Why Bother?

Why should an academic leader risk making a technology investment decision that may make him/her look wasteful or foolish in 12 to 24 months? Why should a faculty member devote more time to learning about new applications of information technology and new ways of teaching? Why should a student learn how to use new instructional devices as part of earning a degree? Why should an academic support service professional try to keep up-to-date on new technology-dependent options for teaching and learning?

The short answer: Because more people will be able to learn and teach better. The following list of reasons provides better justification. The last items on this list may be the most important!

• Essential Applications. A growing number of courses include topics from fields in which applications of information technology have become essential for doing important work.
• New Learning Capabilities. Topics can now be taught and learned that were nearly impossible (or too dangerous) to teach without new applications of information technology.
• Meeting Varied Learning Needs, Preferences, Media. New information technology tools enable a teacher to provide learners with access to instructional materials that better match their individual learning needs or preferences.
• Difficult or Impossible Access. Telecommunications can provide access to instruction that would otherwise be unavailable due to learners' disabilities, inconvenient location, or schedule restrictions.
• Higher Expectations Based on Use of Productivity Tools. As more faculty and learners have access to productivity tools (e.g., word-processing, email, Web), teachers can provide more frequent feedback, and students can make more frequent revisions when completing assignments. Teachers' assignments can more reasonably demand higher quality results.
• Window to the Outside World. Faculty can bring into traditional classrooms otherwise inaccessible resources.
• Information Literacy. Students (and faculty) need both more training and more experience in using information resources and tools.
• Career Necessity. Employers expect employees to demonstrate comfort, confidence, and mastery of basic skills related to the use of computers and telecommunications options.
• Competition. Institutional ability to compete for students, faculty, and grants is dependent to some degree on the apparent level of educational use of information technology.
• Widening "Instructional Bottlenecks." An experienced teacher can recognize the improvement in student behavioral patterns when a new instructional approach or new educational application of information technology has removed or widened an "instructional bottleneck."
• Better Communication, More "Time on Task," Better Learning. When email provides a convenient, attractive means of communicating with other students in the course and with the instructor, many students are observed to spend more time communicating about the subject matter - and to learn more.
• Accumulating Professional Judgment. A growing mountain of informal statements from faculty members, students, and others describe their conviction - based on experience - that their own use of information technology improves the quality and effectiveness of learning.

Taken from a AAHESGIT listserv posting by Steven Gilbert, 10/3/00, and lightly reformatted for this page. For more information, see http://www.tltgroup.org/gilbert/WhyBother.htm.

TLC 10/00