Student Population Is Changing, Not Simply Demographically

¶ … student population is changing, not simply demographically but also in terms of the skill sets students bring to the classroom. Teachers must change their approach to using technology, to engage student interest and to prepare students for the new workplace, which is technologically 'connected.' Often, faculty members may be less technologically aware than their students. Faculty members' levels of comfort with technology must be raised, and they must learn how to alter longstanding teaching practices to suit the new environment.

Formally training faculty members in how to use new technology and integrate it into the classroom is one approach to making education more relevant for students. But simply measuring increased use of technology in the classroom is not effective as a gauge of professional education programs. Some faculty members may simply replace their off-line materials with online materials, such as putting course notes on the website, or links to pdf articles, which is not really a fundamental shift in how the material is taught.

It does not truly change the way that students are learning. Measuring student engagement or positive feelings about a course is not necessarily accurate, given that student evaluations of faculty are notoriously unreliable. Students may give a positive rating to a faculty member simply because he or she was an 'easy grader,' for example. A combined approach must be used that measures types of use of technology, and student performance and perceptions. Instead, the specific types of faculty engagement must be assessed through a qualitative approach.

The research question is as follows: can a faculty training program substantively enhance the learning experience of students in the classroom? A select group of faculty members would be selected, and their performance would be compared before and after the program, as would student grades and retention. Teachers going through the faculty technology training program would be interviewed, both before and afterward. They would be followed over the course of a semester to see how they used technology in the classroom and how their comfort level increased.

Students would be interviewed, to assess whether the use of technology substantially impacted their engagement with the course material. This would allow for a comparison of different types of technology -- for example, to see if using supplementary, visually-driven course materials online was effective, or comparing the use of synchronous learning techniques like interactive chat rooms vs. non-synchronous message boards. It would also enable a comparison to see if certain types of disciplines benefited more from the use of technology vs. others.

For example, with the teaching of literature, was student learning equally enhanced as it was in computer science courses? Student profiles would be assessed before the study took place, so that researchers could accurately compare the reaction of more academically-prepared students, versus less academically-prepared students. Is the use of technology more important for one demographic of student vs. another? Student grades and retention rates would be compared with the faculty member's students before the program began, and also with a control group of students and faculty.