Planning for Effective Teaching with Technology

1. Ensure that the benefits of integrating technology justify the investment
   The benefits of integrating technology with your teaching must justify the significant investment of your time and the costs.  Bates recommends that you start with thinking strategically about the goal of technology use and how it fits with your program, departmental and institutional mission and mandate.  Will it facilitate more active learning and development of your students’ research and analytical skills? Will it address such challenges as large classes or workload management?  Will it open up new markets or improve accessibility to underserved groups such as part-time learners? Will it enhance quality, address unmet needs or reduce costs? Whatever the rationale, the case should be well researched and documented to attract institutional support to render it sustainable.  
   One approach is to include a discussion of technology use in any curriculum or course review.  Departmental workshops might include teaching-focused strategic planning exercises (environmental scanning; analysis of goals, values and priorities), technology demonstrations and small group discussions to develop a vision for teaching in the future. 
   Bates and Poole introduce a helpful framework to oversee technology integration and instructional design. The SECTIONS framework considers the following criteria for choosing and applying technologies for teaching: 
   An example from the University of British Columbia of how to use this framework can be seen here (link is external). 
   • Student needs
   • Ease of use and reliability,
   • Cost considerations,
   • Your approach to Teaching and learning,
   • The desired level of Interaction for students,
   • The Organizational support needed,
   • The Novelty factor, and
   • The Speed with which the technology can be adopted or materials adapted.
2. Develop a teaching plan
   Bates recommends having a comprehensive teaching plan encompassing both curriculum (what) and delivery (how).  Inclusion of a delivery plan ensures the integration of any technology use into regular college or university curriculum planning exercises.
   In addition to curriculum, a teaching plan addresses issues such as your preferred approach to teaching (e.g. problem-based or inquiry methods); time allocations for lectures, seminars, labs, clinics, practicums, field work and other activities; whether courses will be offered face-to-face, online, or in hybrid form (reduced class time with online interaction); scheduling for any face-to-face teaching; and who will teach.
   
3. Plan for course design and development time 
   Good teaching always requires preparation but developing a fully online, hybrid or technology-enhanced classroom course takes extra time to develop before the course begins. Depending upon the subject, learning activities, choice of technologies, resources available and current teaching workloads, it may take up to a year to develop a new course.
   You may take a systems approach whereby the whole course is laid out and then each element designed and developed before teaching begins, or a more open-ended approach relying less on pre-prepared content and more on collaborative learning, class discussion, and building on the existing knowledge of learners.  Bates’ key message is that deciding on a teaching approach, laying out a plan, choosing appropriate technologies, developing and/or choosing learning resources, and ensuring the necessary support and infrastructure requires significant time and must be considered part of your teaching workload.  
   
4. Seek specialist assistance and support 
   Course quality starts with your knowledge of the learners and your subject matter expertise but benefits immensely from other specialist support.  Cross-functional communication among faculty, instructional designers, media specialists, Web programmers, copyright officers, and learner support professionals to facilitate course development provides a dynamic environment for innovation in teaching but requires some consideration of the form of collaboration required.  
   Bates describes different models of course development. The Lone Ranger approach is where a faculty member works independently to integrate a new technology, sometimes with some institutional financial support.  A Boutique Model provides professional assistance on a project-by-project basis from an instructional support unit such as a teaching and learning centre.  A Collegial Materials Development model involves academic colleagues working collaboratively on course development. A full Project Management Model involves a team of inpiduals contributing specialist skills working with a defined product, budget, timelines, and team leader to manage the process.
   Model choice depends upon the size of the project (module, learning activity, whole course or program), design complexity, and level of technology integration. Adding one element of technology to a face-to-face course may be handled quite easily with one-on-one assistance from a specialist whereas a project management approach to a fully online course with significant integration of various technologies probably yields the best quality and cost effectiveness.  Once you have worked through developing a course with specialist help once or twice, you will be well positioned to work more independently.
   
5. Manage the teaching workload
   Bates stresses that technology use should reduce class time, not add to your overall teaching load. Using online technology for a face-to-face class to share the syllabus and links to learning materials such as journal articles should not take extra preparation time and may even save time and resources.   However, if you want to go beyond this basic use of technology in a course, it is important to carefully consider the cost and additional teaching time needed.
   The investment required to plan, prepare and facilitate a course that incorporates pre-prepared modules, multimedia elements and/or online interaction such as class discussions or group projects will outweigh any significant gains in quality if the technology is not used to reduce face-to-face class time.
   
6. Collaborate
   Use of online technologies opens up many opportunities for collaboration in teaching, within and across institutions, even across continents.  Further, as Bates points out, combining efforts pays off in productivity and quality of teaching.  Shared open educational resources can also reduce developmental costs significantly.
   Courses or content common to a variety of programs can be identified and learning materials and resources developed and stored in readily accessible shared virtual spaces.  As with research and publications, faculty with subject expertise in a particular area from one or more institutions can work collaboratively online to develop core materials and/or source learning resources from increasingly available open educational resources.
   Working collaboratively with colleagues, you can share ideas, jointly develop and share resources, and provide critical feedback to one another, thereby improving teaching practice.  Equally important to content is developing learning activities, assessment tools, and multimedia and interactive modules. Best created by a team, these will save resources as well as significant time for inpidual faculty members.  
   
7. Ensure that course evaluation and maintenance are planned
   Evaluation and maintenance of technology-based courses go hand-in-hand.  As Bates points out, because technology-based courses are new and different, it is good practice to evaluate them regularly for educational effectiveness.  Evaluation can take a number of forms, both formative and summative.  Information about enrolments, grades, completion rates, feedback from students and faculty, as well as observations of student behaviour in the course are essential to course maintenance.
   All technology-based courses require at least some minor maintenance.  For Bates, once a course or a learning resource is developed, it should be kept live and dynamic to maintain quality.  The content must be updated as new resources, such as journal articles, become available, assignments and learning activities revised, URL links checked and student feedback incorporated.
   Keeping whole programs or many courses updated is complex, requiring resource allocation and a planned maintenance schedule. Just as development requires faculty time, so does evaluation and maintenance.  The teaching plan (described above) should include an evaluation and maintenance strategy and schedule for technology-based courses that does not add to teaching load. 
   
   Reference
   Bates, T. (2013, Oct. 08). Planning for Effective Teaching with Technology. Retrieved Jan. 09, 2017, fromhttp://teachonline.ca/tools-trends/how-teach-online-student-success/understanding-building-blocks-online-learning/planning-effective-teaching-technology available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.