Technology Ten Commandments

1. Restructure around the learner. Neither over-emphasize nor under-emphasize technology.
2. Build upon research results, which inform design; don’t try to reinvent the wheel.
3. Remember that technology has an intrinsic educational value beyond helping students learn better.
4. Do systematic redesign and not incremental add-ons. There is always a tendency to just add on a few computer experiences to everything else. By definition this costs more, is more work for faculty, and adds to the students’ burden. An innovative approach changes rather than adding poorly integrated exercises.
5. Benchmark your plans and build upon examples of systematic redesign. Do not automate the lecture. Find the best examples and build upon them.
6. Count on Moore’s law ("What is hard today is easy tomorrow"). For example, computer processing power and bandwidth have consistently improved.
7. Cost is an important aspect of quality. There is no lasting quality if there has been no attention to cost. There are more than enough examples of expensive high quality solutions. We need more examples of inexpensive high quality solutions!
8. Avoid pilots that linger. Design for a large scale and pilot projects only as a prelude to scaling up. It is easy to design innovative educational experiences that work for small groups. It is harder to address the needs of the 1000 students taking calculus I at the large research university.
9. Develop a balance between synchronous and asynchronous distributed learning.
10. There is no longer any way to do good scholarship without technology, and there is no longer any way to teach good scholarship without technology.