Toward a Technology of Teaching

...Nathan Glazer recently pointed out that "a very large part of what students and teachers do in the best colleges and universities is sheer waste...

...Social pressures for improving the efficiency of colleges is so strong that these new techniques will certainly be used...

...Which is all just a way of saying that the American academy is a technologically backward sector within a highly industrialized society...

...Second, the surrounding society is demanding a radically more efficient system of higher education to meet the demand of tech nicians and administrators...

...Eliminating Waste What is the significance of the developing technology of teaching...

...These must be distinguished from the amenities which are mere historical accidents of American higher education...

...On page 3 this morning there is a review of 'Ford: Decline and Rebirth 1933-1962,' the third and final volume of the history of the Ford Motor Company by Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill...

...Without such an understanding of what we are really about and why, the thrust toward the efficient campus could bog down in a morass of hardware and bureaucratic decrees...

...What comprises the emerging technology of college teaching...

...Would it not be better to let students pick up the basics of a subject through some kind of mechanical presentation, if one could offer them truly first-rate tutorial instruction later, in small groups or private meetings...

...What gives here...

...New Techniques The quest for new techniques of teaching is one of the most pervasive and quietly powerful developments in the American academy today...

...The value to be cherished is not minimal class size for all purposes and under all conditions...

...Just as socialists characteristically confused the effects of capitalism with those of industrialism, so professors generally blame the growing regimentation of their institutions on an excess of administration and technology (the IBM phobia...

...Individual students would be provided with programed learning materials, perhaps in a teaching machine, which would convey the essentials of each subject...

...The author envisaged a typical university in the year 2000, in which instruction is carried on with the benefit of a wide range of electronic and mechanical devices...

...Whether NOW IT'S ALL CLEAR...

...Modern cultural history suggests that there is an inherent tendency for tech nology to run berserk...

...However, the time saved by presenting the elements of the subject through these packaged courses would be reinvested later to provide individual or very small group instruction for more advanced students...

...The second dangerous attitude is that of the average administrator...

...A recent survey revealed that 16 of the 17 largest colleges and universities in the country are using some form of instructional television for credit...

...But I think that, far from being the disaster some academics fear, this transformation of the college will lead to qualitative improvements in teaching and learning...

...New York Times Book Review, August 11, 1963.] we like it or not, the confluence of a new technology and a public demand for greater efficiency in education makes the drift towards the industrialization of the campus inevitable...

...The character of our campuses will inevitably change under their impact...

...Should colleges continue to rely solely on face-to-face teaching while the size of classes creeps upwards and small group discussions are slowly squeezed out...

...They fail to consider that regimentation may be caused by the lack of really potent technology and administrative finesse...

...Third, more effective methods of teaching are rapidly being perfected in the universities themselves...

...The demand for highly trained professional personnel is growing rapidly...

...Now higher education is coming in for the kind of criticism the lower schools have been exposed to since Sputnik...

...College administrators are eyeing management surveys and long-range plans for development as techniques of assuring orderly growth...

...When the money is paid to an institution, which in turn pays the writer the usual academic salary and he gets no royalties, the suspicion is gone, and the writer keeps his independence...

...By insisting that true education cannot take place unless the student is in the presence of a warm body, we frequently sacrifice the genuine values of effective instruction to the dogmatic demands of a cliche...

...The question is: could they be wrong...

...And it's history.' "Professor Nevins said that particular poor author had no immediate plans for further contact with rich corporations, through a third party...

...Faculty members concerned about the survival of the richest traditions of university teaching will have to take their stand on essentials rather than on peripheral prerogatives if they want to have a voice in directing technology on the campus...

...that these improvements in technique have some intangible value in their own right, and that purposes worthy of them will develop automatically once they are installed...

...The juxtaposition of a rich corporation with a poor author tends to arouse suspicion if moneys are paid directly to him...

...Independent study is being introduced earlier nad in heavier doses, thus setting students on their own and freeing faculty members for other work...

...With it, the new technology of teaching just might lead to some radical improvements...

...First, television...

...the railroad ends up riding on us...

...What makes the technologizing of teaching seem ominous is the suspicion that, as new techniques are introduced on the campus, they will be used to reinforce the anti-liberal bias which prevails at most institutions...

...The first is the hope of most academics that this trend is not really going to prevail...

...Irresistible pressures are coming from three directions...

...It is this, not the use of more efficient organization and media of instruction, which constitutes the real threat to IiberaI learning today...

...Only after they had mastered the rudiments of the subjects through teacher-surrogates, would they be exposed to live teachers...

...Innovations no longer take the form of the experimental colleges of the late 1920's and 30's, the last great wave of change in American higher education...

...But two attitudes can assure our domination by unguided technology...

...Students would be taught in the mass over television...

...Most students and teachers would agree that much of American college education is wasteful and ineffective...

...Industrial Revolution A belated industrial revolution has been going on in the lower schools for the past decade...

...One can also rearrange and revise specific parts...

...It therefore becomes imperative to identify those essential qualities of academic life which are worth preserving...

...To respond to the prospect of the efficient college as a threat to liberal learning is unnecessary...

...The second was the phonograph (1876), the third was radio (1920), and the fourth was television, which just may turn the trick...

...It is a fine question which course holds the greater danger of regimentation and deterioration of educational quality...

...The deployment of faculty is being altered in various ways, including the scheduling of differentsized classes for different instructional purposes...

...First, soaring enrollments are pressing on limited faculty and facilities...

...Nevin, Hill and Ralph W. Hidy...

...The essential value is personal contact with an able, inspiring teacher at a time when the student can benefit most from this contact...

...In the next decade public universities will have to show they are making efficient use of the increased tax funds they require, the larger private institutions will face inordinate demands on their resources, and many of the smaller private ones will undergo fiscal crises...

...The use of teaching aids such as programed learning, audiotapes for language teaching, and filmed lectures is widespread...

...But the predominant portion of a student's education still comes directly from a teacher's larynx...

...I believe the campus will inevitably be "industrialized" to meet the demands being heaped upon it...

...Might it be that technology and increased rationalization of the academic enterprise offer the sole hope of maintaining the central values of liberal learning in an age of mass higher education...

...Oh, that's a device I perfected long ago,' said the cheerful voice of Professor Nevins over the telephone from the Huntington Library in California...

...Controlling Technology Granted, there is a danger here...

...Of course, generous giveandtake between teacher and student is an essential part of any first-rate education...

...Would it not be better to get one superb lecturer on television and bring him to all the freshmen, rather than putting them in the hands of academic novices justifiably preoccupied with their own fledgling research projects...

...But the fact that a college hal a low student-teacher ratio may merely mean that incompetent professors have the opportunity to "communicate mediocrity in an intimate environment...

...Factory workers who cringe under the Damocles' sword of automation might take heart by considering the college professor...

...Once a course has been "programed," it is possible to measure its effectiveness in comparison with other presentations...

...Maybe, maybe not...

...Increasingly the colleges are being recruited into the Cold War, with the job of producing "trained manpower...

...The reasons for public concern are obvious...

...For example, consider the academic penchant for small classes...

...Common to both is a note in the introductory remarks that they were written under the supervision of Columbia University...

...At a time when students come in "tidal waves," is it possible that the prompt and imaginative exploitation of technology and effective organization is the only way to avoid regimentation in collegiate instruction...

...I mean the professor in his most familiar role, lecturing to a group of 25 to 30, or, as happens at institutions as disparate as Harvard and Hofstra, 250 to 300 students...

...Or should they jump at once to mass instruction over television, and use the time thus conserved to provide intimate instruction...

...Despite the highly publicized "Great Debate," it is techniques rather than principles whichhave been changing...

...It therefore demands of those who would use it fully and well, a firm grasp of their own basic purposes...

...Here the mistake is in failing to realize that technology, that awesome but brainless beast, demands a rider who knows where he wants to go...

...Can we exploit a system of instructional technology without becoming mere cogs in it ourselves...

...There aren't many machines on the campus...

...Any teacher who can be replaced by a machine," says B. F. Skinner of Harvard, "should be...

...They fear that the need to run an even tighter academic ship is going to pervert the character of campus life...

...This is about to change...

...The direction of educational thinking in America in the 1960s, as it has been in the 1950s, is conservative, restrictive, and reactionary," writes Harold Taylor, former president of Sarah Lawrence College...

...Finally, the colleges are under growing financial pressure...

...The influential reforms — teaching machines, televised instruction, national curriculum revisions by scholars and scientists, reorganization of the academic calendar and timetable—have vastly improved the schools' effectiveness in reaching the traditional goals of basic education...

...At other times, the student may do just as well—if not better—if brought into contact with a specialist via film or television, or with an expertly produced teaching machine program...

...A series of studies at the University of Minnesota in the 1920s established once and for all that class size is a relatively minor factor in the effectiveness of college instruction...

...Also in the bookstores is 'Timber and Men,' a biography of the Weyerhaeuser Company, by the Messrs...

...Technology enlarges the range of educational possibilities without revealing which of the new alternatives is most promising...

...Consider, for example, the largest single category of instruction: those generally inept and dispiriting freshman and sophomore survey courses taught by struggling graduate students...

...I. A. Richards has referred to programed learning, the basis of the teaching machines, as "curriculum on the cellular level"—a brilliant and suggestive metaphor...

...This hardy laborer in the mills of knowledge has survived no less than four technological inventions, each of which should have rendered his primary work obsolescent...

...Criticisms of the effectiveness of collegiate instruction appear regularly in magazines and books—and this is no longer mere shoptalk, of interest only to insiders...

...The first technological innovation which should have made this kind of thing redundant was the invention of printing (1437...

...To meet these pressures from all sides—burgeoning enrollments, the demand for "brainpower," fiscal emergencies — the colleges will either have to increase the efficiency of their present techniques or adopt new ones...

...The educational philosophy now dominant in American colleges and universities is not one in which the concern is with the liberation of talent within the student...

...Can we be more sophisticated in education than we have been elsewhere...

...Thus, it is hoped, the students would receive a deeper education than can be provided by the present system...

...A vision of the future, as these trends gather momentum, was offered last June in the Atlantic, in an article by Alvin C. Eurich, director of the Fund for the Advancement of Education...

...Most faculty members simply refuse to see the significance of what is happening, because of their aversion to technical efficiency in education...

...The pressure of numbers is becoming terrific—college enrollments will double between 1960 and 1970, triple by 1980, and continue upward thereafter...

...The current concern with improving the effectiveness of instruction (while taking its content and purpose largely for granted) gives a distinctive character to the kinds of change which are rapidly spreading on many college campuses...

...Many campuses are sensibly going on year-round calendars to make maximum use of space and facilities, thus serving more students without additional investment in plant...

...The new academic technology promises to produce not only better teaching of the kind we have now (such as filmed or televised lectures more carefully prepared than classroom performances), but new forms of teaching...

...On campuses in nine states, students can take courses with leading professors at other schools via educational TV networks...