By Jon Mott, Assistant to the Academic VP – Academic Technology, Brigham Young University
When teachers or instructional designers apply technology to their teaching (and to their students’ learning), the goals they start with are vastly more important than the technologies or the tools they use. We’ve probably all seen extraordinarily powerful tools used poorly and vice versa. The challenge before us to match the right tools to the right teaching and learning challenges/opportunities.
I have had the opportunity to serve as a director in the Blackboard Exemplary Course Program for the past four years. One of the most important lessons I have learned by reviewing the hundreds of courses that have been submitted is that the technology should always come second. This might seem an odd assertion given that the award program is about effective use of a technological product, i.e. Blackboard. However, it has been almost always immediately obvious when I've encountered a course that seems to have been designed merely to use Blackboard, and not necessarily to pursue some other set of teaching and learning goals.
Far too often, instructional technologists and even some faculty members become enamored with new technologies because they are "shiny." With stars in their eyes, they set about implementing said technologies in their courses often for no other reason than that they are new. They then have a difficult time measuring whether or not teaching or learning improved.
When reviewing such courses, I'm inclined to be increasingly blunt. How could you possibly expect anything to improve if you didn't begin with clear goals for improvement in mind? Blackboard software provides a host of tools that teachers and students can use in a variety of ways to improve learning. But it is essential to begin with the end in mind, that is a clear idea of what exactly a technologist or teacher wants to improve before implementing any such tool. Only then can we tell if the tool actually helped us accomplish our goals. Evaluations of technology-for-its-own-sake implementations are nothing more than ex post facto attempts to justify the time and energy invested on them.
If you're designing a course, I strongly encourage you think about your goals. What should be better, different, or improved after your designed course is implemented? How will you be able to tell? That is, how will you measure the accomplishment of your goal? Once you're very clear about what you're trying to accomplish, then you can begin thinking about the tools you might want to use.
Some examples are in order. Let's say you want students to come to class better prepared so you can work on cases and real-world applications in class. You might want to encourage students to complete their reading and homework assignments more uniformly and effectively by assigning pre-class quizzes or requiring participation in discussion forums in your Blackboard implementation. Or let's say you find that students are unevenly prepared for some units of the course. Providing online remedial materials in Blackboard for students who need some level-setting might be a great way to help you accomplish said goal.
Technologies like Blackboard software can (and do!) make a significant difference in teaching and learning every day. Those cases in which we can actually demonstrate it are almost always those in which courses were designed with clearly teaching and learning goals in mind.
