Educational Technology Advice for Academic Leaders

Frequently in this newsletter, I let readers know about a new podcast episode featuring a guest with something interesting to share about teaching in higher education. Almost always, that guest is not me. But this week, I had the pleasure of being a guest on the EdUp Provost podcast hosted by Gregor Thuswaldner. Gregor had read my Intentional Tech book and invited me to offer advice on educational technology to the provosts and other academic leaders who listen to the podcast.

Gregor asks very good questions in the interview, questions that helped me make a few connections I hadn't made previously. Back in October, I wrote about a couple of those connections in this newsletter, applying the "wheels on chairs" idea I write about in Intentional Tech at an institutional level and using an analogy featuring the movie Back to the Future 3, of all things, to talk about the importance of teaching fundamentals when shiny new technology comes along. Today, I'd like to share a couple of other connections that Gregor's questions helped me make.

One of those questions was, How should provosts evaluate the success or (in)effectiveness of technology integration at the institutional level? I gave both a practical and a strategic answer. The practical answer is to use the various dashboards that many educational technologies provide to monitor usage on campuses with institutional licenses. Is this new technology your institution adopted only used by a dozen faculty mostly all in the same department? Or are dozens of instructors across departments using the tool on a regular basis? Lots of usage doesn't mean the tool is being used well or in support of institutional priorities, like student learning and student success, but very limited usage often implies that the technology isn't a good fit for your campus.

My strategic answer to this question about evaluating technology integration on a campus is this: Don't focus on the super-heroes. There will always be a small handful of faculty doing amazing things with new technologies. I love working with these faculty and seeing what visions of the possible they provide the rest of us about teaching with technology. But they aren't representative of the faculty at large and often what they're doing isn't replicable. It's like trying to judge if a group of engineers is good at designing rockets and using Tony "Iron Man" Stark as your assessment. You're not measuring what you want.

Instead, look at the more typical faculty members, the ones that sit in the middle of any technology adoption curve. Do those faculty feel empowered to be creative in their use of educational technology? If so, then they likely have access to the tools and support they need to teach effectively with technology. I recall working with hundreds of instructors back in the summer of 2020, helping them learn new ways to use our learning management system to support student learning. Before that time, many faculty used the LMS is pedestrian ways, doing little more than posting course documents and student grades. After that summer, however, many faculty were doing creative things with the many tools our LMS provided, indicating to me that they had a comfort with the technology they lacked previously. None of us want a repeat of that summer, but the end state was a good one since both students and faculty are benefitting from all that creative LMS use.

Here's another story from the summer of 2020 that illustrates a different point I made on the EdUp Provost podcast. During that year of pandemic teaching, we knew that students were giving us (faculty and institutions) a little grace for the poor quality of the spring's emergency remote teaching. We assumed, however, that they would have higher expectations for online course offerings that fall. The Vanderbilt provost at the time reached out to my team at the teaching center and asked us to recommend four or five educational technologies that we thought would be broadly useful across campus to support teaching that fall. We had our lists at the ready, since we were the ones talking with faculty regularly about their teaching and technology needs and since we were regularly vetting new tools that might help meet those needs. The provost then authorized campus licenses for everything on our list.

Some of those technologies turned out to be great choices and some not, per our reading of the tools' institutional dashboards. My point here is that the provost turned to the people on campus who already had the knowledge to offer sound advice. That's advice that I offer provosts and other academic leaders: Lean on the expertise you already have on your campus, whether that's in faculty or staff or students. These are the people you hired, or your people hired, or your predecessors hired, or you enrolled in your institution. You invited them into your community for a reason and hopefully you're investing in their learning and professional development. They'll get things wrong from time to time, but don't discount the deep expertise you have at the ready.

​You can listen to my entire conversation with Gregor Thuswaldner on the EdUp Provost podcast here, or just search "EdUp Provost" in your favorite podcast app. And if you'd like to share it with your provost, well, that's up to you, but I won't complain.

Thanks for reading!

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