When Good Technology Means Bad Teaching: Giving professors gadgets without training can do more harm than good in the classroom
By JEFFREY R. YOUNG
SOURCE: Educause Center for Applied Research
Dull Presentations
The most common technology used in the classroom seems to be PowerPoint, and it is also the most criticized by students. A good PowerPoint presentation can enliven a lecture by offering imagery to support key points, and having a prepared set of slides can keep professors from straying off on tangents. Many students also praise PowerPoint slides for being easy to read, noting that professors' chalkboard scrawls can be illegible.
But students say some professors simply dump their notes into PowerPoint presentations and then read them, which can make the delivery even flatter than it would be if the professor did not use slides.
"Sometimes they don't use it to make their points," says Sara E. Sullivan, a sophomore at Suffolk County Community College. "They use it in lieu of their lesson plan." As one student told researchers in the Educause study: "The majority are taking their lectures and just putting them on PowerPoint. ... With a chalkboard, at least the lights were on and you didn't fall asleep."
And unlike overhead transparencies, which professors can annotate with a pen during a lecture, PowerPoint slides cannot be easily changed during class. "Sometimes overheads are better because you can draw on them, and that's kind of an interactive feature that's gone away with PowerPoint," says Bryan P. Duffie, a senior at Ohio University's main campus.
Increasingly, professors are placing their PowerPoint slides on the Web before or after class -- a feature that students find convenient and helpful. But while students often ask for this service, it can also make them less likely to attend classes.
When students do show up for such classes, they can use the classroom's costly technology to focus on things other than the lecture. "If he's reading me a PowerPoint and I could read it myself later, then I'll check my e-mail," says Brian J. Rizman, a junior at Saint Joseph's University, who says that some classrooms have a computer at every seat.
Stephen H. Loomis, chairman of the biology department at Connecticut College, says he is not surprised by such attitudes. His first attempts at using PowerPoint yielded similarly poor results.
"What I've found is that a lot of times it allows students to disengage instead of becoming more engaged in the topic you're covering," he says. "I don't think the majority of people are using it well."
Mr. Loomis, who has tenure, says that he devotes a considerable amount of time to finding new ways to use technology in his classes, and that his methods seem to be popular with students. He says, for instance, that he asks students in his human physiology courses to go through lessons on a CD-ROM that comes with the textbook before class, and that discussions in those classes have been richer as a result.
He is on the board for the college's center for teaching and learning, which offers summer workshops for professors on how to design Web sites for their courses and how to make effective use of PowerPoint. But he says that his untenured colleagues who hear about his high-tech experiments say they are too busy with research and other obligations that they feel will help them get promoted.
"The support systems are not in place right now to really promote effective use of technology," says Mr. Loomis. "I basically waited until I was a tenured full professor until I started getting into this kind of stuff." Steven Strand, academic administrator in the life-sciences core-curriculum program at the University of California at Los Angeles, says that when he first started using PowerPoint and posting the slides on the Web, attendance in his classes dropped by 20 percent. "If you give them the whole thing, they assume they don't have to come to the lecture," he says.
Now, he produces slides riddled with blanks and missing information, which he fills in aloud during lecture. He also uses slides to spice up what he is saying, by sprinkling in the occasional cartoon or illustration. "We're good visual learners," he says. "And we don't visualize by looking at words.
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