TECHNOLOGY IN HIGHER EDUCATION

WHEREAS, new technologies are taking hold on America’s college campuses - technologies such as interactive telecourses, computer-based instructional programs, on-line "libraries," and intra-campus - e-mail that may substantially change the way higher education carries out its basic academic missions; and

WHEREAS, employed properly, technology offers the prospect of bringing new worlds of information into the classroom, reaching new students, promoting individually paced learning, easing communication among students and faculty and broadening the net of data available to researchers; and

WHEREAS, the improper employment of technology may actually harm educational quality, leaving students with little more to interact with than a "face on a screen," or a computer-based software program, when they need regular and frequent opportunities to talk, in the same time and place, with faculty and other students about the content of their classes, their educational and careers goals and their research; and

WHEREAS, there is considerable evidence that college classroom teaching is being replaced by telecourses too rapidly, without a proper educational basis and in inappropriate ways, as evidenced, among other things, by state efforts to create faculty-free "virtual universities" and by the mass marketing of telecourses by profit-making concerns; and

WHEREAS, there is a danger that access to technology will be inequitably distributed between "information-rich" and "information-poor" campuses and between affluent and disadvantaged students; and

WHEREAS, higher education faculty and staff often fail to receive the training they need to use new classroom, research and communications technologies effectively; and

WHEREAS, technology raises new issues about faculty and staff rights, including compensation and workload standards for distance learning courses, protecting intellectual property rights in cyberspace, offering access and training in new technologies and health and safety; and

WHEREAS, decisions about the employment of new technologies on campus are too often being made without faculty and staff input, based on misguided beliefs about long-term technology costs and with little consideration of the educational implications:

RESOLVED, that AFT endorse Teaming Up With Technology, the report of its higher education program and policy council Task Force on Technology in Higher Education, which offers advice to higher education unions, college and university administrators and public officials concerning the employment of new technologies on campus; and

RESOLVED, that AFT strongly urge its higher education affiliates, as a priority matter, to become well informed about major technology issues at their institutions, to insist upon an open process for making decisions about technology, and to ensure that the union is in a position to contribute effectively to that process; and

RESOLVED, that four questions, as described in Teaming Up With Technology, should be kept front and center in all dealings with management about technology issues:

• Does the technology make sense educationally? Will it really advance student learning and scholarship?
• Does the technology make sense financially? Is there a realistic analysis of long-term as well as short-term costs?
• Will students and faculty all have access to the new technology and know how to use it?
• Are faculty and staff rights protected?

RESOLVED, that distance learning courses, particularly at the undergraduate level, should generally be limited to circumstances in which:

• A campus-based alternative is impractical (that is, when a particular student or group of students are unable to reach the campus, or the college cannot offer an equivalent course); and
• The college faculty retains academic responsibility and control over the content of the course and who will teach it; and
• The course includes substantial opportunities for faculty-student and student-student interchange; and
• The course is part of a larger academic program that includes teaching and learning in the shared human spaces of a campus; and

RESOLVED, that institutions of higher education provide all students, as well as faculty and staff who want it, with the training they need to utilize new teaching, research and communications technologies effectively; and

RESOLVED, that AFT continue to supply affiliates periodically with updated information, both on paper and in cyberspace, about policy and contractual developments related to higher education technology.