Enthusiasm, Hesitation and Stress: The Faculty and Technology by Steve Kolowich

Professors are excited about many of the trappings of digital teaching and scholarship. Other effects increase professors' work loads, stress them out, and scare them, a survey by Inside Higher Ed and Babson Survey Research Group.

 

Download Conflicted: Faculty and Online Education, 2012 and Digital Faculty:
Professors, Teaching and Technology, 2012.

Professors occasionally get lampooned as luddites responsible for the famously slow pace of change in higher education. But in truth the majority of professors are excited about various technology-driven trends in higher education, including the growth of e-textbooks and digital library collections, the increased use of data monitoring as a way to track student performance along with their own, and the increasingly popular idea of “flipping the classroom.”

 

However, other technology trends are more likely to make professors break into a clammy sweat. These include the proliferation of scholarship outlets operating outside the traditional model for peer review, the growth of for-profit education, and the intensity of digital communications. The digital era has brought to the surface other tensions as well, particularly differences in how professors and academic technology administrators perceive how broader technological changes are affecting their campuses and how they should feel about it.

 

These are some of the findings in the second of two reports from surveys conducted by Inside Higher Ed and the Babson Survey Research Group. The first report, focusing on faculty views of online education, was published in June.

A PDF of the new, second report can be downloaded here; the text of the report can be viewed here.

 

The survey relied on the responses of 4,564 faculty members, composing a nationally representative sample spanning various types of institutions; and 591 administrators who are responsible for academic technology at their institutions.

 

The faculty members’ net-positive outlook on several tech-related pedagogical trends suggests that student performance feedback loops and “flipping the classroom” are durable enough to outlast their current buzz. “The increasing collection and analysis of data on teaching and learning on a course-by-course basis” garnered the most enthusiasm of any of the excitement/fear questions in the survey, with 74 percent of professors saying it is, on balance, a good thing.

 

Using the LMS

The learning management system, or LMS, is the nexus of traditional and online education. Not all colleges hold courses online, but virtually every college has an LMS. And since the online platforms can serve as a vehicle for other digital teaching tools, the ways the LMS are being used on a particular campus -- and the ways it is not -- are a pretty good indicator of technology buy-in of an institution and its faculty.

But fewer professors are using the LMS than administrators think.
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Source: Inside Higher Ed