6 Ways that Technology is Eroding Higher Education

How those little gadgets are interfering with the learning process.

Photo credit: Pixabay /Pexels

I have been teaching in higher education since I first taught Introduction to Psychology at the University of New Hampshire as a graduate student in 1994. I have witnessed extraordinary changes in the teaching/learning process—largely related to “advances” in technology related to communication and education.

At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old guy, here are six ways that I have seen the teaching/learning processes adversely affected by novel technologies.

1. Generative Artificial Intelligence

Sure, the fact that we can now take 6 seconds to ask a question into our phone and get an “originally” written dissertation on pretty much any topic in the universe is, perhaps, kind of cool. But as an educator, this fact is wildly frightening. Students are famously using ChatGPT and other forms of generative AI to write college papers, master’s theses, dissertations, applications for graduate schools, love letters, and more. As someone who cares deeply about cultivating the writing and thinking processes, this landscape scares me. To no end, in fact.

While I have very strict AI policies (see my general policy here), I really am not super-optimistic that students are going to roll up their sleeves and learn how to write the old-fashioned way—by writing and re-writing, with solid feedback from experienced educators. The abilities to write and to think are famously inter-connected (see this article on the topic from Steve Mintz in Inside Higher Education). So if we educators lose the capacity and means to teach writing, thinking will fall by the wayside as collateral damage. And I don’t know about you, but I’m not interested in a world in which education becomes deeply compromised because of advances in technology.

2. Internet Security

We don’t need to be convinced about the importance of internet security. By this point, nearly everyone has stories about having been hacked in some way or another. My Facebook account, for instance, that I’d cultivated and utilized for well over a decade, got hacked, compromised, and disabled. Awful situation. So I get the importance of things like double-authentication.

That said, as someone who has taught college since 1994, I have to say that internet-security issues reduce the amount of education that we can offer to our students. Let me explain:

Before the college teaching process became so dominated by computer-based processes—back in the chalk and chalkboard days—a teacher could walk into class, take attendance (by referring to a sheet of paper in a notebook), and start teaching. A 2pm class would get into the content at about 2:03.

These days, if the teacher plans to utilize technology for the teaching process at all during a class period, they have to log onto the school’s computer. This process usually includes a double-authentication process necessitating a clunky moment in which the teacher has to refer to their phone, etc. Next, they have to log into some software (e.g., a university-specific portal that has rosters and other relevant information). Once again, a double-authentication element usually comes into play. But that’s not all. The professor may have emailed themself a copy of a document to be used in today’s lecture. So they will have to log into their campus email account. And you guessed it: Yet another double-authentication.

On days that I use technology in the classroom (which, for me, is the exception and not the rule), I find that, being as efficient as I possibly can be, I don’t start actually teaching the content until about 2:10. In other words, these days, it takes about 10 minutes to just start teaching for most instructors. So students who are paying for a 75-minute class are, in effect, getting a 65-minute class. That is a 13% loss of educational time (based on the estimates included here). I have no idea what the solution to this problem is, but it is, without question, a problem that adversely affects students’ education—due to advances in technology.

3. The Internet’s Extraordinary Reach.

The internet is pretty amazing. We now live in a world in which (with little exaggeration) any person can ask a question anywhere about any topic and get an elaborate and often-accurate answer in the blink of an eye. Sure, this is pretty cool. That said, I have seen the internet’s highly accessible nature adversely affect student learning—especially when it comes to the development of writing.

On one occasion—going back about 10 years now—I had a very bright, advanced student go over a paper with me. When I asked her about the process that she’d used to organize the structure of the paper, she explained that she found a published article online that was related to the topic. And she copied and pasted sections of that article into a Word document and changed words around.

I was horrified. And she was surprised. She explained to me that, in her words, this is what everyone does. Wow, did I not like to hear that. I explained to her that this process was fully unacceptable and worked against her own development and education. I am not sure, to this day, if she actually took my guidance on this issue.

The internet can be great for educational purposes—but there is a dark side—it makes plagiarism way too tempting and way too easy.

What the student in the example included here was doing counts as what we call turn-of-phrase plagiarism—which exists when you take someone else’s prose and simply change things around a bit (such as changing the word “enormous” to “tremendous”). I have definitely seen an increase in turn-of-phrase plagiarism over the years. It works so much against a students’ educational goals—and the internet, unwittingly, makes this kind of “writing” all too easy.

4. Cell Phones

Cell phones are, simply put, wildly distracting. And they are too tempting. Checking texts when one receives a notification is like an addiction at this point. And social media is famously addicting as well. Further, when students use cell phones in class, the instructor is likely to get distracted—at least I know that I do. I like to think that my class is like a high-level conversation between myself and each student. And if you’re in a conversation with someone and they are looking at their phone and clearly ignoring you, you’re going to have a hard time not being distracted.

We’re at a point in the world where expecting all students to turn their phones off fully is, as I’ve found, not even really an option. Efforts to implement that kind of policy leads to all kinds of requests for exceptions—often legitimate requests, such as saying that they need to be on call to check on a family member’s health status.

My particular policy is that if a student must use their cell phone—at all—they need to go into the hallway as, at least for me, that is much less distracting than is a student on their phone, clearly ignoring you and their classmates, during class time. Cell phones are not friends with the process of classroom teaching.

5. Laptops

Laptop computers are becoming more and more common. And many students take notes using laptops these days. And while actually writing notes the old-fashioned way has been shown to lead to better recall of information relative to taking notes on a laptop or similar device (see Desselle et al., 2018), taking notes on laptops seems to be emerging as more and more normative each year.

For me, the main problem associated with laptops in the classroom, however, is the distraction factor. If a student has access to the internet during class, good luck having them pay undivided attention to your lecture.

To this point, consider the following anecdote: A few years ago, I was asked by a junior colleague to observe their class and to write a review of the class. Of course I was happy to comply. I have to say, I was surprised when I settled into my seat at the back of the classroom, that more than half the students had laptops open during the entire class. Given that I sat at the back of the class, I was able to see everyone’s screen. And I kid you not: 100% of the students on laptops hopped onto social media or Amazon—or something else completely unrelated to the class—at least once. In many cases, students pretty much just surfed the internet the entire time. Heck, I found myself checking my Facebook during the class—not proud to admit that, by the way!

The way that I deal with this issue is to disallow students to use laptops—and if a student wants or needs an exception for some reason (often related to software that they rely on related to a disability, for example), I have the student meet with me to discuss the issue. And then I have them state in writing that they will have their device on airplane mode any time that they have their device in operation. Generally, this approach has worked alright for me. But again, it’s just another example of how technological advances adversely affect modern higher education.

6. The PowerPoint Doldrums

When I was a college student in the dark ages, most professors wrote notes on the board. Projector technology was sort of coming into its own and was rarely used. I felt that I learned well from professors writing notes on the board—my writing notes along with the professors’ writing tended to make for an active learning process.

At some point, PowerPoint and similar presentation-based technologies became available. I will say that these softwares do have a time and a place. But over-reliance on PowerPoint is often something that makes for a highly passive educational experience. On more than one occasion, I’ve heard students complain about over-use of PowerPoints for notes from other professors.

And so here’s an anecdote on this issue: Several years ago, a junior colleague asked me to review their class. The course dealt with relatively technical information. And it started at 8am. Uggh! But of course I said yes.

I walked into the classroom and sat in the back, ready to take notes as part of the observation. Once the room was full, the professor turned on the computer and the projector and proceeded to turn off the lights so that the PowerPoint slides could be most visible.

I noticed during the lecture that the student next to me fell asleep. And the student in front of that student fell asleep. And for about 2 seconds (I think!), I even fell asleep! (not proud of this, by the way!)

When I later talked with the professor to provide feedback, they enthusiastically reported that all the PowerPoint slides were provided by the textbook publisher. This professor was essentially bragging that they didn’t have to really do anything to prepare for the class—and didn’t bring a bit of their own content or experience into the teaching of the course. Of course, I was horrified. When I mentioned that some of the students seemed disengaged by the heavy usage of PowerPoint and suggested some alternative options for delivering content, this professor smiled with an implication that they were teaching the way that they had been encouraged to teach and that they weren’t really planning to change a thing. So it goes.

Perhaps using a mix of content-delivery methods (including some PowerPoint (with some light on in the room!) along with writing on the board, in-class structured discussions, etc., might be a better way to go.

Bottom Line

Technological advances related to communication and education have been moving at breakneck speed. While game-changing technologies, such as generative AI, seem nothing short of extraordinary at first, to my mind, educators need to be cautious about endorsing such novel technologies without much in the way of deliberation.

While all the technologies listed above have their place and have the capacity to make things easier for us in some ways, from my experience as a professor for the past 30+ years, I have to say that there are education-related downsides to advanced technology.

My recommendation to up-and-coming teachers, thus, would be this: When it comes to technology in the classroom, ask yourself if the technology, on average, advances the goals of teaching and learning or if it impedes said goals. Questioning the utility of incorporating technology into the classroom can go a long way to making for stronger teachers and more engaged students.

References

Desselle SP, Shane PA. Laptop Versus Longhand Note Taking in a Professional Doctorate Course: Student Performance, Attitudes, and Behaviors. Innov Pharm. 2018 Nov 5;9(3):1-12. doi: 10.24926/iip.v9i3.1392. PMID: 34007708; PMCID: PMC6302751.