0.3 Findings

Clash with blackboard

A technical issue Mark faced was trying to maintain two course websites. The university required instructors to create a website for each course they taught in Blackboard, and he created the other in Online Day. He tried to keep parallel websites going, using Blackboard as the “email kind of contact source.” Because all the students had access to Blackboard even if they hadn’t bought the textbook, he eventually stopped maintaining the other website.

Attitude toward technology

Three years ago, when Mark ended his stint as provost, he had embraced technology in teaching. He taught online classes to multiple remote sites via videoconferencing, he created voice-over PowerPoint presentations of lectures which he posted on the web, he video recorded some of his lectures for students who missed class, he played students’ audio recordings of practice sessions over the Internet to the remote classes and commented on them synchronously, and he used Blackboard to deliver resources to both distant learners and on-campus students. He made use of discussion boards, online exams, and the computer labs for orienting students to technology for his courses. The first year following Katrina, the campus was completely shut down due to flooding, and two-thirds of the courses were offered online. So by the time Mark taught this course, he had experimented widely with teaching technologies.

By the end of the semester, Mark had stopped maintaining the Online Day course website for the class, and instead relied completely on the Blackboard website. Student use of the Online Day resources had been made optional. Mark resorted to his old methods of classroom teaching. Why? A combination of factors challenged uniform use of Online Day by the students: inability to afford textbook, lack of computers at home, lack of high-speed Internet connections at home, discomfort with downloading software or learning a new program, and difficulty accessing school computer labs, to name a few. Mark’ facility with pre-existing technology made certain elements of the program, such as the test bank questions, which were attractive to the other adopters, irrelevant for him, since he had already created his own online chapter quizzes which he administered through Blackboard.

Summary

In summary, the participants were willing to address my standard questions with thoughtful answers based upon their personal experiences. Personal information gleaned from the interviews included:

• career paths,
• personalities,
• teaching styles,
• teaching philosophies,
• mentors,
• goals for the course,
• attitudes toward the students,
• technology training,
• beliefs about how students learn, and
• how they like to be taught to use technology.

Based on the accounts of the participants, it is clear that integrating technology in teaching is a complex process. Each instructor had his or her own particular set of circumstances that determined the degree to which he or she incorporated technology. Some personal elements necessary for integrating technology included the instructors’ intrinsic motivation for adopting it, a level of comfort with technology, tenacity in getting technical assistance, having the time to experiment with the software to learn what it could do, their willingness to change the way they taught in order to incorporate the new technology, and their ability to teach themselves to use a new web-based course management system. Some other key factors to technology integration were classrooms equipped with computers and high-speed Internet, students who bought the textbook (and thereby had access to the course website), student access to high-speed Internet at home, and students’ computer competency to navigate the course website and download the software to access the streaming videos.

The themes that emerged from this chapter provide the focus for the final chapter discussion. Although each instructor taught in a unique way, there were certain experiences they encountered that determined how they taught, and how they incorporated the Online Day resources into their teaching.