Exploring Faculty Experiences With Technology-Supported Collaboration in College Classrooms

Introduction

University faculty who teach preservice teachers continually evaluate their courses to ensure their objectives correlate to current governing standards, rules, and requirements. This ensures their graduates meet the accreditation standards that allow them to earn teacher certification. Traditionally, this involved a course instructor presenting new content through a lecture format which placed the students in the role of passive learners on the receiving end of instruction. This is often referred to as the “sage-on-the-stage” approach. (He et al., 2019; Killian & Woods, 2018; King, 1993; Lee et al., 2017).

The current generation of college students has grown up in a technology-driven society. The students that faculty currently teach are considered “digital natives” who regularly engage in multiple high-technology opportunities (Au-Yong-Oliveria et al., 2018). These students demonstrate great comfort with technological tools such as social media applications, instant messages, texts, and emails delivered to their computer, phone, or watch. These students have also demonstrated strength in multi-tasking between each of these seemingly seamlessly. These disruptions can cause their in-class attention to be divided between the content being presented to them, often through the more passive, lecture-driven means, and the rapid-fire information they are receiving through their technological devices (Au-Yong-Oliveira et al., 2018). For this reason, research has found that if an instructor’s content or delivery method lacks interest or engagement, these 21st-century learners report a lack of motivation to learn course content beyond the required surface level (Finn & Zimmer, 2012; Lee & Yeong, 2018). This discontentment has caused higher education faculty to reconsider their approach to instruction (Au-Yong-Olivera et al., 2018; Killian & Woods, 2018).

One possible solution to this problem is that instructors become facilitators of learning, creating a more counterbalanced approach to instruction; this is often referred to as a “guide on the side” approach (King, 1993). This classroom is typically more student-centered, and technology driven (Kipp et al., 2007; Sfard, 1997; Shea, 2006). To accomplish this, instructors begin by ensuring their objectives and content are challenging yet motivating and engaging for their students. This drives the activities they engage in with their students. These instructors search for ways to create active learning opportunities and incorporate technological tools into their authentic assignments, and relevant classroom opportunities (Freeman et al., 2014; Onodipe et al., 2020; Weimer, 2016). This shift in teaching has allowed educators to better meet the challenges related to technology-driven learners, as well as other issues such as a decreasing trend in the number of students enrolled in teacher education programs, by integrating a more student-centered, technology-driven approach to instruction. Ultimately, these improvements accurately reflect students’ future workplace demands and support their need to use technology confidently (Shrivastava, 1999). Therefore, this chapter will present faculty experiences using educational technology tools to increase engagement and motivation. The intended outcome of this chapter is to help others see how educational technology tools successfully encourage student collaboration within the college classrooms and to encourage faculty members to integrate technology tools into their own curriculum. This chapter will present four college professors’ experiences implementing new educational technology tools to increase students’ collaboration within their courses (See Table 1).