Suzanne Estler, PhD
Associate Professor
Higher Educational Leadership
University of Maine
estler@umit.maine.edu

Posted: February 10, 2003     Student Affairs Online, vol. 4 no. 1 - Winter 2003

Several years ago, I returned from a decade in university administration back to a career as a professor and scholar of student development and colleges and universities as complex organizations at the University of Maine. Our Student Development in Higher Education, program was small and in transition.  A regenerated doctoral program was then in exploratory phases and has since admitted and advanced students who view technology as one of the key challenges facing higher education. With my return to the faculty and the hiring of a new faculty member to replace a retiring “legend,” graduate students had a new complement of faculty in student development and higher educational leadership.  Starting anew with coordination of the program, we could assess and adapt to a revolution in technology impacting the tools our students would need for career success in student affairs. Within a few years, technology was integrated throughout our curriculum.  The transformation resulted from faculty initiative in a campus environment supportive of change in a myriad of ways rather than through a centralized, top-down mandate.

I found that during my administrative sojourn, there had been profound changes relative to new technologies for teaching, learning, research, communications, publication processes, and student affairs program delivery. Those changes clearly continue to challenge those of us who teach to better prepare students for a very different world of practice than the one in which we had grown up.

The technology lessons of my transition year were shaped by reading, conferences, student responses, experience, and discussions with professional staff and presidents from colleges across the state to assess the need for a doctoral program in Higher Educational Leadership. Presidents and staff consistently cited the importance of technology for a contemporary curriculum in higher education.  Those lessons influenced the future of our program in several ways.  Specifically they helped:

(a)    to shape criteria to include technological literacy in hiring a new faculty member;

(b)   to influence integration of a variety of technologies in masters and doctoral course delivery;

(c)    to shape additional infrastructure for programmatic communication (use of email, university intranet conferencing system and the world wide web); and

(d)   to influence norms among students and faculty around pedagogy incorporating technology (experiential, problem-solving, and collaborative student centered learning emphasizing the lifelong learning skills needed to stay current in a rapidly changing world.)

We started with the premise that, whether for good or ill (and most likely both), new technologies were, above all, a reality with which students would have to work.  As a result, we did not separate technology as a separate area of study, but incorporated use and exposure to a variety of technologies throughout the curriculum.  Upon enrolling in the graduate program, students were assigned an account on the password protected campus intranet, a user-friendly internal conferencing system allowing many of the features of the Internet.  Unlike the Internet, the system required minimal technical expertise on the part of either students or faculty for immediate use.  As a result, as faculty, we could easily set up course conferences that fostered communication relative to assignments, the posting of course specific resources, links to web resources in a “virtual library,” threaded discussions, and observations related to class content throughout the week that passed between classes. We experimented, sometimes out of necessity, with a variety of approaches including  (a) online courses using web based structures through BlackBoard and WebCT, (b) a transition to a hybrid independent study when pregnancy and childbirth limited one student’s ability to travel in the last third of a semester (While working independently with some alternative assignments, she continued interaction and feedback with other students through the course conference.), and (c) use of a state of the art interactive audio/visual system (ATM) that allows students at several sites to participate in real time in seminar classes from a distance. Each distance student is represented on a separate TV monitor at the end of the table at the home site, and all sites are simultaneously visible in quadrants on a movie screen at the remote sites.  Students serving as “technology assistants” during class sessions became familiar with the capabilities of a fully wired classroom and learned to handle camera work to capture shifts from VCR, document reader, PowerPoint on the computer, and live access to Internet resources.

Our efforts as faculty were supported by a loosely connected web of campus based resources:

(a)    a range of on-line and face to face technical support for both faculty and students including faculty development opportunities (Information Technologies @ The University of ...)

(b)   a forward thinking campus library whose staff provides a host of expert resources including, on request: web based reference sheets for our classes (course guides for two courses: Seminar in Higher Education and Higher Education and the Law are at:  Fogler Library: Course Guide for HED 620, Fogler Library: Course Guide for HED 630.), a password protected on-line reserved reading system, a state of the art electronic catalog and research database system; (see Fogler Library, the University of Maine); and

(c)    College of Education and Human Development technology resources through the Maine Distance Learning Project (ATM)  and faculty support and consultation (COEHD Technology. )

The aggregate effect of these diverse resources, faculty commitment, and student ingenuity brings us to the present with a curriculum that looks stable in course titles and content, but has been nevertheless transformed in delivery through the integration of new technologies.  Our courses put students in situations in which they use computer technologies to solve problems of information, communications and logistics in the college setting.  The structure of classes produces collaborative exploratory learning on how best to use rapidly evolving technologies as a resource in student affairs programming.  Our graduate students have critically examined the impact of technologies on student life in papers and class presentations  exemplified by such topics as internet addiction, distance learning, the potential for isolation, and legal implications of internet harassment and online publishing.  They apply their knowledge in the field.  For example, resident directors increasingly use the campus intranet to help build community within their residence halls.  Others who are practicing professionals or graduate assistants in a variety of student affairs offices set the pace in providing new avenues of program delivery, communication, and information dissemination.  Students routinely use PowerPoint and the Internet as tools for class presentations. One group engaged nationally, winning third place in the StudentAffairs.com Virtual Case Study competition.  Further, our graduate students saw that students of color, as well as those often isolated because of sexual identity or gender, used computer technology to network nationally and help dispel some of the isolation often felt in the predominately White campus culture in a predominately White state.

Our students come to use a variety of technologies routinely without seeing it as unique.  Yet they discover in the job market, that they are perceived, with a literacy in technology, as having “a fuller bag of tools” for addressing student development and programming needs.  They do not view the new generation technology tools as a replacement for the people skills at the foundation of the student affairs profession.  Indeed, even in our state-of-the-art interactive seminars uniting four distance sites in real time, students agree they would prefer the spontaneity of real face-to-face contact, but not at the expense of a four-hour commute in hostile weather. Instead, students find their technology skills are a supplement to more traditional student affairs skills and understanding.  They find that technology allows new options for accessing and engaging students, including (a) those with increasingly complex demands on their time, (b) those who live at a distance unable to easily commute, and/or (c) those whose learning or communication styles may make traditional programming unattractive or inaccessible. 

Paradoxically, the very technology that some view as a threat to human interaction in the student experience may, in fact, increase access and engagement with the campus community by offering asynchronous engagement alternatives. That paradox and our experience clearly demonstrate that, as faculty, we owe students aspiring to careers in student affairs (a) the skills to function effectively in that changing world, (b) the skills to constantly acquire and evaluate new knowledge in the face of fast paced change, and  (c) knowledge and skills for leadership in assuring the centrality of student needs, in all their complexity, as technology impacts the structure and functioning of colleges and universities and with it, the student experience. The grass-roots experience at the University of Maine demonstrates the power of a low-key, pervasive, and non-mandated approach to the integration of technology into the curriculum of student development programs.