(Listen to this entry in the Everything that FITS podcast.)

My wife and I just had the opportunity to visit Montréal over Columbus Day weekend, and it provided a nice little vacation, as well as an opportunity for me to practice my French skills. I was a little nervous at first, because although I had a French minor as an undergrad, that was twelve years ago, and I’ve had very little formal practice since. I guess that goes with speaking a language that isn’t used very much in North America, with the exception of Québec. My first attempts at speaking again were a little stumbling, as I made reservations for accommodations and tickets over the phone. I was often fishing for the right verb or term to use. However, I was really surprised at how quickly it all came back to me with only a little practice. By the second day, I was having lengthy, involved conversations with people, which I would then have to attempt to translate back to my wife. It was after having a detailed conversation about wine with a restaurant’s sommelier on Saturday night that I began to think I might not be as rusty as I’ve been telling everyone. I’d never actually talked about wine in French before, but I found myself navigating a discussion about tannins and different aromas in the wine’s nose with ease. My wife didn’t speak more than a few words of French before we went on the trip, and although she still didn’t know a lot more afterward, she speaks with a great accent.

All this was possible through the magic of language immersion. Yes, I could have brushed up on my French before the trip (and I did, a little), but this was not nearly as effective as being dropped into the streets of Montréal and knowing that we weren’t going to get directions to our next destination if I didn’t know how to ask. Being forced to practice not only what I knew how to say but also listening and responding to others in an unscripted fashion reawakened my comprehension skills. I can also say that once that switch has been flipped, it’s hard to change it back; I found myself saying “pardon” to people on the streets of Chicago instead of “excuse me” for most of the next week!

This anecdote illustrates in a concrete way the power of immersion in language learning. The fact that I could spend a weekend in Montréal and come back nearly fluent again after over a decade of very little practice shows immersion’s ability to generate near-native fluency without making the learner aware that it is happening. When you get thrown into the deep end like this, if you have the rudimentary skills necessary, most of the time you end up swimming, and swimming strongly. This was not true immersion, i.e. learning mathematics and science in French to expand my skills in math and science as well as French, but submersion; I was the foreign-language speaker with all the natives, and it was sink-or-swim. Still, it provided an opportunity to reacquire skills at a much greater rate than practicing at home.

As educators, we are constantly searching for ways to create activities and assessments in our courses that will not only challenge our students in the present but also prepare them for similar as-yet-unknown challenges in their disciplines in the future. We make them jump through hoops in our courses, believing that each hoop is getting them a little closer to our ultimate goal, that of fluency with the materials and processes at hand. However, even though we may think we are immersing our students in that world of content, we often are just giving them a boat to travel across the surface. Consider the following scenario:

A marketing professor is teaching his students about the processes involved in targeted marketing (the practice of selecting specific strategies or materials in order to best attract a particular group of individuals). His current objectives are:

1. Students will select a group to target.
2. Students will select a strategy to market a product to this specific group.
3. Students will develop a marketing campaign aimed at this specific group.

Based on these objectives, it would be very possible to create an exercise in which students select a group, use some typical strategies outlined by the textbook in reaching that market, make use of instructor-provided data and generate a marketing campaign. This could even be a project that could take a whole term, depending on how the various pieces of the exercise are presented. Sounds good, right?

Let’s take another look. I spend a lot of time in this blog talking about the need for authenticity in student exercises, and this is yet another place where it’s easy to think you’re giving students a real-life, hands-on experience, when in fact you’re giving them strategies from a textbook and data from a box. Is this a good real-world exercise? Well, for the most part it is. These kinds of simulation exercises are given in many classes, and it does teach students how to process and analyze data. In many cases, this will adequately prepare students for performance in the real world, assuming that they are predominantly dealing with mostly cut-and-dry data.

However, this exercise, while it might be comprehensive, lacks the “messiness” associated with a more authentic experience. When you’re dealing with real data and real firms, things happen that you aren’t really prepared for in a “canned” exercise like I just described. Data points don’t always tell a story; sometimes they are scattered in such a way that they don’t show any relationships at all, or perhaps the data suggest a conclusion altogether different than the one students are striving to prove. Target markets change all the time, as the whims of a fickle population change. A real firm might have an enormous amount of data far in excess of what is needed or is relevant and so might require any number of weeding out processes to obtain actually usable data. Given all these possibilities, the internship model is about the truest experience out there, because it provides the opportunity to practice skills gained in class as well as to see how things actually work outside the classroom “ideal situation” bubble. However, not everyone has the time to devote to an internship in every academic program. Therefore, it is up to us as instructors to not only provide the tools to solve the problems our students will face in the real world but also to expose them as much as possible to the actual chaos that can happen within it. As much as we always try to tell our students that there are standardized procedures for everything they will face, we know that the real world doesn’t always work that way.

What does this mean for us? As we are creating assessments and exercises for our students that are supposed to be real-world simulations, we should be striving as much as possible to simulate real-world situations in their construction. Rather than giving students data from a set, show students how to obtain various data from various places and have them obtain it themselves. Have them create their own research rather than telling them what questions to ask and what data correlations to look for. In this way they can encounter the chaos they will find in the future when research and data don’t always play well together. Most importantly, giving students this more realistic experience will allow them to make mistakes. We often think that guiding students to be mistake-free will be the best learning experience, but we also know that students can learn just as much from failing and needing to come up with an alternate solution to a problem. Just because it’s real-world data doesn’t necessarily make it a real-world exercise; students need to feel like they have some ownership, and they have to be exposed to the imperfections right along with the methods.

So it’s now been a few weeks since our French immersion experience, and I can say at this point that a little refresher was just what I needed. I tried really hard to speak well, and I failed plenty during that time too. Fortunately, the locals were nice enough to correct me or suggest a different wording, but those mistakes also helped me learn even more and recall things I really shouldn’t have forgotten in the first place. My wife has been inspired to learn more French and is now doing audio lessons on her morning commute. The early immersion experience has been quite helpful to her as she navigates conversational expressions, because her ear has already been attuned to the nuances of the language; she’s getting more out of the instruction than she would if she were just presented with canned audio and conversation because she already knows how to listen to it.

Creating an immersive learning process can be tougher, messier and less predictable than just giving out textbook problems and quizzes, but real life doesn’t have a textbook, and students won’t be able to refer to a handy manual when they encounter situations they might not be prepared for. Immersion is tremendously valuable for teaching students to think on their feet and to adjust as necessary. It’s worth the extra effort on our part to help bring a little more of the outside world into the classroom, because our students will be that much better prepared to venture out into it later.

In the FITS Department, there are a few things we assume pretty often. We are tasked with providing technology training and support services to faculty and with designing and assisting in the implementation of online courses. So the technology part of the Instructional Technology Consultant or Instructional Designer is often what’s emphasized the most. The majority of the work we do involves interacting with, mastering, and then teaching emergent technologies. However, even before the explosion of all this technology, people like us were doing the same job with more emphasis on the instructional part. We are here to support teaching and learning first. Doing so with technology comes second, but it’s easy to forget this when we are surrounded with faculty who want the next big thing right now. Think back a long ways to the days when reel-to-reel films became available relatively cheaply. Before long, someone decided that these films would be great to show to students in school, and then the initial challenge was presented: how to incorporate such a novel experience as watching a film in school as authentic learning experiences. Once the novelty wore off for students, the next challenge was to continue to use audiovisual materials to enhance instruction rather than just relying on them as instruction in and of themselves. Thus, instructional design begins to be an important idea, as a changing world prompts new ideas and new challenges in bringing those ideas to fruition.

We live in a technological world; by most accounts we are firmly entrenched in the digital age, and technology of all types is becoming virtually inescapable. We take for granted the ability to do things that were impossible only a few years or even a few months ago. I’m just old enough to remember the first wave of personal computers in schools and homes, and today you can buy a calculator that will do more than that TRS-80 or Apple II was ever capable of. Not only are we improving these near-ubiquitous technologies at a relentless pace, but the pace of these improvements is also increasing as development cycles are shortened. Today’s college students probably don’t remember not having the Internet or cell phones, but the tipping point where just about everyone had them still happened within their lifetimes!

I’ve got a technological job. I spend my days exploring technologies on the cutting edge and helping professors integrate them into classroom instruction. I am usually in front of at least one computer, more often two, all day long, and I am connected to the world through a work e-mail account, a personal e-mail account, and an instant-messaging client. I’ve got a telephone, but honestly it doesn’t get used much, as most people seem to prefer e-mail these days. I couldn’t escape all of this progress if I wanted to; in fact, it’s my job not to! Some days I feel like a technological fire fighter, because it’s my job to run into the fires that everyone else is running away from.

With all of these technological marvels swirling around us all the time, it’s easy to lose focus on the real nuts and bolts of the task: designing instruction. The task is about people, about talking to them and finding out what makes their course tick, and then translating that into improvements in pedagogy, streamlined access to resources, and smoother technology integration in the classroom for those elements that are technology dependent. Even though we’re some of the chief pushers of technology at DePaul, the ideal we are striving for is to get the technology out of the way so the teaching can continue, unburdened by “How do I…” or “I can’t….” Instructors should be asking questions that begin with “I’d like to” instead of “I need to,” and students shouldn’t be confused as to why something is used in their courses; a well-designed course makes all of the answers transparent and linear.

Yes, we love technology and try to find new ways to use it all the time, but not just because we can. Instructional design is about ideas, not stuff, and the end result should be a memorable learning experience for students no matter how it is reached. Instructors will still teach, and students will still learn, and we will still be standing in the middle of those two, working to make the jobs of both parties easier and more fulfilling and to keep them all looking forward.

Every time I prepare to teach a class or run a workshop, I think back to one of my favorite scenes from an episode of The Simpsons. Principal Skinner has taken an almost-bursting carload of newspaper to the recycling center and is discouraged to see that a half-ton will only get him seventy-five cents. He complains, “That won’t even cover the gas I used to go to the store to buy the twine to tie up the bundles.” The hippie running the place tells him, “It sounds like you’re working for your car. Simplify, man!”

We laugh at this bit of humor, but honestly it’s exactly what many of us do when we are preparing to teach with new technology resources. We are very sure that we want to make use of this new piece of technology; after all, we love it, so surely our students will too, right? We cheerfully load our classrooms full of hardware, software, music and video players, document cameras, interactive whiteboards, classroom response systems, and other equipment focused on accomplishing a specific set of tasks, confident that we have the knowledge and proficiency with them to accomplish what we set out to do. We’re also sure that what we do with our shiny new toys is bound to revolutionize what we do in the classroom every time we teach this material.

In reality, each of us is driving around with a carful of newspaper and no idea of what kind of results we’ll wind up with. We forge ahead into the class intent on delivering exciting new content and too often are derailed by a host of unforeseen issues either with the technology itself or the unexpected effect it has on the delivery of otherwise familiar content. We put that half-ton of effort into making the class work and wind up with seventy-five cents of educational value when it ends. Therefore, it’s up to us to make sure we have the mixture of expertise, practice, and technical know-how necessary to make technology tools work for the class and not against it. Here are five steps to think about before you add that cool new toy to your class.

• Do you know your stuff?

This seems obvious at first. “Well, of course I do! I’m teaching it, aren’t I?” However, to make sure students get the most out of the class, you should know your material well enough that you don’t really need any notes. I was told by a former professor long ago that if you can’t teach your entire class session with notes on one side of a 3 x 5 card, you’re not ready. This guy used to do graduate-level lectures that lasted two hours with no notes whatsoever; he was so familiar with the material that it was just a matter of recall. This idea is great to consider when you are thinking about bringing something new into the class. In case something goes wrong with the technology, you can go on autopilot, and you can focus not on the things you already know but on the one new variable, making your technology work and using it to enhance your instruction.

• Can you make it work?

Again, this answer seems obvious. “Well, it’s mine! Of course I’ve mastered this stuff!” Then surely you know how to troubleshoot all of your wireless connectivity issues, connect your hardware to audiovisual equipment in the classroom, and make sure that any content that needs to be authenticated can be. (If you’re scratching your head right now, you haven’t mastered the technology.) It’s not enough to know how to do this one really cool thing that would be so fantastic in class; you’ve got to be prepared for the fact that it might not work at first and know how to fix the problem. Although it’s always possible to call someone from the Technology Support Center to fix technology problems, there is no guarantee that they will be immediately available or that their solution will be quick. If you’re teaching an evening class, that fix might not be available until the next day or even later. This also assumes that whoever comes from the TSC knows how to fix the technology you’re having trouble with, and if it’s your new toy from home, they might not have any idea. In cases like this, you have to be the expert!

• Can you teach it with this?

Especially when adding new technology to the delivery of a lesson, it is extremely important to make sure that the instruction itself is well paced and makes good use of all available resources. It’s also important to make sure that you know exactly when, where, and how the technology piece will integrate with the lesson. Are you adding in a new delivery system to be used all the time, or is this only for one lesson? Is your new technology going to be a central feature of the lesson, or is it really just a cool “bell-and-whistle” feature that will ultimately distract your students and detract from where you wanted to go? Be sure that the “cool factor” of your new device will be outweighed by its instructional value in the classroom. Don’t think about the neat stuff it can do; think about how you can use it to enhance the quality of your instruction. Too often we assume we can enhance a lesson we’ve had trouble teaching in the past with that exciting, new piece of technology; it usually only makes things worse, because students get distracted by the cool stuff when there is already weaker instruction and lose track entirely.

• Do you have a backup plan? Or, “What if it doesn’t work?”

Most of us remember back to those days when we didn’t have computers in every classroom, when we didn’t have projectors and interactive whiteboards, when we didn’t have iPods and iPads, et cetera. We still learned just fine, and our instructors taught us without all of the equipment we take for granted now. The question we forget most often when bringing new technology into class might just be the most important: what happens if it doesn’t work? There is no bigger disaster than having your presentation take a nosedive because you were counting on the technology and found that it didn’t work the way you figured it would, or refused to work at all. Just like with everything else, technology-integrated lessons need an emergency plan. Be ready to do it analog-style if the tech won’t work this time, and have a plan ready in case it never does. The students have to learn this stuff whether or not you wow them with fancy devices!

• How will you evaluate your results?

In the case of technology, there aren’t always well-defined ways to assess the effects of your technology use on instruction. If you’re simply using new technology to teach old material, the only benchmarks you may have are students’ comprehension rates compared to you not using the technology. If you’re using a new tool to deliver specific content types that you haven’t taught before, you don’t even have a frame of reference to compare it to. In this case it might be useful to survey your students on their reactions to the new instructional tool to gauge its effectiveness before you use it a second time. If you’re using the tool to present material that they will be tested on later, test scores are a great measure of effectiveness; you can see right away what they did and didn’t get, and that can be directly attributed to your performance in front of the class.

I don’t in any way want to discourage anyone from experimenting; after all, that’s what my job, like my other stay at home jobs, is about! I think one of the most important aspects of being a good teacher is the willingness to explore and expand the scope of what instruction is and how to go about it. However, we have to make sure that whatever we do is backed by solid pedagogy, content knowledge, and a well-developed game plan. Armed with this set of tools, we can get our money’s worth for that half-ton of work!