Campus was closed in the middle of the week due to a blizzard that left drifts of snow blocking every street and driveway in the region. A lot of people have put in a lot of hours moving small mountains of snow and keeping infrastructure up and running. We didn't lose power (although there was some kind of water-supply-related crisis on campus yesterday), so the general atmosphere has turned out to be one of community camaraderie. I love my small midwestern college town.
I don't love interruptions in my work schedule, though. The conventional academic calendar gives me 15 weeks to cultivate changes in my students' neural networks while simultaneously planning revisions to future offerings of my courses. This semester, I have the opportunity to play with incorporating more information technology into my teaching. I'm adapting a brick-and-mortar course for online availability and I'm exploring the use of an iPad and/or electronic textbooks for another course. In the process, I'm running into the limits of evidence for or against innovations in teaching.
I think of myself as being more willing than many of my colleagues to use unconventional pedagogies. If someone were to ask me how I decided what innovations to attempt, though, I'm not sure I could point to many specific sources of support. I think my method has consisted of realizing something doesn't work and trying something different that makes sense to me, based on experience and general principles of how people learn.
Colleagues in my department have been supportive, overall. A couple of them have voiced concern from time to time that they wouldn't know how to step in and cover my class meetings if I were ill. As a group, we seem to be most comfortable with the conventional lecture format, preferably with lecture outlines already printed up as coursepacks. Although I can't cite my inspirations for my specific approach, some of the leading voices in our discipline have recently advocated for pedagogical innovation pretty much in line with what I'm already doing. It's been gratifying to receive that validation.
Now I've been asked to accelerate the incorporation of information technology into my courses. I don't mind the requests; I take it as recognition of my relative comfort with online communication. If students need some online course sections offered in order to keep college affordable, I want to make some online courses available. I've already revised courses to cut textbook costs for students; if offering the option of an online textbook will cut into the overwhelming expense of specialty textbooks, I want to offer the option of an online textbook.
With previous course revisions, I've operated on my own timeframe, responding to my own observations about what isn't working in the classroom. This is a new challenge: I need to evaluate the merits of course design elements rapidly, based on someone else's requests for innovation, with an eye toward improving something that I already think works rather than fixing something that obviously doesn't.
I don't want to add course elements that wind up profiting publishers and iGadget manufacturers more than they benefit my students, though. I'm deeply skeptical. There is entirely too much money involved in educational information technology for me to trust most of what's written about it. For now, I'm playing as fast as I can-- playing with iPad apps, playing with publisher's websites, playing with tools in the Blackboard system. In the meantime, I'd love to receive whatever insights you might have about the deliberate addition of information technology to course design.