Problem-Based Learning (PBL) Questions on
Tenure and Technology

Carl Cuneo [email / web ]
Director
EvNet: Network for the Evaluation of Education and Training Technologies

I have set up issues in Tenure and Technology as a series of questions posed under the learning paradigm known as Problem-Based Learning, or PBL. For those unfamiliar with this paradigm, you may wish to consult my PBL web slide show. There are also many other resources on PBL on the Internet.
Many universities have completed task forces on learning technologies. I have created a list of some of them which you can access directly by clicking HERE.

Index to Questions
1. Incentives
   1. Professional Associations
   2. Budget Pressures
   3. Institutional Reputation
   4. Age and Careers
2. Time
   1. Expansion in Communications Work
   2. Development Time
   3. Virtual Office Hours
3. Implications of Courseware Development
   1. Tenure vs Profit?
   2. Tenure vs Jobs
   3. High Quality Courseware?
   4. Who Owns My Course?
4. Implications of Online Teaching
   1. Plagiarism
   2. Authority of Instructor
   3. Negative Technological Teacher Evaluations
5. Changing Meaning of Research
   1. Individual vs. Network Research
   2. Evaluation of Networked Research
   3. Intellectual Property Rights
6. Electronic Publishing
   1. Reputation
   2. Instability
   3. Access
   4. Learning Style
   5. That 'Ole Musty Library?
   6. Budget, Downsizing

1. Incentives: Do universities reward traditional research output (e.g. number of refereed articles in high-ranking professional journals) more than outstanding teaching records and contributions? (Click here for a proposal to reward learning technology applications in teaching on a par with research). If this is the case, what are the factors behind it?
   1. Professional Associations: Professors belong to professional associations in which status and recognition are based on innovations in research, which are publicly visible in journals that all members read and respect. Do professional publishing pressures discourage faculty members from devoting more time to the applications of technology in teaching?
   2. Budget Pressures: Do higher education institutions experience pressures to increase revenue from research funding agencies? Is this part of the budget crunch many institutions face as government revenue falls, and greater reliance is placed on corporate, alumni, and other sources of revenue? Does this pressure lead these institutions to give greater rewards to those faculty members who get large research grants? Does this deter attempts to reward professors for technological innovations in teaching?
   3. Institutional Reputation: Is the academic reputation of higher education institutions based on 'research intensivity' rather than on 'teaching intensivity'? Does this deter institutions from rewarding teaching, especially technological innovations in teaching, as much or more than research?
   4. Age and Careers: Years ago I once attended a workshop by a full professor ready to retire who proudly demonstrated his interactive CD, which he took years to develop. He made a remark that has stuck in my mind: "I would be crazy to do all this work if I was a young untenured professor, since the institution discourages such innovations in teaching. I would never be granted tenure." Is there a contradiction in the supposition that it is the young faculty member who may have the skills to author courseware, yet not be in a position to do so since institutions offer few incentives for technological teaching innovations? Does this mean that only the secure tenure prof, who has given up the idea of a star research career, will be the only person on campus willing to engage in the costly and time-consuming task of developing innovative learnware?
2. Time: Do the social uses of time, and constraints over time scheduling, have a profound effect on the role of technology in tenure issues? Some considerations:
   1. Expansion in Communications Work: Does the introduction of computer-mediated communications into the academic environment increase the absolute and relative number of hours we devote to communications with colleagues in our own department, across the institution, and outside the institution, both within our own discipline and in other disciplines, nationally and internationally? Has this reduced the amount of time we have left over for research, for teaching, for administration, and for our personal lives?
   2. Development Time: Do instructors devote more time developing electronic materials for delivery by CD-ROM, computer slide presentations in the classroom, and across the intranet and internet, as in web pages, than in traditional classroom format? Is this 'extra' time recognized and rewarded in tenure, promotion, and merit reviews?
   3. Virtual Office Hours: Do instructors who make themselves available to students by asynchronous means (e-mail) and synchronous means (real - time chats):
      1. increase the flow of communications with students?
      2. enhance the prospect of negative feedback on their course, resulting in more negative evaluation of instructors' teaching effectiveness, thereby harming their prospects for tenure and promotion to the extent they take into account teaching?
      3. create greater opportunities for formative evaluation and hence mid-course corrections?
      4. create added pressures on their personal and family lives?
      5. reduce time devoted to research?
      6. hence harm their chance for tenure based mostly on research output in traditional forms?
3. Implications of Courseware Development:
   1. Tenure vs Profit? Will the future reward for the development of courseware offered via CD-ROM Discs, on-line video, and the world wide web be profits derived from royalities and copyright? Does this make tenure irrelevant in a world of online education?
   2. Tenure vs Jobs: Such government departments as Industry Canada and private organizations as Stentor are offering academics money for developing courseware, consisting of replaceable modules, created cooperatively by consortia of different institutions? Once completed, will students be able to enroll in such courses without the presence or active involvement of the original developers, without teachers, or with low-paid tutorial assistants, thereby threatening tenure for teaching in the future?
   3. High Quality Courseware? Will online access to courseware around the world (with questions answered by Nobel Laureates or the stars in a field) lead to the survival of the highest quality learning materials and programs, thereby wiping out the local good or average teacher who can no longer compete with their offerings?
   4. Who Owns My Course? If I invest my personal capital and time, and use my insitution's computer and software resources, mixed in with my own, who owns my course? Once on the web, can my institution give this course to another instructor who offers it without my consent or involvement? Who modifies and updates it?
4. Implications of Online Teaching:
   1. Plagiarism: Some online courses require students to post their notes and their final research papers, either on computer conferences or on the web. Does instant access to digital resources both increase the possibility of plagiarism, and decrease it, due to this visibility?
   2. Authority of Instructor: Do online courses reduce the authority and security in the role of teacher, and increase its consulting status? Do students, who have instant access to digital resources outside the formal course curriculum, pose challenges to the teachers's status and the viability of the course organization set by the instructor? Do teachers become more passive and students more active in digital courses? Would tenure committees accept this passivity as a postive component of the teacher's role?
   3. Negative Technological Teacher Evaluations: Because classroom hardware often breaks down, and software often does not function properly, do teachers who try to implement instructional technologies in their courses suffer in student teacher evaluations? Does technology result in lower teacher evaluations, and less chance for tenure and promotion?
5. Changing Meaning of Research: How has the advent of computer-mediated communications, especially across intranets, extranets, and the Internet, altered the way research is conducted, affected how it is organized, and impacted on the lives of those who conduct it?
   1. Individual vs. Network Research: Have computer-mediated communications brought about a transformation from individual research to networked research? Has the group or team approach to research in the 'hard' sciences spread to the 'soft' sciences because of the popularity of computer-mediated communications as a tool among researchers? Is the era of the lone scholar at an end?
   2. Evaluation of Networked Reserch: How is networked research evaluated? If there are multiple authors participating in a research output, and if their contributions have been made electronically across a distance, how are each of their contributions measured?
   3. Intellectual Property Rights: What are the implications of networked research for intellectual property rights? Does the intellectual property rights in the contributions or products contributed by a participant vanish in the thin air of electronic networking?
6. Electronic Publishing:
   1. Reputation: Do online electronic journals have the same reputation as hard copy journals among tenure and review committees often populated by faculty members and administrators who know little about online refereed journals? How does this affect the chances of the faculty member for tenure and promotion who has several such publications?
   2. Instability: How certain are academic researchers that their online refereed publications will still be there next year, and the year after, and the decade after, publishing? Does the great flux in web sites and urls on the Internet discourage researchers from seeking out this publishing outlet? Can years of refereed articles published in an online journal be trashed by pulling the plug on the server where they reside?
   3. Access: Do students have the same access to online journal articles as they do through the hard copy journals sections in the library bookshelves? If not, are we disadvantaging those students who happen not to have such access, including those too poor to buy a personal computer and pay an Internet Service Provider for an Internet connection?
   4. Learning Style: Do online journals force students and researchers to adopt a different learning/researching style -- reading text and graphics on the computer screen? Does this force the costly printing of pages after pages of articles when they could have been efficiently bound in hard copy editions? Do visually impaired students have the same access to online journals as hardcopy editions? Do hypertextual mouse clicks lead to an aimless wandering of the internet and result in a more disorganized learning than linear page turning?
   5. That 'Ole Musty Library? Do you like browsing through musty-smelling bookstacks, looking for your favorite journal or book? Will this touchy/feely/smelly experience be forever lost as we move to the digital library?
   6. Budget, Downsizing: Is the transition from the bricks-and-mortar library to the digital library driven by organizational budget constraints rather than by conscious decisions as to the most appropriate modes of learning and researching? Are budgets driving learning and research rather than learning and research driving budgets?

© Carl Cuneo http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/srnet/t_tissues.htm