By Mary Kay Kane

In my inaugural speech in January, I urged that faculty members and law schools take the opportunity during this year to reflect on our teaching and scholarly missions and how we might or should alter or adapt them to ensure that we will be able to meet the challenges of the new century. Thus, I thought it might be a helpful spur to such introspection if I used this column to share with you some of the work being done in higher education generally on issues that may influence the directions we take. Not being a general higher education expert myself, I obviously cannot claim to be presenting a complete or exhaustive survey of trends there. But, in February, I had the opportunity as AALS President to attend a conference sponsored by the American Association of Higher Education (AAHE) that was focused on new technologies and the changing professoriate. At that meeting several important developments were discussed that, while not yet very visible at the law school level, are sure to find their way into our arena and thus provide much food for thought about what the future may hold.

A centerpiece of the AAHE conference was consideration of technology in the classroom - how it is being implemented, what successes and challenges it has presented, what the future holds. Those issues were evaluated in the context of what the technological revolution means for the traditional role of faculty members as teachers and researchers. Suggestions also were made as to the implications for faculty responsibilities as seen from the point of view of how universities are likely to manage the technological revolution in the higher education environment. The discussions suggested some dramatic changes well worth pondering.

The key premise underlying all the presentations was that technology in the classroom is not only here to stay, its utilization will continue to grow and is likely over time to become the dominant method for delivery of higher education. Indeed, one commentator noted that the rhetoric of educational technology has changed over the last 10 years from a critique (?What does this have to do with learning??) to a mantra (?Of course, this has to do with learning.?). With the new generation of students embracing every aspect of technology and demanding modernized learning environments in their universities and with the pressure on universities to provide a more cost efficient and broader extension of their academic program for greater numbers, the reliance on technology appears inevitable. But what does that mean? As described, it is far more than allowing lectures to be transmitted to vast audiences. Instead educational technology is seen as the mechanism to expand communication between faculty and students and to improve the quality of the learning process by creating a new paradigm for learning at the university level.

As described at the AAHE conference, the traditional learning paradigm is one in which there are three stages: (1) first exposure - information delivery to the student, usually in the form of the class; (2) information processing to create a usable ?product; and (3) response or assessment. In that structure, a faculty member?s predominant efforts are in ordering the class to present the information or knowledge to the student and in evaluating how much the student has retained through the development of testing at the third stage. The student acts alone in the second stage. The new paradigm offered by technology is one that has the faculty member significantly involved in the second, processing stage. Faculty members initially continue to consider how the information relevant to their courses may be presented, but once they design the various means of delivery, students, using technology, access that material on their own time. Faculty then engage in continued and serious electronic communication with students, individually and in group formats, throughout the processing stage. They also, of course, continue to design and implement the evaluation stage.

It was suggested that the opportunities for enhancing learning through this sort of shift are great because it allows for the development of more refined and varied tools of delivering information (customized learning) and evaluation. and these, in turn, may better reach the many different learning styles that may be represented in the student population. In this way, technology may be seen as the means to create a more effective teaching environment because of its potential to increase learning by a broader segment of the student body.

The challenges of this new paradigm also are great, however. Even with this brief description it should be apparent that the faculty teaching burden is much greater under this model than the more traditional approach. Initially, faculty members will need to reconceptualize their courses in order to design and implement the means of information delivery for the students to access during the first stage. An even more fundamental shift is the time spent in the second stage, engaging in a continuing dialogue with students about the material as they work their way through it. Even if faculty members decide to contain that engagement by establishing some sort of a more heirarchical structure, having students helping other students process the material, supervision and monitoring of that structure remains the faculty member?s responsibility. So what conclusion should or can we draw from all of this?

At the conference it was suggested that although there will be numerous faculty members who will be interested and willing to make the teaching commitment necessary to take full advantage of this technological opportunity, others would be very reluctant. The prime concern was that the additional time spent there would be time away from research and that the obligations of scholarship are such in higher education, at least in major research universities, that it would not be feasible to expect such a major redirection of faculty efforts in the teaching arena. Further, to the extent that that fact was true, it was recognized that for institutions to embrace this teaching model would create an even greater tension or divide between individual faculty members with regard to the importance of their teaching and scholarly responsibilities. Despite those concerns, universities appear determined to forge ahead and, it was stated, already are restructuring faculty appointments to provide greater flexibility. For example, some preliminary results were revealed from an ongoing study of senior and junior faculty throughout higher education and these showed a disturbing trend. Since 1992, 33% of the FTE in universities represent new appointments. But of those, more than one-half were term appointments, not tenure-track appointments and the work expected and imposed on those term arrangements made research a lower priority or possibility. Illustratively, in one survey, some 39% of the tenure-track faculty respondents reported they had little time for research, whereas 59% of term appointments reported similar pressures. Although those responses obviously were not tied to the use of technology, the suggestion was made that technology is an important element driving universities to consider new, more flexible types of faculty appointments, allowing them to exert greater control and to direct the efforts of faculty in ways in which the universities have decided are critical in serving their student communities. To the extent that the direction of higher education generally is to focus on creating the most innovative or technologically sophisticated course of instruction possible, then a new generation of faculty with new and different priorities may emerge. Of course, that leaves the question how that generation will coexist or interact with the current generation, particularly in research universities.

The above sketch of some of the current concerns and tensions in higher education should serve as a wake-up call for law teachers. We cannot afford not to take seriously the need to consider how we intend to use and react to technology in our law classes. Already students who come to law school appear excited by and conversant with many of the opportunities provided by technology and they are demanding that their schools keep up with the pace. (As competition between law schools for law applicants rises, these demands will become even more important.) To date that largely has meant that law schools are making use of technology in the provision of student services and students are using computers to take notes and for their research. Although some experiments in law school classrooms are going on, the use of interactive technology in law classes is not pervasive. But if the university classroom model begins to change on a broad scale, then the students of the new generation will be coming to our law schools expecting similar opportunities for intense interaction beyond that provided by a socratic dialogue. And to the extent that resources and time spent in developing these new educational approaches increases, the tensions between our obligation to engage in scholarship, as well as teaching, also will increase.

Although no easy solutions to these challenges are likely to exist, by observing what is happening in the undergraduate setting today as it struggles with these issues, we have the opportunity to start considering in advance how we want to respond when they inevitably enter our environs. It is time not to be wasted and is just one more reason to recommit ourselves this year to examining and exploring our teaching and scholarly missions.

* This article appeared in the April 2001 AALS Newsletter