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a paper presented at
Conference on "Ensuring National Competitiveness in the Information
Economy"
24-27 April 1996
Jakarta, Indonesia
Dr Gordon Doughty
University of Glasgow Scotland UK
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Opportunities are arising as communications, computer and TV
technologies combine. There are many potential advantages of the use
of IT in education. IT will replace some lectures, laboratories and
tutorials where it provides resources for learning which a re more
effective, richer, available for extended hours, and open to a wider
range of students.
Students will have greater control over timing and pace, and there
will be more likelihood of resources suiting the style and stage of
each students learning. Teachers can expect to gain time for more
individual attention to students.
Both students and their teachers need to be trained in IT, and its
use for learning. Organisations and governments need to learn how to
make wise investments in IT for education and training.
A decision maker in education often needs to move a course in at
least one of three directions: better quality, cheaper provision
(lower cost), or quicker delivery (less time). It is not possible to
improve in one of these directions without one or more of the other
two deteriorating, unless more resources can be employed, or greater
efficiency found.
Information technology (IT) can make teaching and learning more
effective and efficient, but you need to invest in its physical and
organisational infrastructure, in how to use it, and in integrating
IT into the students learning.
Because IT is so powerful, it can be used at all levels of education and training, from primary to higher education and in the workplace. In certain situations IT can probably be more effective than any other media, for example in
With lectures, students need to absorb material at a fixed rate, or
make good notes. CAL can be used at the students optimum pace. Test
results seem to indicate that the material covered by their
courseware is more accessible, and offers more opportunity for
practise on a computer, than in textbooks and lectures.
There is, of course, a need for any country to have enough trained
electronics engineers and computer scientists. But it is essential
for a much larger number of employees to have a wide range of
practical IT skills. It is also important for them to have m ore
general skills in lifelong learning. Evidence is emerging that early
learning of study skills can make students more effective learners
overall. These can be skills in using IT for studying, or more
general skills learned through IT. It should be worth students being
educated in IT to be able to make full use of:
As well as using IT tools in learning, computer based learning materials can provide powerful aids to all students, in many different ways:
The flexibility of IT for learning allows adults and others
outside of full-time attendance at schools and universities to learn
in their own time. IT can add a great extra value to the distance
learning, such as is provided by an open learning university.
Teachers difficulties in adopting IT have tended to centre on lack
of time, lack of support staff, lack of information and lack of
suitable materials. Staff attitudes often contain objections:
Cost-cutting to balance the budget is our main priority
We must do whatever attracts the most new students
Computers will never be more effective than lectures
We should only do enough to impress quality assessors
Educational research should guide us
Information technology will solve our problems
We can't give up laboratory space for computers
The students will always learn, whatever way we try to teach
The IT advocate must accommodate the many views that teachers hold
on what is important in the teaching and learning process. Various
views become fashionable at times (e.g. behaviourism,
constructivism). The ways in which a teacher may see IT fitting into
their teaching depends on these views.
In Discovery Learning, students learn through projects,
investigations and problem solving, with the teacher providing
motivation and advice, and pointing to resources. Such teachers may
prefer a package to be a resource collection, or use access to the
Web.
Behaviourism emphasises stimulus reward. CAL designed with a
behaviourist bias emphasises formative assessment feedback, and may
not permit progress through the package until questions have been
correctly answered.
Most CAL packages are constructed for subject specific learning,
providing knowledge and understanding of concepts, facts, trends,
conventions, theories, principles, rules, laws and structures. Others
are for professional skills: practical competences that are specific
to a vocation, such as dentistry. It is less common for a CAL package
to specifically address curricular aims for general skills: to
analyse, observe, discriminate, conceptualise, classify, speculate,
validate, explain, predict, apply, integer ate, evaluate, reflect,
solve complex and new problems, form points of view, acquire motor
skills, interactional skills, communication skills.
Teachers and administrators require convincing that it is worthwhile to invest in IT for their teaching. The following forms of evidence have been found helpful in convincing them:
It has been shown to be important that students working in an
interactive environment should have clear pointers to routes by which
they can find answers to their questions regarding the material being
covered in class. This avoids a feeling that the inter active
environment is closed and that all questions must be found within
it.
The value of IT is greatly enhanced by working in course teaching
teams and working in student learning groups, rather than working
alone. Evidence of more effective learning is beginning to emerge
from the use of CAL in cooperative learning and in a team teaching
environment. Productivity improvements flowing from the students
training in IT skills and from the use of computer mediated
communication for teaching and assessment are also becoming
apparent.
We have carefully evaluated a wide range of IT uses for learning.
Some require large teams of many specialists to produce and deliver
learning materials. Others need only normal staff levels of IT skills
(eg wordprocessing, spreadsheets etc). Others need very little IT
skill - we have found that some staff can assist students using
computers with learning difficulties in their subject content without
needing to support the students with their IT skills. There is no
single level of minimum IT skill needed.
Staff in teaching teams need a wide range of skills to succeed in
providing IT for learning:
There are several ways to provide learning materials:
All teachers who may use IT need basic training, and their
trainers need very extensive training to keep the teachers up to date
and efficient. However, teachers usually have the most important
skill already - experience in using whatever resources they ca n find
to help the students learn.
As IT pervades all business and industrial enterprises, employers
need workers skilled in all aspects of IT, and rely on the education
system as well as their own training schemes.
Each enterprise and educational establishment needs to invest in
computers and networks, coordinated nationally, and linked to the
internet.
IT affects strategic issues, accounts for large expenditures,
competes for resources, is complex, and could eventually become at
the core of educational processes. Your approach to evaluating costs
and benefits depends on whether you are interested in big issues or
local ones. Education is an investment in the future of a nation. To
educational economists the evaluation of costs and benefits of
education must include all costs and all benefits to the whole of
society. These considerations would be applied, for example, to
whether or not the government should subsidise a special loan scheme
for mature students to buy computers. Accounting and estimating must
find a monetary value for all factors, with discounting rates
appropriate to a whole economy.
Making a decision to adopt new technologies on a large scale is
not a trivial one for an organisation or nation. It requires long
term survival as the criteria, rather than short-term profitability.
Educational changes should be driven by teaching and learning needs,
which in themselves are usually driven by external pressures. The key
issue to be addressed is how to help teaching departments and
individual teachers evaluate and make decisions on investing in the
effective use of IT in delivering learning, and then to support them
until they become self-sufficient, during the period when using this
technology for learning is a novelty, with sparse local
expertise.
A mixture of both bottom-up and top-down approaches is necessary to
sustain success. The many teachers who have engaged in the use of IT
for their students learning should be linked by informal networks,
coordinated by a service which responds to the demands of educational
and IT issues and of users. To some the help provided by this service
would provide insurance against uninvited change, to others it would
help to make teaching more productive, to others it would open up
opportunities for radical reform of their teaching.
Over the three years of the TILT project at the University of
Glasgow the processes of action and reflection brought about more
widespread use of IT for teaching and learning. TILT also provided a
great deal of information on the efficient use of IT. But t here was
also a refocus of the original question behind TILT, a shift away
from mainly encouraging the use of software to how this can be
integrated into teaching. The question of how to integrate IT led to
much more attention on describing course objectives, assessing
student learning, and reflections on teaching methods. Information
gathered on integration efforts of IT helped a more general focus on
improving teaching and learning, which reflected a deeper
appreciation of the relationship of IT to teaching.
Although there is much literature on organisational change, some
points of view have particularly helped us to identify appropriate
variables and processes that affect technological change:
These points of view suggest that, in order to make a satisfactory
technological change, the following inter-related factors need to be
identified, understood, and be in a beneficial state, or made so:
There are a range of measures that can be used to benchmark
achievement relative to other organisations and nations. These
include
such as
and
such as
In the UK, government initiatives have funded the purchase and
installation of computers and networks (some fast enough for
real-time multimedia and video), information and advice centres,
production of educational software, software purchase schemes and
national archives, eg:
Although the author takes responsibility for interpretation and
emphasis in this paper, he gratefully acknowledges the efforts of
about 80 staff and hundreds of students who took part in the TILT and
EMASHE projects in the University of Glasgow, and many o thers at
conferences and workshops held throughout the UK.
Robert Clark Centre for Technological Education
University of Glasgow
66 Oakfield Avenue
Glasgow G12 8LS Scotland UK
tel +44 (0)141 330 4976
fax +44 (0)141 330 4832
Internet: g.doughty@elec.gla.ac.uk
While working in Research & Development and Management in the
optical industry for many years Dr Gordon Doughty took an Open
University BA degree in a very wide variety of subjects. His PhD was
based on work at Glasgow University in the Dept of Electronics &
Electrical Engineering from 1979-82 on geodesic lenses for an
integrated optics spectrum analyser. Later he conducted collaborative
research on optoelectronic fabrication, concentrating on the dry
etching of structures for lightwave devices in semicondu ctors.
He began lecturing in 1987 for the then new Bachelor of
Technological Education degree, which produces teachers of
Technology, Craft & Design and Graphic Communication. He is now
responsible for that degree course, the Robert Clark Centre for
Technological Education, an ITTI project Establishing
Multimedia Authoring Skills in Higher Education, Glasgow
University's Teaching with Independent Learning
Technologies project in the UK Teaching & Learning
Technology Programme, and the Glasgow Centre of the UK Teaching
& Learning Technology Support Network.
Details of his activities in IT and Education can be found at
http://www.elec.gla.ac.uk/BTECHED/RCCTE/
http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/itti ITTI
Information Technology Training Initiative
http://www.elec.gla.ac.uk/EMASHE/ ITTI
Establishing Multimedia Authoring Skills in Higher Education
http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/tltp/ TLTP
Teaching & Learning Technology Programme
http://www.elec.gla.ac.uk/TILT/ TLTP
TILT Teaching with Independent Learning Technologies Project
http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/tltsn UK
National Teaching & Learning Technology TLT Support
Network
http://www.elec.gla.ac.uk/TLTSN/ GlasgowTLT
Support Network Centre
http://www.elec.gla.ac.uk/BTECHED/ Teaching
of/with Technology at University of Glasgow
http://www.gla.ac.uk/ University of
Glasgow Web Server
http://www.gla.ac.uk/Otherdepts/TLS/ Teaching
& Learning Service, University of Glasgow
http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/ltdi/ Scottish
LTDI Learning Technology Dissemination Initiative
http://www.scotweb.co.uk/tp/ The
Tartan Pages: Scotland on the Internet
http://www.edunet.co.uk Edunet UK
Education Network
http://sol.ultralab.anglia.ac.uk Schools
on Line - Anglia Ultralab
http://www.wwt.co.uk/colleges/colleges.html Further
Education Colleges in England
http://www.csv.warwic ALT
Association for Learning Technology
http://www.ox.ac.uk/ctiss/ CTISS
Computers in Teaching Initiative support service
http://ncet.csv.warwick.ac.uk/ NCET
National Council for Educational Technology
http://www.hensa.ac.uk/ Higher
Education National Software Archive for Microcomputers
http://www.niss.ac.uk NISS National
Information on Software & Services
http://www.niss.ac.uk/tltp/ TLTP
Catalogue
http://www.niss.ac.uk:80/chest/ CHEST
Combined Higher Education Software Team
http://www.ed.ac.uk/uctlig UCISA
Universities and Colleges Information System Association
http://www.ed.ac.uk/~uctlig Universities
and Colleges Teaching, Learning and Information Group
http://www-emrg.open.ac.uk Electronic
Media Research Group at the Open University
http://www-iet.open.ac.uk/iet/iet Open
University's Institute of Educational Technology
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/csalt/ Centre
for the Study of Advanced Learning Technologies
http://www.macromedia.com/Industry/Market.research/roi.html
Return on Investment and Multimedia Training
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~mmi/interactive.html overview
of teaching with the Web
http://www.netskills.ac.uk/TONIC/ Online
Netskills Interactive course on using the Internet
http://www.satlab.hawaii.edu/space/hawaii/qform.htm package
for creating (and grading) test forms
http://www.qmark.com/ Question
Mark Computing
http://www.http://www.open.gov.uk/index.htm UK
Government Information Service
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