UNIVERSITY OF PADJADJALAN

INDONESIA
BANDUNG (WEST JAVA)
musamuwaga@yahoo.com

ASSIGNMENT TOPIC: INFORMATION TECHINOLOGY IN

EDUCATION

STUDENT: MUWAGA MUSA

STUDENT NO. 190220093001
DUE DATE: 21/04/2010.
Many people warn of the possible harmful effects of using technology in the classroom.
Questions regularly asked: will children lose their ability to relate to other human beings? Will
they become dependant on technology? Will they find inappropriate materials? The same was
probably said with the invention of the printing process, radio and television. All of these can be
used inappropriately, but all of them have given humanity unbounded access to information
which can be turned into knowledge. Appropriately used interactively and with guidance they
have become tools for the development of higher order thinking skills. Inappropriately used in
the classroom, technology can be used to perpetuate old models of teaching and learning.
Students can be plugged into computers to do drill and practice that are not so different from
workbooks. Teachers can use multimedia technology to give more colourful, stimulating
lectures. Both of these have their place, but such use does not begin to tap the power of these
new tools.

Although Universities create and acquire knowledge, they are not always very successful in
applying the gained knowledge to their personal activities. In fact, academic institutions typically
lag businesses by roughly a decade in the adoption of new technological devices (U.S Congress,
1988). This is certainly very true in terms of the application of information technology/systems
into the learning process: ultimately, the blackboard and chalk remain the primary teaching
technologies I my business schools even while the merits of information technology to improve
communication, efficiency and decision making organizations are recognized and inculcated by
IS researches. However, as business schools experience increased competitive pressures,
information technology is one area that schools might use to differentiate or compete with or,
more importantly, to use as a catalyst for transforming educational processes. IT is not heralded
as a miraculous yet unpredictable means of mitigating educational attrition, but as efficacious
means of enabling international changes in teaching and learning processes.

According to Fiske and Hammond, quality educational is a universal goal. It is common to hear
arguments that instructional technology will be the key to educational quality as we enter the
new millennium. Investment in educational technology is urged upon policy-makers as the path
to educational technology argues that quality. In fact, enthusiasts for educational technology
argue that quality has and will continue to increased rapidly, creating a “new educational
culture” Whatever problems exist are see as ones which can be handled through better
administrative and technological planning – that is, technology believers perceive no intrinsic
obstacles to total quality assurance using information technology in higher education. Other
voices question educational technology as a panacea. Cardenas, for instance, has written on the
problems associated with technology in the college classroom in terms of issues such as poorly
functioning equipment, over promotion of technology-based learning to students and a lack of
quality in courses delivered by technology. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education
reported on critics of educational technology who say students choosing online courses are not
getting the education they pay for, and question whether universities should be providing such
instruction. The American Federation of Teachers and other faculty organizations have also
raised serious cautions about web-based education (Mingle and Gold, 1996) and had even gone
on strike over it. The unruly growth of online distance education is the basis of these concerns.
One has only to look at popular books like, The Best Distance Learning Graduate Schools:
Earning Your Degree without leaving home (Guernsey, 1998). This work profiles 195 accredited
institutions that offered graduate degrees via distance learning as of 1997-98. It acknowledges
that “diploma mills” are a danger. Even accredited programs from recognized institutions of
higher learning may have been thrown together as experiments or simply in quick response to
administrative fiat.
In response to growing criticism of the recent, rapid and unregulated growth of distance
education and apparently a number of highly recognized higher education organizations have
formulated quality standards and guidelines. Johnstone and Krauth, 1996, Zuniga and Krauth,
1996; WCET, 1997 have implemented principles. Theses principles have been endorsed by a
number of higher education governing and policymaking bodies in the western United States, as
well as by the regional accrediting community. The core assumption of these guidelines is that,
“The institution’s programs holding specialized accreditation meet the same requirements when
offered electronically.
 Quality is often defined in terms of “appropriate” and “complete” online education, with
appropriateness and completeness to be adjudged by faculty. Faculty agreement, of course is apt
to refer to faculty with interests in promotions of online education, with tacit consent of peers in
a typical academic culture which strongly encourages faculty course development autonomy and
an administration more interested in “getting into the online education game” than in creating
quality standards a traditional course is often sufficient to meet this criterion. Students must have
access to support service example: library, computer, facility access, peer interaction. In fact,
most make available to online students only a fraction of the library resources, computer
resources, faculty access, peer interaction, and other advantages of on campus students However,
as long as the most import resources are available online in some form, this standard is ordinarily
deemed to have been met.
Quality is defined in terms of “evaluation” of specific, measurable “learning outcomes” or
“competency-based objectives.” This is met by the instructor formulating a set of syllabus
statements of the “At the end of the course, the students will be able to….” Type, and making
sure examination questions relate to these statements. As in traditional courses, content of the
objectives is the prerogative of the faculty member having objectives, not there content, is the
what quality standards assess.
To be sure, there are some online offerings which do not meet even the minimal of the foregoing
guidelines. Overall, however it cannot be said that “quality” guidelines such as the foregoing are
difficult to meet the practice. By the same token, such guidelines leave the critical observer
wondering what else might be involved by some higher of “quality.”

Controversy over higher standards for quality in online education has emerged as a major
distance learning conference topic. For instance, has written on “the search for quality standards
in distance learning.” Based on a review of historical quality standards and on a case study of
Walden University’s online psychology courses, Hillesheim distinguished three dimensions to
quality standards: managerial quality/organizational criteria ex. Leadership and record keeping,
functional quality/technological criteria ex. Students support via progress teams, and ethical
quality/instructional criteria ex. Relationship between students and faculty, faculty evaluation,
and student and faculty empowerment. The first and second dimensions are those upon which
promoters of distance education have focused, as discussed above. Achievement of goals in these
two dimensions is necessary but not sufficient for quality education. Much more depends upon
achievement of Hillesheim’s third dimension goal such as establishment of authentic
relationships and empowerment of students and faculty.

Alfred Bork is a leading educational technology guru, having for years headed the Association
for Computer Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Uses in Education and having
advised on this subject for the National Institute of Education and having been named
Outstanding Computer Educator by the Association of Educational Data Systems, among other
honours. In 1999 Bork was interviewed by Educom Review, the journal of EDUCAUSE
(formerly EDUCOM), the leading association of colleges and universities for the advancement
of educational technology. In this interview (Educom Review, 1999), Bork set forth several
aspects of his vision of "the future of education:"

Education will become highly interactive, engaging the student every 20 seconds or so for a
response, much in contrast to present-day passive lecture methods. Education will become
highly individualized, with world-accessible records of learning attempts by particular students,
to enable computer presentation of education tailored for each student's past learning experiences
and styles. Education will become highly flexible in interaction, enabling natural language
tutoring using the Socratic method of tutorial question and student response. Education will
become highly accessible, opening opportunities for the disadvantaged in this country as well as
for the millions in developing nations. Education will become highly computer-mediated,
replacing (not supplementing, which would be an added cost) the lecture method in courses for
15 or more students. Distance education will begin to displace campus-based education because
the high costs of an interactive computer-mediated course can be justified only through their use
by a large number of students than only distance education can provide.

In Bork's view, "Teaching faculty, in the sense we know them today, may cease to exist, except
for in small, advantage. He foresees the conversion of large, lower-division courses - about 50%
of university teaching - to online formats, resulting in "significant improvement in learning, at
lower cost". He warns that those institutions, which do not follow this, may prove unable to
survive the competition of the coming era. Bork is hardly the only technology spokesperson who
believes that computer-mediated distance education will spell the end of the traditional university
as we know it. George Mason University's Peter Denning (1997) made such an argument before
the National Science Foundation, basing himself on four arguments:(1) The library as a physical
place is soon to be replaced by digital libraries accessible worldwide by almost anyone.(2) The
"community of scholars" around the library is soon to be replaced by communities of specialists
linked electronically, divorced from geographical location.(3) The ideal-typical small
undergraduate class has become unaffordable and cannot compete with commercially provided
education on the same subjects, such as computer science, nor can universities compete with
commercial courses' glitz and entertainment production values.(4) Job structure has changed
such that universities can no longer hope to prepare students for or promise them a "lifelong
career", the central selling point of higher education until recently.

Denning then asked, "What roles can universities fulfill that people would find valuable?" The
answer, Denning argued, was increasingly Internet-based distance education for adult
professionals. Similarly, futurists often see an inevitable economic shift from local material
goods to global knowledge services, forcing education to move toward electronically mediated
education (cf. Alic, 1997). "A revolution is taking place in education," wrote Donald Norman
and James C. Spohrer (1996: 25-6) in Communications of the ACM, the nation's premier
computing journal. Norman and Spoher noted that though distance education has been around
forever, only in recent years has new technology been available to fuel the hyperbolic growth of
the Internet and energized a new vision of how to deliver distance education. Gerald van Dusen,
in his The Virtual Campus: Technology and Reform in Higher Education, sets forth an optimistic
view of how technology will transform education from faculty-centered to learner-centered,
making instruction better by replacing the "sage on the stage" with interactive, individualized
learning possibilities; will improve scholarly research by enabling far greater collaboration as
well as information access; and will improve educational organization by facilitating
interdisciplinary conections. There are many advantages and disadvantages of information
systems used in education. Students may become dependant on these technological machinery
and this can result to many difficulties, such as not being able to calculate mentally, not being
able to research assignments etc. yet technology also helps them complete assignments and
motivates and encourages them to implement new devices or create web-sites. There are huge
demand for people who are qualified in information systems and maybe by using technology in
schools more and more students will become interested in doing this course at tertiary education
level.

I have concluded that using information systems in education has a good impact on students and
society and yet, learners might become dependant on technology, but I personally think in a good
way and this good become tools for development of much higher thinking skills and this can
have a very positive outcome on society. I feel that this can also improve the teaching and
learning process. When I have assignments to do and when I am eager to acquire knowledge I
depend on technology and sometimes I wonder what if there was no such thing as computers or
the internet what would I do and the answer is I would just give up. This essay has made me
realize that without information systems we would struggle mentally as well as physically.
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