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Viewpoint: Digital learning tools fulfilling their promise

College students are more easily able to communicate with young professors accustomed to technology.
College students are more easily able to communicate with young professors accustomed to technology.

A recent Student Watch survey conducted by the National Association of College Stores (NACS) found that while most students still prefer textbooks to eBooks, sales of digital learning products are expected to quadruple by 2012 “if content is made more interactive and faculty become more comfortable using it.”

That first condition has already been met; the most recent digital products on the market have become far more interactive, customizable, and engaging in just the past year.

New learning platforms are not just more interactive or intuitive, they also provide a pedagogical road map that allows instructors to tailor their assignments and exams while giving individual students more options in how they approach and pace their own learning.

The second factor deemed necessary for the rapid adoption of digital products—faculty becoming more comfortable with technology—is already a rapidly growing trend.

It’s not surprising that professors are adopting digital technology quickly, when you consider that the current generation of new college instructors has grown up using the internet, and that this year’s incoming college freshmen share their birth year with the World Wide Web.

These young instructors and students speak the same language, which is increasingly the more visual and kinesthetic language of the internet as opposed to the primarily verbal and static communication found in textbooks. They are eager to adopt the more engaging and multimedia educational options that digital technology can provide—now that digital is finally catching up with the most important capabilities inherent in textbooks.

The reason textbooks have remained popular—even in the face of a world that has otherwise migrated to digital and internet-based forms of communication—is because textbooks are pedagogically sound.

Textbooks are designed according to education principles such as those found in Bloom’s taxonomy of learning. Textbooks lead students from the most basic underlying facts of a new discipline to higher levels of thinking, one level at a time—taking them from rote memorization of facts to the ability to analyze, synthesize, and apply sophisticated concepts creatively.

Until recently, web-based educational tools were incapable of retracing this route. Now they can. The new generation of products coming to market has finally succeeded in addressing many of the issues that once made eBooks and other digital tools so frustrating for both instructors and students to use.

One of the drawbacks that have heretofore hindered greater adoption of digital learning platforms has been product incompatibility.

The past decade has seen many exciting new computer-based educational products come to market, each of which performed some essential task well—assigning homework, tracking individual student progress, creating quizzes and exams.

Few of them, however, worked together, and none seamlessly. Each required navigation to a different URL and a separate password for access. And you could not migrate data from one to the other; each was its own separate and walled-off domain.

Even instructors like myself, who are familiar and comfortable with digital technology, found this intensely frustrating. I had to maintain a detailed list just to keep track of all of the different web sites and log-in passwords I and my students needed to access the different tools at my disposal.

I typically teach as many as 300 students in six classes, plus adjunct courses. Every assignment requiring access to an internet site would generate dozens of panicky eMails from students who had experienced difficulty logging in. Now, programs exist that make everything available in one place—one site, one password: one-stop shopping.

Another factor that I believe prevented more instructors from using digital and web-based learning tools in the past was the general lack of flexibility these products offered. With earlier programs, instructors were more or less limited to true-false, multiple choice, or—at best—fill-in-the-blank answers. In other words, we could only get the answers we were looking for; there was nothing to encourage creative analysis or higher-ordered thinking among students.

It was impossible to tell whether the student really understood the question or whether he or she was merely parroting back some unconnected, temporarily memorized fact. And there was nothing to prevent students from passing on the answers to others.

Now we have the option of asking algorithmic questions that can be answered correctly with a range of values. This compels students to analyze and truly understand the underlying concepts necessary to establish the correct range.

I use a tool called LearnSmart, one of the offerings from McGraw-Hill’s new learning platform Connect, in my Anatomy and Physiology classes. LearnSmart takes advantage of the most recent developments in Artificial Intelligence to serve as an individual tutor, bringing students along on their own time and at their own pace.

I use LearnSmart to assign basic study of the underlying principles necessary for the following week’s curriculum. LearnSmart provides students with the basic foundation of each unit of study, so that when they come in the following week to learn about the heart, for example, I do not have to spend valuable class time explaining basic concepts such as cardiac output. I can begin immediately applying that definition.

The ability to assess and track student progress individually and automatically grade homework assignments and exams is another powerful tool. I and my adjuncts have reduced the time we spend on grading by 90 percent, and student test scores have risen, on average, 10 points since we began using Connect.

These features prove even more useful and convenient when integrated into one holistic platform where all of the offerings work seamlessly in concert.

Perhaps most appealing from an instructor’s point of view, the latest generation of digital tools allows us to edit and customize our assignments and exams so as to reflect our own individual pedagogical ideas and teaching styles.

This provides us with greater academic freedom in designing and managing our courses—something very important to all of us who teach on the post-secondary level.

Technology is a tool. Although new technologies may excite or intimidate us, they are only useful insofar as they accomplish the work they are meant to do. In the case of education, textbooks were, until very recently, the best technology we had for leading our students from Bloom Taxonomy level one to five.

Today we are seeing the advent of some powerful new digital tools that can replicate what textbooks used to do and more—increasing exponentially our ability to teach and our students’ capacity to learn.

William L. Hoover II, M.D. is an assistant professor of science and engineering at Bunker Hill Community College (BHCC), which enrolls more than 11,000 students on four campuses in Boston, Mass., and the surrounding area. Hoover teaches several sections of Anatomy and Physiology I and II at BHCC and manages up to 15 adjunct instructors who teach the same course.