Instructional technology creates a whole new world of possibilities for teaching and learning. As William Geoghegan pointed out in 1994, however, only a very small proportion of faculty are actively using instructional technology, and these tend to be "innovators" or "early adopters" rather than "mainstream" faculty.
Although there has been an increase in the percentage of faculty using technology since 1996, Kenneth Green in his report of the 1996 National Survey of Information Technology in Higher Education notes that the percentages of college courses using various kinds of information technology resources remains relatively low:
Multimedia 11% E-mail 25% Presentation Handouts 28% Commercial Courseware 19% CD-ROM Materials 9% Computer Simulations 14% Computer Lab/Classroom 24% WWW-based Resources 9% As the Director of Duquesne University's Center for Teaching Excellence and co-chair of Duquesne's Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtable, I have been very much involved in assisting our faculty to envision ways to use technology to enhance their teaching and student learning. I've found that mainstream faculty are most likely to use instructional technology if they see it as a solution to a particular problem they face in their teaching, rather than a "gimmick."
Kozma and Johnston (1991) conceptualized ways in which instructional technology can support learning:
- enabling active engagement in construction of knowledge,
- making available real-world situations,
- providing representations in multiple modalities (e.g. 3-D, auditory, graphic, text),
- drilling students on basic concepts to reach mastery,
- facilitating collaborative activity among students,
- seeing interconnections among concepts through hypertext,
- learning to use the tools of scholarship, and
- simulating laboratory work.
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