The Promise and Challenges of Integrating Interactive Technologies into University Pedagogy

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The Promise and Challenges of Integrating Interactive Technologies into University Pedagogy

Excerpted from the Campus Technology 2007 conference proceedings for the session, "Realizing Your Smart Classroom Dream"

8/22/2007

By Randy Jackson

At the University of Washington (UW), Seattle, one of the key factors driving AV purchases these days is the quest to create added value in our existing learning environments. In the past this simply meant installing data projectors, Ethernet, and AV control systems. It was largely a capital projects effort with little or no thought being put into the precise pedagogical demands that we were meeting by doing so. This was something that almost everyone wanted regardless of their personal approach to instruction, and we happily met that demand. Life was easy.

Questions about Classroom Technology
Now that many of our rooms have reached a certain standard of computer-based multimedia display sophistication, we are turning to pedagogical-based analyses of the roles technology plays in our classrooms. This process is impacting how we look at basic room configuration and design, but, more importantly, it is leading us to consider technology offerings that might better support desirable pedagogical outcomes. After all, we now have more than 100 years of dramatic growth in learning theory, learning science, and technological aids to guide us. Yet, with countless hours of practical experience invested in investigating these tools it seems remarkable that up to 80 percent of our campus instruction still comes in the form of tried-and-true sage-on-the-stage lecturing, albeit enhanced by digital bullet points, clipart, and sound bites.

Surely there is value to be found in traditional lecture formats, but what added value might we harvest from large lecture environments where significant interaction is seriously lacking and where only a handful of students dominate any attempt at spontaneous interaction? How might we improve a 50-minute lecture period where questions from the audience comprise less than five minutes of class time and where only 19 percent of students will ask a teacher for advice after class? And how might we improve things if we know that only one-third of all students leaving a typical lecture will have most of the key lecture points recorded? What are the barriers that prevent our smart classrooms from being used by our very smart faculty in the smartest of ways?

Questions like these have led us to investigate the promise and challenge of integrating technologies that support interactive experiences into our learning environments. Many theories of learning suggest that instruction will be most effective when it leverages both active and interactive learning experiences. That is, learners must respond in some way to the learning material they encounter. Passive listening, viewing, or reading cannot yield the same benefit. With this in mind we set about to identify technologies that would support some degree of interactive learning believing that the true value of modern educational technologies is only fully realized when they allow us to do things interactively. We sought to find ways to engage students using technology, to provide formative feedback along the way, and to allow for novel ways of interacting with instructional content.