In “Teachers in the Age of Digital Instruction,” The Fordham Institute (2011) presented a policy statement regarding how technology will impact the teaching profession. In the digital age, effective teachers will be those who are capable of leveraging technology to produce outstanding learning outcomes among massive numbers of students. As a result of this transformation, a hierarchy will emerge, and the nation will require fewer teachers. Effective teachers will be retained through increased pay and career opportunities. Average teachers will be relieved of duties involving “complex tasks” (p. 2) and will be used to personalize instruction to students in traditional classrooms. Their working hours will be reduced, along with pay. Ineffective teachers will work as tutors, monitor online learning labs, or be replaced by candidates who are more qualified. Teacher training programs will appeal to “digital natives” (p. 7), those who have grown up using digital tools, as opposed to “digital immigrants” (p. 7), those who were not born into the digital age but who adapted to and sometimes adopted technology (Prensky, 2001). Great teachers will become “media-genic super-instructors” who reach “boundless number of students” (p. 5).
What’s wrong with this picture?
Any number of things, as pointed out by Luis A. Huerta in an article entitled “Review of Teachers in the Age of Digital Instruction” (2012). The Fordham Institute report lacks empirical research evidence to support its assertion that the digital technologies will improve education. According to Huerta, it presents a utopian vision that is untenable in guiding future policy and practice. Although teachers do need to “harness technology to optimize learning” (Derbel, 2013, p. 94), the process will likely unfold gradually in slow pedagogical transitions. While teachers may not enthusiastically embrace digital tools, as depicted in The Fordham Institute report, online roles will certainly encompass more complex tasks. Derbel (2013) identified three roles that will need to be adopted: an instructional design role, a managerial role, and a social role that includes humanistic teaching that draws on best practices in face-to-face instruction. Effective instructors will therefore require a mixture of skills in order to facilitate and mediate within online communities in the future.
Recommendation: Take “Contemporary Teaching and Learning Concepts,” offered in the DHSc program at A.T. Still University, to find out more about distance education.
References
Derbel, F. (2013). Facilitation of learning in electronic environments: Reconfiguring the teacher’s role. Proceedings of The International Conference On E-Learning, 94-100.
Hassel, B. C., & Hassel, E. A. (2011). Teachers in the age of digital instruction. Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Retrieved from http://edex.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/publication/pdfs/20111116_TeachersintheAgeofDigitalInstruction_7.pdf
Huerta, L. A. (2012). Review of ‘teachers in the age of digital instruction’. National Education Policy Center. Retrieved from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED530732.pdf
Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5), 1 – 6.
priming the mind 
Hi Justin,
I like the clean uncluttered look of your blog. I will take your advice and experiment with WordPress. I considered using it this time around but because my time was limited, I relied on the tried and true. Thank you for including the list of blogs you follow. I have never followed any blog sites but I took a look at Live to Write-Write to Live and might start. I have been an amateur writer and have written fiction in the past. It can be a lonely pastime and it’s nice to “hear” another person’s thoughts on the process.
Integration of technology into teaching pedagogy is a worthy subject. Points are well made in the articles you summarized. I especially appreciated the highlighting of the importance of technology usability and the implementation of tech support. Last semester, in Curriculum and Course Design, I was frustrated by the lack of time allocated and available instruction regarding the use of Blackboard to create a “mock” lecture. By accessing other University’s Blackboard teaching sites, I was able to get a sense of the extensive capabilities of Blackboard and I would have liked to experiment with real time polling, a question and answer period and the uploading of additional media. I do wish ATSU would add this to the teaching tract curriculum. However, maybe this subject matter is taught more adequately in the Ed.D program. Do you think this is something easy enough to self-teach or would you be in favor of additional instruction in this regard?
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Hi Patricia,
Thank you for your comments. WordPress requires a little more time to learn than Blogger, but it has more functionality. Due to the fact that I had quite a bit of unstructured time on my hands, I decided to teach myself how to construct a professional looking blog.
The writing process is mysterious, and I’ve always been fascinated by what writers go through in producing works of art. I discovered by my late 20s that it would take an enormous amount of time, sweat, and luck to earn my living through creative writing alone. At that point, I went back to school in health information management. But I’ve continued to write through the years — short stories, novels, and poetry, some of which has been published. I hope to produce more during retirement.
I’m not familiar with the capabilities of Blackboard in supporting mock lectures, but I would be willing to bet you could teach yourself how to do it, given the appropriate resources and time. I teach in an online platform called eLearning, and I find it more graceful and user-friendly than Blackboard. We have lectures already posted in the course shell, so we do not create our own. Interactive exercises are created by media specialists, although I redeveloped one of the courses a while back and designed a couple of interactives.
You could always ask a faculty member in the Ed.D. program about the real time polling and the Q&A functions in Blackboard. I’m still dissatisfied with the fact that the editing function in the discussion forum has been switched off. We should be able to edit our own posts, especially when we make a small error. Errors are there for everyone to see unless we post again with the correction, and that can be embarrassing. I’ve inquired more than once about the possibility of being able to edit my own posts, and I’m told that the posts are regarded as fixed assignments. Do you think the editing function should be turned on in Blackboard?
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