Oversold and underused
Why faculty don't use computers in the classroom

By Larry Cuban

Academics are hardly technophobes. At home and office they use computers to write, analyze data, communicate with colleagues, and draft syllabi and handouts for courses. Nor are professors resistant to learning new machines and software applications. Personal accounts and surveys report again and again that most academics are enthusiastic about using computers and other technologies for routine tasks in laboratories, lecture halls and for data analysis.

Further, adventurous faculty on campus after campus have designed software for particular topics in their discipline; they have adapted existing applications to classes that they teach; they have experimented with e-mail, Web-based classes and other forms of distance learning.

Yet using computers and other new technologies to improve instruction--the glow of higher productivity that entices higher education policymakers and administrators to invest in the latest machines and software--has had little tangible effect on undergraduate classroom teaching or learning. University promoters of computers for instruction need to downsize their expectations for deep changes in pedagogy or seriously examine other factors that influence how professors teach.

During the mid- and late 1990s, surveys of faculty in public and private institutions showed that the majority used computers infrequently for classroom instruction and in limited ways. The growing prevalence of computers on campus has produced few changes in how faculty teach and how their students learn. What has become increasingly apparent across the nation is nowhere more so than at Stanford University, an elite private research-driven institution where conditions favored an explosion in computer use for instruction.

Throughout the 1990s, Stanford administrators invested substantial funds in laying down miles of fiber-optic cables to offices, networking the campus, providing computer clusters in libraries and residences for students, building elaborate new classrooms and computer labs, and ensuring that faculty had on-site specialists in departments and schools to assist them in using new technologies for both their research and teaching.

In 1999, virtually all professors had computers at their offices and homes, and most had more than two machines available to them. By 2000, about 95 percent of students had their own machines and connected to Stanford networks in their rooms. In light of this massive investment in new technologies, how have Stanford faculty used computers inside classrooms?

In three separate faculty surveys conducted in the 1990s, professors reported that they relied mainly on lectures in undergraduate classes, while teaching in seminars and labs with small groups in graduate courses. Use of non-traditional approaches (e.g., case-method teaching, computers in class) was very limited. Less than 10 percent of the Stanford professoriate use non-traditional teaching methods regularly--a pattern generally applicable to American universities.

These data suggest that a small percentage of the faculty (of almost 1,600 on tenure-line) have been very serious about using new technologies in teaching their undergraduate courses. Such data, however, are seldom reported to the larger faculty community or beyond the campus. What does get reported in the media are the actions of adventurous faculty, the early adopters, who create imaginative software for their classes and teach with computers regularly.

In the years of greatest penetration of new technologies, then, dominant undergraduate teaching practices remained largely constant. Lecturing still absorbed more than one-half to two-thirds of various departments' teaching practices.

Traditional forms of teaching seem to have been relatively untouched by the enormous investment in technologies that universities have made in recent decades. That individual professors in various departments and schools turned to case-study teaching, project-based teaching, problem-based learning and other innovative approaches with students using computer simulations and applications is apparent. That such faculty were a tiny minority is just as clear.

Why?

Unlocking this puzzle requires examining three factors that seldom receive attention. First, the origins of the new technologies have influence on their future use. Computer technologies were introduced in the 1960s mainly as productivity tools for individual and group research and for managing organizational information--not for teaching. Second, the institutional financing of undergraduate and graduate education--large classes in the former and small classes in the latter--continues to have major consequences for organizing instruction and pedagogy. Finally, the institutional rewards that go to faculty are geared to research productivity and quality rather than to transforming teaching.