The integration of technology into learning and teaching in the liberal arts. (Perspectives).

AS LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATORS, we want to empower our students to become lifelong learners and creative and critical citizens of a media-intensive world. Well-educated citizens need to understand technology and how to communicate within new media effectively in the same way that they need to be able to write. Our students will be creators of, participants in, and observers of various means of digital communications. We take this into consideration as we strive to provide our students with the richest learning environments and the best preparation for lifelong learning. Our students, because they are exposed to ideas from diverse disciplines, have a lot to contribute to the world as communicators in digital media. Students learn valuable things about themselves and about the general nature of communication through grappling with these sometimes difficult media and articulating their ideas effectively through them.

Over the past several decades, the ways in which college faculty, students, and administrators communicate with one another and access information have changed dramatically. At our campus, as at most campuses in the U.S., faculty members have computers in their offices and most have them at home as well; we communicate regularly and frequently via e-mail and access information at record speed over the Internet. Nearly all of our students arrive with their own computers. We are wiring and changing our classrooms, dormitories, and library to accommodate new technologies. We are restructuring our information technology services and struggling to keep up with demands for support.

New technologies offer rich opportunities for enhancing the skills that liberal education seeks to develop. What is striking about technological change on liberal arts campuses is the constant effort to measure these advances against the overall goals for student learning that remain at the core of our mission. Infrastructure in terms of hardware, software, and support are crucial, but without a faculty dedicated to delivering the goals of liberal education, expensive "advances" might in fact work against the intense student-centered learning environment we seek to foster.

Starting the project

At Grinnell College, where significant changes have occurred in the ways education is delivered, discussions about teaching with technology have been less about technology and more about the student learning and effective pedagogy that lie at the core of our educational mission. We began serious institution-wide discussions in answer to an invitation from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 1994. The Foundation invited a number of liberal arts colleges to apply for funding to support the integration of technology into their curricula. The invitation asked colleges to consider taking advantage of the opportunities offered by technology in the teaching of foreign languages, in addressing curricular and teaching implications of new forms of access to data bases and library information, and in considering alternative modes of student learning.

In 1995, we received a Mellon grant that provided support for faculty already engaged in the use of technology in teaching and capitalized on their experience to encourage others to experiment. The aim was to change the culture surrounding technology-related teaching and curricular development through an active partnership between faculty and information specialists. We planned to accomplish this by adding a librarian and an instructional multimedia technology specialist (IMTS) who would assist in 1) developing demonstration projects, 2) providing seminars for faculty to learn about and apply new technologies, and 3) developing second generation projects based on the experiences of our first demonstration projects.

At that time, we were unsure what we needed to proceed in a meaningful and sustainable way. In a second invitation in 1996, the Mellon Foundation stated: "Building on our current teaching and technology initiative, the Mellon Foundation wishes to encourage liberal arts colleges to consider next steps." This invitation was crucial in moving us forward. Without having to justify to the Foundation where we were and where we thought we needed to go to meet our goals, we might not have gone through the careful planning process that has allowed us to succeed. We were encouraged to look back over a year of experience with our efforts to meaningfully integrate technology into teaching. Our Mellon steering committee held focus group discussions with representatives from all departments, increasing the visibility of our project on campus and calling attention to infrastructure needs. Most important to faculty was the need for more technology specialists dedicated to pedagogical and curricular support and with backgroun d and experience in the disciplines.

We received a second Mellon grant in 1997 and a similar grant, focused on the fine arts, from the Charles E. Culpeper Foundation in 1998. The objective of these two grants was to build a permanent infrastructure of support that would integrate technology into effective pedagogical strategies and meet the needs created by the continuing evolution in technological competency and information literacy among faculty and students. We planned to accomplish this by expanding our cadre of instructional multimedia technology specialists (IMTS) to provide support in each major curricular area of the college.

The key to success with faculty and curricular development has been the IMTS staff. We now have a specialist with a Ph.D. in neurobiology for the science division, one with a Ph.D. in sociology for the social studies division, one in fine arts with ABD in music theory and composition, and one in the humanities division (non-fine arts) with a background in foreign languages and an M.A. in communication. Housed in the academic areas that they serve, they meet biweekly with the associate dean and the director of information technology services (ITS) to discuss faculty projects underway, student support for these projects, planning for faculty workshops, and outreach in areas where there is potential for growth. They also support one another informally on a daily basis-an important ingredient in their ongoing success and job satisfaction.

The following charts provide a picture of the evolution of faculty involvement through our Mellon/Culpeper initiatives.

Descriptions of our Mellon/Culpeper funded projects can be found at: web.grinnell.edu/imts/mellon web.grinnell.edu/imts/finearts/.

What have we learned on our campus about delivering education through the use of technology?

Improved student learning

First and foremost, we have seen the benefits of measuring such developments according to their impact on student learning, although tools for measuring that impact are imperfect. While several national efforts are underway to assess the impact of technology on student learning such as projects under the Flashlight Program (www.tltgroup.org), we have relied mostly on common-sense demonstrations of improved teaching and student learning based on the experiences of our faculty. Here are a few examples:

* Increased impact of ideas: One of the most exciting and hard to define aspects of the benefits of working with technology has been the increased impact of the ideas that instructors deliver and potentially the ideas that our students convey. Oftentimes a picture is worth a thousand words. In music, for instance, speaking about musical structure while listening to the music can be a great challenge, but technology offers an effective solution. The IMTS in the fine arts helped one of us (Chenette) develop an animation to provide a visual image of how motives are used in the composition of music: how clusters of notes are flipped over and moved around to express a unified idea. Without technical jargon or required music-reading ability, the animation helps students better understand how music is put together. (www.grinnell.edu/music/Bachlnvl3 .html)

* Increased efficiency and flexibility: technology can facilitate the delivery of instructional materials. The IMTS in the fine arts helped the art department, for example, create a database of all the slides used in art history courses. The slides have been scanned and digitized at four different sizes and placed into a searchable database so that individual faculty members can use them in a variety of ways as they design their syllabi and course materials. During class, a faculty member can spontaneously decide to make a comparison to prove a point by pulling up slides located by name or a variety of search terms; for homework, students can use the data base for study from any computer connected to the campus network. The ease with which connections can be made both in and out of class contributes to increased learning and creativity.

* Increased opportunities for collaboration on and off campus: New technologies are providing a natural medium for collaboration among students and faculty both on and off campus. Discussion forums provide a natural environment for carrying on asynchronous conversations that help both the instructor and student to prepare for class or continue after class times. Experts from off campus can be brought into the classroom. Students in a first-year seminar had the opportunity to interact in a video teleconference with a Grinnell alumnus who is a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. The WWW also provides wonderful opportunities for faculty members to collaborate on course development and delivery and to exchange ideas about teaching. There is great potential for "distance collaboration" among liberal arts colleges.

Reassessment of what liberally educated students need to know

What do liberally educated students need to know in this new age? They need to know how to locate information on the Internet, assess its authority, ethically use those resources that they find, and organize ideas and communicate them effectively. If we delete the words "on the Internet," we would have the same set of goals for information management that we have always held for students. The digital medium, however, adds new challenges. How will we incorporate into the curriculum, as one of the core elements of a liberal education, the additional skills that our students will need to accomplish these goals using digital technologies?

One of the ways students acquire the skills they need to enhance learning and to function effectively with digital technology is through the grapevine. Some entering students have a high level of competence, and those with greater skills are often seen helping those less fluent. Some colleges, and we are among their number, have experimented with cocurricular computer workshops for entering students, usually before the semester begins. We have not found these to be very successful, however, because entering students arrive with very different skill levels and also because students learn these skills best when they have a need for them in actual courses.

Two models

Currently, we favor two models for the integration of computer-based skill acquisition; both are integrated into the curriculum, unlike the cocurricular workshops, and are thus more likely to accomplish our goals. The first model consists of specialized courses in which students acquire skills in information and multimedia technology within the context of the course. The second model is based on our writing-across-the-curriculum program.

* Specialized courses: "The Arts, Multimedia, and the Internet" is an example of a specialized course requiring students to acquire skills in digital media (webarts.Grinnell.edu). The aim of the course is to learn to use the WWW as a medium for artistic creation and exchange. Students work in small groups on multimedia art projects, written and created for the WWW, that interactively merge some of the following elements: text, images, video, sound, and animation. The course is interdisciplinary, involving a collaborative teaching arrangement that requires a high commitment of resources, and it brings in guest faculty from several departments to present material and provide feedback on student work. A librarian attends most class sessions and teaches those sessions about the location and assessment of sources on the Web. The fine arts IMTS also attends most of the classes, helping to teach the tools and aiding in solving problems that inevitably arise. Students take their assignments seriously because their pr oducts are universally available on the WWW and because they know that they are on the cutting edge of a new artistic practice. A final distinctive aspect of this course is that it has constantly pushed the envelope of the college's technology infrastructure. This course was the first on campus to deliver streaming audio and video files, for example, and this accomplishment was accompanied by all of the problems and stress that go along with being first. Samples of student work for this course can be found at: webarts.grinnell.edu/ Course-pages/projects.html

* Skill acquisition across the curriculum: We are considering an approach that would model technological literacy instruction on the way we teach writing. The key components of our writing-across-the-curriculum approach are 1) summer faculty development workshops on the teaching of writing; 2) a first-year tutorial taught by all faculty on a rotational basis with a primary focus on written and oral communication skills; 3) the writing lab staffed by five fill-time professionals that helps students grapple with writing problems; and 4) regular discipline-based courses within the curriculum that are writing intensive (designated writing courses).

The integration of technology skills into the curriculum might follow a similar pattern: 1) we already support workshops for faculty on the use of technology in teaching; 2) the first-year tutorial now includes information literacy as one of the basic skills students need to begin acquiring along with critical reading, writing, and oral communication skills; 3) the main responsibility of the IMTS staff has been to support faculty members, but we are considering how they might be able to widen their responsibilities to provide some student support and instruction; 4) faculty members could designate courses as technology intensive when they require or offer the option of technology-based assignments.

Effective collaboration is essential

Success has depended upon close and effective collaboration among creative and energetic faculty members, IMTS staff librarians, and ITS staff To this list must be added academic support staff--formerly called "faculty secretaries"-- who are now doing things well beyond the traditional realm of secretarial responsibilities. They have contributed a great deal to this initiative, requiring a substantial development effort.

We have also learned that collaboration beyond our own campus is enormously beneficial. With support from the Mellon Foundation during the past two summers (2000 and 2001), Grinnell organized a workshop for colleges in the Associated Colleges of the Midwest. Teaching with Technology across the Liberal Arts (TTALA) brought together faculty and instructional technology staff for training, sharing ideas, and developing new curricular projects: web.grinnell.edu/imts/ttala/index.html

Changes in infrastructure support

The integration of technology into teaching, in a meaningful and sustainable way, is expensive. As we moved through the granting period of the 90s with increasing demands for better support for teaching with technology, we were presented with the significant challenge of providing the appropriate infrastructure. We recognized that we needed to improve our hardware and software support. The range of standard and specialized software we were trying to support was too broad. Classrooms were poorly equipped for the new applications that were emerging.

We developed a plan to improve our support for technology in a variety of ways. We have:

* upgraded network servers and disks with redundancy in both.

* upgraded Ethernet systems so that they all use the same robust system that can be managed off-campus.

* upgraded our connection to the outside world to provide substantial additional bandwidth and redundant pathways.

* implemented a three-year replacement cycle for desktop computers.

* reorganized computing and AV units into a single area realizing that faculty need support for their technology needs without having to worry about where the support is coming from.

* reorganized the support system around user groups rather than around hardware and software; when problems arise users can make a single call without having to worry about whether they have a hardware or software problem.

* installed computers and projection equipment in over 40 percent of classrooms.

* standardized the e-mail system for communicating more effectively.

* standardized productivity software for better support.

* installed a course management system.

* upgraded library software to better integrate information delivery across the campus and to provide a consistent Web-based interface.

All of these infrastructure improvements required expenditures well beyond the support received from the granting agencies.

Summing up

Substantial strides in changing our culture to meet the challenges of digital technologies have been made, and we owe an enormous debt to the Mellon Foundation for its vision in encouraging through funding thoughtful and long-range planning at a time when we were just beginning to experience the impact of technology on our teaching.

In thinking about how we move forward in using technology to enhance liberal arts education, we need to make hard choices about how we are spending our resources both in terms of dollars and of time and energy. We also need to collaborate on mechanisms for developing and sharing what we do in this area.

The Center for Educational Technology (GET), established around the time the first grants for the integration of technology into teaching at liberal arts colleges were awarded and funded by the Mellon Foundation, has become the technology support center for colleges in the Northeast. The Mellon Foundation is funding the ACS Technology Center at Southwestern University for the Associated Colleges of the South (www.colleges.org/rechcenter/) and has recently established a Midwest Instructional Technology Center (www.glca.org/MITC/description.shtml) for colleges in the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) and the Great Lakes Colleges Association (OLGA). An umbrella institute, the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (www.nitle.org/), has been established in Burlington, Vermont, under the able leadership of Clara Yu, former director of GET, Cornelius V. Starr professor of linguistics and languages and professor of Chinese and Chinese literature at Middlebury College.

These centers are built on the premise that collaboration amongst colleges is an essential next step as we move into the future.

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Teaching with Technology: Faculty Curricular Projects

As the previous chart indicates, the nature of the workshops has changed
from skill focused to a focus on course development, and the number of
curricular development projects has increased dramatically,
demonstrating that the skill development workshops are bearing fruit.
This chart shows a total of seventy-nine curricular development projects
encompassing 10 percent of our courses. Over one-half of our faculty
members have worked on curricular development projects supported by
Mellon or Culpeper stipends.

1995-96   4
1996-97   7
1997-98  11
1998-99  18
1999-00  39
2000-01  72

Note: Table made from bar graph

HELEN SCOTT is associate dean of the college, JON CHENETTE is Blanche Johnson Professor of Music, and JIM SWARTZ is vice-president for academic affairs and dean of the college at Grinnell College.