Faculty & Technology: Rewarding TET
The emphasis on this article is the fear of Technology-Enabled Teaching due to the concerns that teachers will not be compensated or rewarded for the time they spend working on creating or recreating their courses into an online format. The fear that is discussed is due to “growing pains” that many institutions have faced (Starrett, 2004). With this, when technology was first pushed, the institutions were wanting it used more, but did not have the support put together for faculty that needed help or training on how to use the technology.
Now, more institutions want technology integrated into courses. However, the instructors are worried about several items. With the array of technology tools that are available they are first worried about support for training, maintenance, and upgrades. Secondly, what financial or time incentives will they be given to use more technology in their courses. Will they be given stipends or release time? Third, will they be rewarded with promotion or tenure? What kind of autonomy will they have to adapt courses? Other issues raised include workloads, accessibility to students and instructors in compliance with ADA, copyright laws, the quality of the classes, plagiarism, and reality of course materials.
Many of these concerns have been more in the higher education setting according to the articles, while K-12 has been pushed in this arena already. It is suggested that in order to address all of the issues discussed that the faculty need to talk with the different associations and increase awareness with the administration.
When looking at this article, I understand the concerns that the faculty have raised. One issued that a lot of schools face is technology support. I have talked with teachers from other districts and even people that do not work in an education related field and technical support is a big concern. The overwhelming point that I hear is essentially how can the tools be used if the teachers do not know how to use them or they do not work properly. The second concern I hear is workload. It takes a lot of extra time to plan an activity that has technology involved due to the complexity. If they are asking teachers to teach more online or courses that require a lot of technology then that increases the prep time needed to organize the lessons. With that in mind, several teachers want to be compensated for the extra time they put into a lesson. With budgetary issues, will there be the money to do this?
The last two points that I can see issues with that and that I have seen as problems in the news at different points in time is copyright and plagiarism. Students especially do not understand the importance of copyright laws. Many believe that if it is on the internet that they can just copy and past it into another document without a problem and it is their property. They do not understand giving credit to someone else for their work. Along those lines, some teachers do not understand exactly what they can use and be in compliance with the copyright laws and what would be outside of them. We need to make sure everyone understands these items. However, most teachers also believe that anything they create is “theirs” not the institutions. Many do not think of the items that they have created for their classes to be property of the institutions since they created it while employed by the institution or district. This may be an eye opening experience for many. Plagiarism goes into all of this. I can see how easy it is for someone to read something and just copy and paste it into their own document without giving credit to the original author or creator. With the majority of information being found online instead of in actual print journals, books, and primary documents it is easy to just copy things word for word and forget to cite them properly. However, how will the administration support teachers that are checking for this and what will happen when it is discovered? If there are no consequences, then why do we even worry, but if there are consequences, how will they be enforced?
Attitudes towards technology in education are changing everyday. The key point is that teachers need to be rewarded for using it effectively in their classrooms. The rewards currently are not clearly defined and that is something that all teachers need to keep in mind and have communication occurring with their administration and associations on.
Starrett, D (2004, September 29). Faculty & technology: Rewarding TET. Retrieved October 3, 2008, from Campus Technology Web site: http://www.campustechnology.com/printarticle.aspx?id=39970