Just Click OK: Technology, Autonomy, and Educational Decision Making
What happens to the faculty decision process when the system preselects technology choices?
Or
What happens to the faculty decision process when the system does not support desired choices?
In both cases faculty autonomy and decision making are limited. The reality, however, is that all faculty must contend with some of these constraints.
A brief look at one campus technology initiative will illustrate.
The Carolina Computing Initiative mandates that all entering students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill be required to arrive with a laptop computer. (Many similar initiatives are underway or under consideration across the nation.) The initiative also specifies that those computers be standardized and that faculty will be provided with new computers only if they are willing to accept the standardized equipment and options.
To fund this and other technology initiatives on campus over ten million dollars is devoted annually to technology budgets.
In a draft report on the role of faculty and administration in decisions affecting educational goals, the Educational Policy Committee at UNC, Chapel Hill cites the Carolina Computing Initiative as an example of a large scale initiative that represents "administrators faced with changing demographics, financial realities and the role of computers in the larger world, with faculty being consulted only after significant decisions on resource allocation were made" (Draft Report).
Top down initiatives like this raise important questions about:
priorities,
policies,
privatization, and
faculty "buy in."
A second concern at most institutions is that faculty must work with moving targets:
The rapid development of instructional technologies, their complexities, and their substantial costs could lead one to conclude that most institutions are engaged in extensive planning to guide their investments in this area. However, as of 1998, just under half of U.S. colleges had a strategic plan for information technology, more than 60% did not have a financial plan, and only about 20% had a curriculum plan . . . (Taylor, Alton L. and Schmidtlein, Frank A. "Creating a Cost Framework for Instructional Technology" http://horizon.unc.edu/TS/commentary/2000-11a.asp.)
The reality is that most faculty work within an institutional context that significantly influences the decisions they make about using instructional technologies.
A truly critical sense of faculty decision making relating to instructional technology should see faculty decision making as a process of negotiation between teaching decisions and institutional contexts. This view enables faculty to make better decisions about specific methodologies and technologies they might use in their classes and to appreciate and perhaps take part in more general decisions that will influence their abilities to teach with technology.
Key points to consider regarding instructional technology decisions in an institutional context:
Move on to more examples for possible discussion and showcase
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Daniel Anderson
University of North Carolina
iamdan@unc.edu
http://sites.unc.edu/~daniel/ok