Gail Weatherly

Lesson 9: Undertake an Internet search of websites addressing issues of cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis of educational technology and share your findings via email with the class.
Complete Article:       http://www.learner.org/edtech/rscheval/rightquestion.html

Asking the Right Question

What Does Research Tell Us About Technology and Higher Learning?

Stephen C. Ehrmann, Ph.D.
Director of Flashlight
American Association of Higher Education

This article offers a great deal of insight in the difficult area of assessing the overall benefit and cost-effectiveness of educational technology. The author says that in his 20 years of research about innovation in higher education--it's funding, its evaluation, and research about it, he found that questions like: "What do computers teach best? Does video encourage passive learning?" and, "Is it cheaper to teach with telecommunications?" can't be answered in any reliable, valid way. Rather, he says, "The quest for useful information about technology begins with an exacting search for the right questions."

BAD QUESTIONS

• seek universal answers to questions about the comparative teaching effectiveness and costs of technology. These kinds of evaluative questions are phrased like, "Do computers do a better job of teaching English composition than traditional methods?" Think about it. That question assumes that education operates something like a machine, and that each college is a slightly different version of the same ideal machine.
  
• search for global generalizations about the costs of technology relative to traditional methods. A noted economist of higher education, Howard Bowen, found that institutions of higher education each raise all the money they can, spend all they get, and spend it in ways that relate closely to the way they spent the money last year. They spent rather different amounts per student, and they spent each dollar differently. Bowen found no way to state rationally what it ought to cost to educate a student properly. Tougher economic times may have forced some convergence in costs among institutions. But we still have no rational way of describing what traditional education should cost per student. None of this suggests that we should ignore issues of cost in looking at new investments in technology. But caution flags should go up whenever you hear someone say the nation can teach English composition more cheaply if it uses technology X, be that technology old or new.

IF YOU'RE HEADED IN THE WRONG DIRECTION, TECHNOLOGY WON'T HELP YOU GET TO THE RIGHT PLACE

• Many advocates of technology want to improve current teaching. But too often they fail to ask whether traditional education has been teaching the right content. They seek to change the means of education but don't ask hard questions first about its objectives.

THE MEDIUM ISN'T THE MESSAGE

• Too many observers assume that if they know what the hardware is (computers, seminar rooms), they know whether student learning will occur. They assume that if faculty members get this hardware, they easily, automatically, and quickly change their teaching tactics and course materials to take advantage of it. Thus technology budgets usually include almost no money for helping faculty and staff upgrade the instructional programs.
  
• Without asking hard questions about learning, technology remains an unguided missile.

STRATEGIES MATTER MOST

• To make visible improvements in learning outcomes using technology, use that technology to enable large-scale changes in the methods and resources of learning. That usually requires hardware and software that faculty and students use repeatedly, with increasing sophistication and power. Thus far few educators, evaluators and researchers have paid much attention to educational strategies for using technologies. Too often they've been victims of "rapture of the technologies." Mesmerized, they focus on individual pieces of software and hardware, individual assignments and, occasionally, to individual courses.

Ordinarily what matters most is:

• not the technology per se but how it is used,
  
• not so much what happens in the moments when the student is using the technology, but more how those uses promote larger improvements in the fabric of the student's education, and
  
• not so much what we can discover about the average truth for education at all institutions but more what we can learn about our own degree programs and our own students.

PROS and CONS for investing in new telecommunications technologies as part of the educational enterprise:

PROS

• Technology can enable important changes in the curriculum
  
• Technology can support innovative educational strategies
  
• New telecommunications technologies promote change and redesign
  
• New telecommunications technologies provide alternatives for life-long learning
  
• New telecommunications technologies, in conjunction with a well thought out strategic plan, offer a scalability that is greatly needed.
  
• New telecommunications technologies present provocative opportunities for improving education and possibly making it less expensive.
  
• The powerful visualization capabilities of computers can be used to present information in ways that are often more effective than print.
  
• A Web-based course can be improved steadily, screen by screen and lecture by lecture, and thus grow in effectiveness and quality each year in a way that simply does not happen in the traditional format.

CONS

• Institutions must carefully define their distributed/distance learning strategies in light of the economics and the goals of higher education and within the context of the unprecedented pressures and accountability issues that higher education is facing today.
  
• As hard as it is to believe, the Web could disappear. It hasn't so far because it has managed to evolve, in effect replacing itself. In fact, it has done this twice so far.
  
• Without asking hard questions, technology remains an unguided missile.
  
• Myriad institutional issues should be considered before investing heavily in new telecommunications technologies: library access, faculty workload, faculty incentives, faculty support structures, intellectual property, financial aid, pricing of distance education, technology infrastructure requirements, goals of the parent organization.

My particular position on technology as an effective instructional tool:

I must admit that I adopt Ehrmann's position of a Triple Challenge facing educators when considering the use of technology: outcomes, accessibility, costs. Technology, when incorporated into a lesson, can become a magical tool, even if the technology is simply a pencil. Today, our society is bombarded with an array of technologies, and they are slowly finding their way into the educational arena amidst a barrage of criticism from those who seek to block its entry into the traditional educational setting. Unfortunately, this is a setting that has changed little since the turn of the century. This seems to be a clear illustration that education is in a time warp. Change does happen, will happen, is happening, with or without the acceptance of those at the helm of educational decision-making. Society is shifting. So, will the organizations that are responsible for educating society refuse to change? An older, wiser businessman gave my husband, who owns his own business, some great advice years ago. "Son, there are three rules in business," the gentleman said. "You start out as a risk taker. Later, when your business gets going well, you become a caretaker. And later on, if you don't become a risk taker again, you'll become an undertaker." That sums up my philosophy about technology in education. If education as a whole refuses to take risks by reinventing itself with new, innovative tools that might engage learners, then history suggests there is the potential for education as we know it to become obsolete.