

When it came to use of digital course materials, 74% reported using a mix of digital and paper-based textbooks. A similar number said they used open educational resources to take advantage of free and low-cost content.

Teachers Want VR in the Classroom

Educators see potential in virtual reality (VR) and would like more access to it in their classrooms. A new survey from the networking software company Extreme Networks found that 23% of responding schools said they had tested VR and more than half said they were looking into using it.

The study reported that 52% of the schools that tried VR technology used it for science classes, while 20% used it in engineering, and 29% in history. Google was the most popular brand in the survey, at 74%, followed by Oculus (17%) and Samsung (14%).

One challenge for responding school administrators was IT infrastructure. The report found that 32% said they could use VR, 31% said they were “somewhat sure” they had the infrastructure, and 30% were sure they couldn’t support the technology.

“The major benefit of virtual reality in the classroom is that it engages students completely in the lesson,” Bob Nilsson, director of vertical solutions marketing for Extreme Networks, wrote in a blog post about the survey. “It sparks creativity and brings difficult concepts to life. The downside is there is not yet enough VR content and it is still perceived as difficult to implement.”

Trigger Warnings Back in the News

The University of Chicago got the debate about trigger warnings started again when it told incoming freshmen that the university did not support warning students about potentially difficult material. Not all faculty members agree with that stance.

A survey of more than 800 faculty members conducted last fall by National Public Radio found that about half of them used trigger warnings, and most did it on their own. The study, which NPR admitted was not a scientific sample, noted that 86% of the professors knew of the term “trigger warning,” but fewer than 2% said their institutions had official policies about their use.

The survey also reported that fewer than 4% of students requested a warning. Nearly 65% of the professors who provided one did so because they thought the material required it and none of the respondents said they had students try to get out of an assignment or skip a class because the topic made them uncomfortable.

“I think that trigger warnings can and should be used in a limited number of situations, but overusing them can create a situation in which students opt out of learning experiences simply because they don’t want to confront their own assumptions about the world,” Lauren Griffith, a professor of ethnology at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, told NPR about her use of the warnings.

Faculty Awareness of OER Continues to Lag

The use of open educational resources (OER) is becoming more popular each year, but faculty still trail behind in awareness. Babson Survey Research Group reported in a new study that 25% of faculty are either aware or very aware of OER, up from 20% a year ago, but 58% remained unaware or didn’t know much about open content.

Another 17% of faculty said they were aware of OER but weren’t sure how to use them. More than 3,000 teaching faculty responded to the survey for the report Opening the Textbook: Education Resources in U.S. HigherEducation 2015-16.

The study found that instructors of large-enrollment, introductory-level classes adopted OER at twice the rate (10%) of other faculty members. Nearly 50% of the respondents said they felt there weren’t enough OER resources for the subject they taught and 45% cited the absence of comprehensive catalogs of the resources, but 30% said they would consider using OER in the future.

“There is potential for growth for OER, as many faculty report that they are willing to try these resources,” said Jeff Seaman, co-author of the report. “However, while faculty cite cost to the students more than any other factor in selecting educational materials, concerns about the time and effort it takes to find and evaluate these materials remain a significant barrier to wider adoption.”

MOOC Instructors Need More Support

A new study found that teaching massive open online courses (MOOCs) takes its toll on instructors. The research concluded that supporting instructors may be as important to creation of successful courses as attracting students, according to a report on phys.org.

When researchers from Penn State University and the University of Central Florida interviewed 14 MOOC instructors for the study, they found only four who expressed interested in teaching them on a regular basis. Two instructors said they won’t teach another MOOC and another four worried about the demands of teaching a MOOC as well as a regular class.

Instructors said they struggled to find new ways to teach a MOOC and needed support in course preparation, implementation, and feedback. Dealing with teaching a class the size of a MOOC can be a challenge. One instructor told researchers that the preparation for a course took nearly 400 hours on top of regular teaching responsibilities.

“Most of the research on how we can make MOOCs successful has focused on the student side—how do we attract and retain them, for instance—but now attention is starting to switch to instructors, who make the MOOCs happen,” said Sajing Zheng, a doctoral candidate in information sciences and technology at Penn State who helped conduct the research. “So it’s important to know the motivations of the instructors for teaching this new format and their experiences and challenges when they teach these MOOCs.”

Faculty Not Sold on OER

The news is full of reports about digital learning and open educational resources (OER), and yet faculty members don’t seem to be on board. Nearly a quarter of faculty members responding to a new survey said digital will never be used in their classes and 27% said if it did happen it wouldn’t be for another couple of years, according to a report in Campus Technology.

When it comes to OER, 75% said they either never heard of them or know little about them. Another 10% said they have reviewed OER content and decided against using it.

The survey, conducted for the Independent College Bookstore Association, also found that 97% of faculty members said they consider their own assessment of course materials as either important or very important, with 86% specifying cost of the material as important. However, just 36% said course materials in digital format were important.

Most faculty members (79%) said they believed digital content “generally costs less,” but just 44% said they thought students preferred it. Fewer than 30% said digital could have a “beneficial impact” on learning when compared to print.

“While the transition from print to digital course materials may be inevitable, these new survey data make two things clear: First is that the pace of this change is much slower than anticipated by publishers, administrators, and campus IT professionals,” Kenneth Green, head of the Campus Computing Project, said in his report Going Digital: Faculty Perspectives on Digital and OER Course Materials. “And, second, most faculty are not convinced that digital products have a positive impact on student learning outcomes.”

Online Learning Important on Campus

Online education has become a critical component for colleges and universities, according to the 2014 Babson Survey Research Group report. That’s particularly true for smaller campuses, where 70% of the academic leaders from schools with fewer than 1,500 students told Babson researchers that online education was a critical long-term strategy at their institutions.

Overall, 71% of respondents said online education was an important part of the educational plans at their schools, up from 66% in the 2013 report.

The study, Grade Level: Tracking Online Education inthe United States, also reported that 74% of academic leaders said they believe online courses are at least as good as face-to-face courses, but that most professors continue to be wary of online courses. In fact, just 28% of the academic leaders said their professors thought online courses were legitimate, the same percentage from the 2002 survey, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The study reported just a 3.7% increase in the number of distance-education students in 2014, the lowest increase in the 13 years of research. It also found that only 8% of the institutions in the survey offered massive open online courses (MOOCs). Just 16% of the academic officers said they believe MOOCs are a sustainable way to offer online courses.

Faculty Still Not Sold on Digital

Two recent surveys of faculty members found that many instructors aren’t buying into online courses as an effective method of learning and aren’t really sure what open educational resources (OER) are.

The first report, Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology, found that 52% of responding faculty members said online courses produce inferior results when compared to in-person courses. The survey of 2,799 faculty members and 288 academic technology administrators was conducted by Gallup in August and September.

Humanities instructors disapproved of online courses the most (54%), but 51% of social sciences teachers and 46% of engineering, biological, and physical sciences instructors agreed with them. In addition, just 18% of faculty who had taught an online course thought they outperformed in-person classes, while 71% said online courses provided lower-quality interaction with students.

“My general reaction is that the data show that the more exposure a faculty member has had to online or blended learning, the more positive their view,” Ronald Legon, executive director of the Quality Matters Program, told Inside Higher Education. “But clearly, not all faculty have seen the potential of online learning to match and even exceed the effectiveness of face-to-face learning because they have not had the opportunity to become familiar with best practices and research-driven course design and delivery.”

The second study, to find out if faculty are using OER, reported that nearly two-thirds said they were unaware of open educational resources, even though about half reported using them. More than 2,100 faculty members responded to the survey, conducted by Babson Survey Research Group.

“The answer appears to have two causes,” authors of the report wrote. “The [lack of] faculty understanding of the term of ‘open educational resources,’ and the fact that faculty often make resource choices without consideration to the licensing of that resource.”

The report noted that the most popular types of open content were images (89%) and videos (87%). Nearly 75% of respondents said the quality of OER materials was the same as or better than traditional resources. That quality was one of the most important considerations for faculty members who used OER, but 85% rated OER superior to traditional materials when it came to cost for students.

A major problem is the availability of OER. Faculty members cited lack of a comprehensive catalog as the largest barrier to using OER, followed by difficulty in finding the resources and concerns about licensing.

“While awareness of OER remains low among teaching faculty, it is not the critical barrier to wider adoption,” said Jeff Seaman, co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group. “The time and effort required to find, evaluate, and adopt these materials is the critical factor for faculty.”

Flipped Classrooms Gaining Momentum

A new report from the Center for Digital Education and Sonic Foundry found that half of the faculty members participating in an the online survey said they are using the flipped-classroom model or plan to in the next 12 months. Of the respondents already using the technique, 57% said the experience was successful.

A flipped classroom allows students to learn new content at home online, with what used to be homework assignments being done in class with the instructor offering more personalized guidance and interaction.

According to the study, 81% of respondents reported an “improved mastery of information” from students, while 80% said there was “improved retention of information.” Instructors also cited better learning experiences for students, greater availability of technology, and positive results from trials as the top reasons for using flipped classrooms.

“Based upon my experience, the benefits of the flipped-classroom model far outweigh the challenges, and I’ve seen the difficulties with implementing the model decrease over time as efficiencies are realized,” Clemson University lecturer Ralph Welsh wrote in the report. “It has also allowed me to tailor my classroom time more toward answering specific student questions and discussing the material at a more applied, higher level of thinking.”

Preparing for a flipped classroom takes more time, according to 75% of the responding faculty members, but 83% agreed or strongly agreed that the model had a positive impact on their classrooms. Another 86% said student attitudes improved as well.

A quarter of the respondents said they plan to use flipped classrooms across all disciplines and 51% record their own video content.  A webcast of the findings is available at sonicfoundry.com.

Don't Look to MOOCs for Revenue Yet

Massive open online courses will not create revenue, or even save money, according to a study from the American Council on Education (ACE) and InsideTrack. The study was based on interviews with campus administrators and instructors with firsthand experience using MOOCs.

Nearly every instructor participating in the survey said teaching a MOOC was a good experience and 92% are planning to teach more. The respondents just don’t see the courses as a way for their schools to make money, according to a report in eCampus News.

“Don’t view MOOCs as either revenue-generating or cost-saving vehicles,” one administrator wrote. “They are neither.”

That doesn’t mean some professors aren’t trying. Students at the University of Texas at Austin can pay a $550 registration fee to take a psychology MOOC for three credit hours. At the beginning of October, 1,500 students had signed up for what the professors decided to call a synchronous massive online course (SMOC), which could generate $825,000 if all the participants complete the course.

In addition, almost half of administrators and instructors in the ACE/InsideTrack study felt MOOCs were important to help an institution expand its reach and increase access to higher education. More than half of the respondents also said creating a MOOC is important to develop an instructor’s online pedagogy.

“We didn’t jump in to make money,” one respondent wrote. “The business model is intriguing, but we didn’t go in with those expectations and that remains the same. We reached people we wouldn’t have otherwise, and for every student who enrolled there were 10 times as many who looked at us. It’s become a great platform to promote the brand of our institution and aligns with our mission to share knowledge.”

Faculty Still Skeptical of MOOC Results

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) may be generating lots of public interest, but faculty members are not quite there yet, according to a new survey from Inside Higher Education.

Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology, a study of 2,251 professors, found that just one in five agree that MOOCs achieve the same learning outcomes as traditional classroom instruction. At the same time, the percentage of instructors who had taught at least one online course rose from 25% in 2012 to 30% this year. Nearly 50% of those respondents said they believe the learning outcomes online were the same as in-person classes.

The study also found that six of 10 instructors said institutions offering a class online as well as in-person was a “very important” indicator of quality, but just 45% said online courses for credit are very important. On the other hand, 63% of the 248 academic technology administrators surveyed for the study said credit was a “very important” indicator of the quality of online education.

“The skepticism [of MOOCs] comes from a suspicion that these efforts are about cost savings, and are being driven by economic discussions and not learning discussions,” said Anne Balsamo, dean of the School Media Studies at The New School for Public Engagement.

Professors Surveyed on Teaching MOOCs

A survey of professors who have taught massive open online courses (MOOCs) by The Chronicle of Higher Education found that 79% believed MOOCs are worth the publicity that has been generated, while 64% said they believed MOOCs could help reduce the cost of attaining a college degree to some degree at their particular institutions.

The results show professors are beginning to accept and embrace MOOCs, according to The Chronicle. It’s surprising because surveys of chief academic administrators have found that just 30% thought that their faculty members accept the value of online education.

Online questionnaires were sent in February to 184 professors who have taught MOOCs, with 103 responding. The Chronicle was quick to admit the results were unscientific, but two-thirds of the professors who did respond had taught for more than a decade and would not be considered a group of MOOC “true believers.”

The survey found that 97% of the instructors used original videos in their courses and 75% used open educational resources. However, professors also reported spending more than 100 hours on MOOCs before the first class and up to eight to 10 hours each week keeping the MOOC materials up to date and answering students.

“I had almost no time for anything else,” said Geoffrey Hinton, professor of computer science at the University of Toronto. “My graduate students suffered as a consequence. It’s equivalent to volunteering to supply a textbook for free and to provide one chapter of camera-ready copy every week without fail.”

While The Chronicle research shows professors may be starting to embrace the idea of MOOCs, there’s still some convincing left to do. Although the professors felt MOOCs could cut college costs, 72% felt that students didn’t deserve formal credit.

Studies Show Devices Disrupt Focus

While there has been no long-term study of the role of electronic devices in society in general, and education in particular, recent research suggests the constant use of technology can have an effect on the attention span of students. Research done by both the Pew Research Center and Common Sense Media found that teachers think constant use of digital devices makes it more difficult for students to pay attention and focus on classroom tasks. This has changed the way many instructors conduct their classes.

“I’m tap-dancing all over the place,” said Dave Mendell, a fourth-grade teacher in Wallingford, PA, in a New York Times article. “The more I stand in front of class, the easier it is to lose them.”

Larry Rosen, professor of psychology, California State University, Dominguez Hills, weighed in on the subject in a column that appeared in eSchool News. Rosen studied student test scores after they were told to answer text messages they might receive during a video lecture. All the students got lower grades because waiting for the text to arrive was a distraction. His research also found that students who responded to the text immediately got even lower grades than those who waited to respond.

“After the study, when asked why they did not respond immediately, they told us that they were waiting for a time when the videotape material seemed less important and not likely to be on the test,” Rosen wrote. “Those students were using their metacognitive skills to decide when was a good time to be distracted and when it was important to focus.”

Rosen went on to suggest teachers use “technology breaks” as a possible way to get students to focus.  A technology break allows students to check messages between extended periods of time focused on classroom work.

“The trick is to gradually lengthen the time between tech breaks to teach students how to focus for longer periods of time without being distracted,” Rosen wrote. “I have teachers using this in classrooms, parents using it at the dinner table or a restaurant, and bosses using tech breaks during meetings with great success.”

Free Webinar on Professors and Technology

The new study Digital Faculty: Professors, Teaching and Technology, 2012, found that professors are excited about technology trends in education, including the growth of e-textbooks. This is the type of information that should be important to collegiate retailers as the industry moves forward.

Inside Higher Education is now offering a free hour-long webinar Sept. 24 at 2 p.m. Eastern to discuss the findings. The panel will be made up of Inside Higher Ed editor Scott Jaschik; Joshua Kim, a blogger for the publication and director of learning and technology, Dartmouth College; technology reporter Steve Kolowich; and Jeff Seaman, co-director, Babson Survey Research Group.

Registration information will be shared with sponsor companies CourseSmart, Deltak, Pearson, and Sonic Foundry.

Survey: Professors Open to Modern Techniques

Professors have mixed feelings about technologies in the academic world, but most are trying to get their arms around new ideas and processes. That’s the conclusion of a new survey conducted by Inside Higher Ed and the Babson Survey Research Group focus on faculty views of online education, in addition to professors’ outlook on the growth of e-textbooks, digital library collections, data monitoring, and the idea of moving away from traditional lecturing.

The survey is based on the responses of 4,564 faculty from various types of institutions, and 591 administrators responsible for academic technology at their campuses.

Tech tools intended to help faculty manage tasks and, by extension, reduce their stress seem to be having the opposite effect. The increase in technology appears to increase stress levels for some professors. Some suggest that has to do with professors being available 24/7 through e-mail and text.