What the Millennium Teacher Must Know and Be Able to Do

Pedagogical tools for the millennium teacher will look very different from those in place in most classrooms today. Video, sound, and text will all be interwoven, creating environments that will engage students as all senses are engaged. Students will be exposed to information and people in “real-time” settings, will be using a variety of learner-based tools (Bull, Bell, Garofalo & Sigmon, 2002), and will employ tools that speak to each other. As Kellner (2001) indicates, such new technologies may appear exotic in the present, but “will become increasingly commonplace in the future and will force a rethinking of education” (p. 47). Teachers will not be, nor should they expect to be, “experts” in the classroom, but will serve as guides, while they themselves receive guidance and assistance from others to support the use of technology tools that will be “in place” in millennium learning environments. Millennium teachers must ask for and expect this support, as it will be necessary to meet the “three musts” of teachers for millennium classrooms.

Web Conferencing in Distance Education

Web conferencing is a technology that allows groups of individuals in a variety of diverse locations to communicate and share information without having to leave their desks. It provides features such as whiteboarding, screen sharing, chat, and polling. It eliminates the need to travel, reduces downtime, increases efficiency, and reduces costs. AT&T worked on proofs of concepts and prototypes for personal conferencing systems for 20 years and finally released its product in 1993 (Perey, 2003). Microsoft released NetMeeting in about 1995. Wooley now lists 95 real-time collaboration products and Web sites on his Web site, ThinkofIt. com. The growth of real-time collaboration has grown significantly and been more successful in the last few years, as the CPUs in PCs are faster, the PCs have more memory, and more bandwidth is available and cheaper. Frost and Sullivan’s 2002 report estimates that by 2008, $2 billion will be spent on Web conferencing (as cited by Perey, 2003). This technology allows a business to conduct training simultaneously, globally creating a collaborative learning environment while keeping costs down.

Using Gagné's Events of Instruction to Analyze Online Course Quality

Student perceptions of online courses are likely influenced by two overarching aspects of quality: instructor quality and course design quality (Ortiz-Rodriguez, Telg, Irani, Roberts & Rhoades, 2005). Both of these forces in online education may be analyzed using a well-known model of instructional design - Gagnés instructional design and cognition theory, the centerpiece of which are the nine events of instruction (Gagné, Wager, Golas, & Keller, 2004). Multiple studies positively correlate learner attitudes and perceptions of the online course to instructor quality. Early studies evaluating instructor quality attempted to correlate instructor quality with the attitude and perception of the learner, but not directly to learner success or course design quality. Researchers of online courses, such as Palloff & Pratt (2003), discussed the role of the instructor in depth while neglecting the roles of the learner, the institution, and course design. The main focus remained instructor-centered, and highlighted key instructor tasks such as understanding the virtual learner in terms of roles the learner plays, fostering team roles for the learner, designing an effective course orientation, and identifying potential legal issues the instructor might face (Palloff & Pratt, 2002, p. 16). A distant secondary focus was on effective course design. This highlighted instructor tasks in building an effective online learning community without highlighting the roles effective communication tools would play.

Understanding Dynamic Change and Creation of Learning Organizations

In a letter to the editor of the New York Times, Mark Peck (May 6, 2007), a 10th grade student, notes “it’s too bad that students have to take the rap for old-style teachers who are still not comfortable with the computer as an educational tool” (p. A22). Mark’s comment was in response to a front-page article that highlighted how little substantive change had occurred in the learning environments of schools that instituted laptop programs. In succinct terms, Mark identifies a major barrier to meaningful adoption of new technologies by stating that “computer-based learning initiatives are not going to take off until teachers are just as excited about them as their students” (p. A22). Mark’s experience as a learner is echoed in a recent report (Education Week, 2007).

Transforming Universities in the Online World

As the world moves online, various pressures drive changes in the way industries and organizations do business: market pressures, for example, global competition; technological pressures, for example, the use of e-commerce to lower the costs of production; and societal pressures, for example, government regulations (Turban, King, Lee, & Viehland, 2004). In considering the implications of the online world for industry, it is necessary to consider both structure and process, where process includes change processes (Gregor & Johnston, 2000, 2001; Johnston & Gregor, 2000). In Giddens’ (1977, 1984, 1991) theory of structuration, process (activity) and structure are reciprocal. As Giddens (1977) states, “social structures are both constituted by human agency, and yet at the same time are the very medium of this constitution”(p. 121) or, as Rose (1999) puts it, “agents in their actions constantly produce and reproduce and develop the social structures which both constrain and enable them” (p.643).

There are So Many More than Three Barriers

One major barrier is that educators often view themselves as “people persons” and not “technology persons,” which ends up being an excuse for not familiarizing themselves with new tools. Ironically, the actual research in other industries related to people who employ a high level of information technology in their jobs is that the technology liberates them to be more interactive with other people, not machines. The financial disaster “wolf” has never really been at the door of most school districts. By almost any measure, schools have for decades received funding that outpaces inflation. (That is why proponents for increased school funding have “cloaked” their requests in other measures such as percentage of the state budget or to equal expenditures in other states.) Conversely, many of the companies that have “reengineered” themselves have done so at the threat of going out of business. Some of these companies have seen declines in revenues over a short period of time of 50% or more. This has forced them to make really difficult decisions in order to increase productivity. They have often had to substantially reallocate priorities and resources in order to survive.

Teachers for the New Millennium

They say if you drop a live frog into a pot of boiling water, it will jump right out. But, if you place the same frog into a pot of water at room temperature and then gradually raise the flame under it, the frog will not notice the changes and remain in the pot until it is cooked. Now, you might ask, what is the connection between a frog in a pot and what a millennium teacher should know and be able to do? My view of the connection is that there are events and processes happening around us every day. Most of the time, we do not pay them much attention because they occur so frequently or gradually that from moment to moment they do not seem to signify very much—like the gradually rising temperature in the pot of the cooking frog. Once in a great while, a potentially transformative event occurs and it makes us jump: September 11, Columbine, sending a man to the moon, or Y2K hysteria. Usually though, we conduct our routines and make our way through the day or the semester and tend to rely on the comfort of the familiar, seemingly unchanging, landscape. Yet, were we to carefully study and reflect upon that landscape, we might discern important trends that hold meaning for how we conduct ourselves presently, and in the future.

Successful Self-Funding E-Learning Programs

The Greek philosopher Aristotle indicated that learning is the outcome of both teaching and practice. Clearly, learning is not confined to classroom lectures exclusively. In the past several decades, educators explored the possibility of providing learning experience to remote students. With improvement in technology and the growing popularity of Internet usage, e-learning caught the attention of both corporations and educational institutions. However, traditional learning methodology began transforming when elite universities embraced the Internet as a vehicle for their degree programs (Forelle, 2003). Progress in e-learning has increased its popularity in the past decade (Levy & Murphy, 2002). Consequently, it is carving a new brand of universities, causing traditional schools to rethink their business model. Furthermore, some elite schools have developed specialized online degree and certificate programs. In doing so, these schools strive to compete on this new learning medium and create a new source of revenue, especially due to the declining enrollment and lower government funding resulting from the events on September 11, 2001 (Roueche, Roueche, & Johnson, 2002). This paper provides definitions of the eight key elements any institution should have to successfully implement self-funding e-learning systems.

Student Retention in Online Education

Successful program completion in an online education context is a combination of learner attributes, the university’s focus on meeting the needs of the students, and providing a quality educational product. This article focuses on the needs of the online student and how a program can provide the educational services that promote student retention. By recognizing distance education student needs and putting strategies into place to best meet those needs, programs can have a high course and program completion rate to meet accreditation standards and provide financial stability for the institution.

Soft Technology Skills and the Teacher of the 21st Century

For many years, we have attempted to teach teachers technology for their own personal use and to help them use technology effectively with their students. We have introduced them to computers, to operating systems, peripherals, software, the Internet, and to all of the attending elements of digital technology. These, the knowledge and effective use of digital tools, are the “hard skills.” They are “hard skills” not because they are difficult to learn, but because they are time intensive and require the ability to put all of the disparate parts of technology together. They are the skills anyone would need were they to assume the responsibility of teaching them to someone else.