ABSTRACT: The course-based methods by which student teachers at the University of Calgary have been prepared to meet technology requirements for teacher certification have been rendered obsolete by the introduction of a new inquiry-based teacher education program. Combined with a new school curriculum, which requires cross-curricular integration of technology, this has required a redesign of the technology aspect of our teacher education program. A web-based, needs assessment based on the new provincial technology curriculum was conducted to generate a technology profile of student teachers in the new program, and to facilitate selection of appropriate means to integrate technology within it. This paper presents our findings in multiple ways. First, we describe the design, administration and results of our web-based needs assessment. Second, readers have the opportunity to access the online survey we designed, our complete set of results, and some of our technology workshop materials that are published on the World Wide Web. Third, strategies used to target professional development to identified need areas with undergraduate students are discussed. Finally, we discuss an approach to developing web-based materials that utilize a constructivist approach to teaching and learning about Web Page Design using the Internet.

TEACHER EDUCATION TRANSFORMED

The University of Calgary used to offer a very "traditional" teacher education program. The Faculty of Education accepted students into a four-year Bachelor of Education program, a shorter B.Ed. after-degree program, and a variety of combined degree programs. Students saw themselves as students, and were treated like students; they attended classes on teaching methods, psychometrics, communication, special education, and so on. Common to their experience was a belief that what they did at the University bore no useful relationship to what happened in the real world. Most students believed that their practicum experiences offered the only chance to do real teaching in real schools. The academic program was designed to prepare students for teacher certification in the Province of Alberta and this included meeting the technology requirements for teacher certification. Consequently among the courses in their program was EDTS 325: Introduction to Computers in Education—two hours a week of lecture supported by three hours a week in the lab, plus extra personal time required to complete lab assignments and projects. Students who passed through the program gained at least a minimally acceptable level of competence with productivity software, multimedia, hypermedia, communications, and computer assisted instruction, and they were required to consider these in educational contexts. Those who were intrigued by technology in education were afforded the opportunity to obtain a minor in computer applications by taking additional elective courses.

The course-based teacher education program is now defunct, and the Master of Teaching Program has superceded the conventional undergraduate program. After completing at least one previous degree with a specialization in an area relevant to a K-12 classroom, individuals wishing to become teachers now sign-up for the university’s two-year Master of Teaching (MT) Program. First Year MT students are assigned to a Professional Seminar, a Case Tutorial, a Field Seminar, a school, and a community/workplace teaching site. They are treated as professionals in the making in a program which describes itself as learner- focused, inquiry-based, and field-oriented. Within five days of beginning their program, students spend a week immersed in their school settings, and for the remainder of their first year they divide their time almost equally between school and campus. The exception is a period of five weeks in which their field experience shifts to some educational setting other than a traditional school: zoo, art gallery, museum, prison, day care, special needs facility, social agency, human resources department, and so on.

The academic portion of this program is offered through a series of cases with which students must wrestle weekly. No one student can possibly research all of the issues embedded in the cases, and they soon learn that they are heavily dependent upon each other to gain maximum benefit from the program. The idea of mutual inter-dependency has been facilitated by removing the private and competitive elements associated with grades, and substituting a credit/fail system that is documented by a series of narrative reports. Those who do not contribute to the common good experience the weight of peer pressure to actively participate. Field Seminars provide opportunity for cross-fertilization from the breadth of experiences which students have in their various school and community/workplace settings, and to pursue issues arising from their practical experiences. Finally, Professional Seminar provides a forum in which additional lenses may be brought to bear on the integration of theory and practice, and also provide a container to house the independent inquiries and biographies of learning required of each student. The second year of the MT program is dominated in the first semester by a sustained field experience in a school, and in the second semester by a field-based research project.

A considerable amount of research and careful thought went into transforming teacher education at the University of Calgary. What was not considered carefully enough in conceptualizing this new program was how to address the needs of students to gain the technology competencies required for certification. That task is now in the hands of the authors of this paper—and there are some constraints! Returning to the formalities of lecture and lab is not an option; the philosophy and spirit of the new program, learner-focused, inquiry-based, field-oriented, must be maintained.

THE MT PROGRAM MEETS NEW PROVINCIAL TECHNOLOGY CURRICULA

Our goal of developing the technology component of the MT Program is influenced by a change in the school curriculum within our province. Alberta Education has operationally defined technology as a "thinking tool" in the classroom that is to be integrated across the curriculum (Alberta Education, 1998a). The new provincial curriculum, Information and Communication Technology, Kindergarten to Grade 12: Interim Program of Studies (Alberta Education, 1998a), is due for implementation in the schools by September 1999. This new framework emphasizes (1) the seamless relationship between technology and the subject disciplines, (2) the process nature of technology itself, and (3) the co-existence of KSAs (knowledge, skills, and attributes) for technology alongside those for the subject areas. In large measure it also assumes a constructivist approach to teaching.

Our efforts to design professional development for technology integration are further motivated by a specific requirement that teachers develop competency using communications technology in order to qualify for interim certification. Provincial legislation, in form of the Alberta School Act and specifically the Ministerial Order #016/97 Policy 4.2.1., defines the following technology requirement for teacher interim certification:

1. Our target audience differs from that enrolled in a customary B.Ed. program. Instead of working from a profile of students in our old four-year, first-degree B.Ed. program, we need to focus our efforts on a program in which every student has already completed at least one degree.
2. It is inappropriate to assume that repackaging the technology content from the previous program to a new format is all that is required.
3. We need to rethink the implications of skill development within a constructivist framework.

NEEDS ASSESSMENT METHODOLOGY

Instead of simply importing technology content from the previous program into the new one, and hoping for the best, we decided to gather information from students that might help us to determine where we should target professional development. Viewing this problem from an instructional design perspective, we determined that a needs assessment was the most appropriate means of:

(1) collecting baseline information from Master of Teaching students about their current educational technology knowledge and skills, and
(2) evaluating their current teaching readiness against the backdrop of the new Alberta Education technology learner objectives.

The 51 curricular items sampled approximately 25% of the specific learner outcomes from the three sections of the technology curriculum (Alberta Education, 1998a). The 4-point scale used to indicate readiness to teach the curriculum distinguished between knowledge and skill, and between personal knowledge/skill and the ability to teach (i.e., 1 = I cannot do this, 2 = I know about this, 3 = I can do this, 4 = I can teach this to students). To address our concern that the survey not be perceived as long by respondents, an effort was made to select learner objectives that represented the overall curriculum but were not redundant with other objectives. The three categories of learner outcomes from which we developed our survey appear in Table 1.

WEB-BASED SURVEY DESIGN AND ADMINISTRATION

We administered the Educational Technology Needs Assessment Survey to participants using a World Wide Web-based form (http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~dmjacobs/mt/). The use of a web-based interface for survey research is a relatively new way to conduct educational research. Many areas of inquiry can benefit by extending their data collection activities to take advantage of an Internet connection which offers several advantages over traditional methods (Mueller, 1997). First, web-based surveys can gain access to a large sample without the expense and delay of conventional paper-based or face-to-face questionnaire methods. Second, instead of using manual or scantron methods for data entry, the data collected using a web-based interface are entered by participants and are stored in a cumulative data file that is ready for analysis with statistical software. Third, because the Internet is available to anyone with a computer and a connection, at anytime and from anywhere, data can be collected 24 hours per day without the researcher having to be physically or temporally present and without having to procure laboratory space. Fourth, WWW surveys can benefit both the respondent and administrator through the use of dynamic and interactive forms that provide instant feedback tailored to the user’s responses (Schmidt, 1997). Depending upon the survey content, it may be desirable to give feedback about the respondent’s results, or to present them with a separate set of survey items.

We created our needs assessment instrument using a cross-platform, hypertext markup language (i.e., HTML), and tested it using multiple platforms (i.e., PC and Macintosh) and a variety of browsers to ensure that the web-based survey would display effectively using either Netscape CommunicatorÔ or Microsoft Internet ExplorerÔ . We subjected the web-based survey instrument to a number of revisions and tests to improve both its design and validity. For example, undergraduate students, who were regarded as representative of those for whom the survey was designed (Crocker & Algina, 1986), tested and provided feedback on the web-based interface and item construction.

Following pilot testing and revision, the web-based needs assessment was administered to all students attending Professional Seminar within a two-week time period during November 1998. According to a pre-arranged schedule, one of the authors met briefly with students in each Professional Seminar and explained the nature and purpose of the survey. Anonymous participation was guaranteed; we explained to students that the data gathered could not be traced back either to them individually or to the professional seminar collectively. In general, when results are submitted using a web-based, HTML-generated response form, the cumulative data file lists the date and time the results were submitted and the IP address of the server from which the survey was completed. Each group of students went to one of two computer labs in the faculty, completed the survey, and then returned to their seminars; this process took approximately 30 minutes per group. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, most students left the computer labs thanking the authors for the opportunity to participate. A significant byproduct of conducting the survey proved to be its value in heightening awareness among student teachers, and faculty members, of the scope and sequence of the new technology curriculum.

MT STUDENTS TECHNOLOGY SKILLS PROFILE

A complete set of survey results has been published on the World Wide Web (Clark & Jacobsen, 1998). From a potential pool of 383 first year students currently registered in the MT program, 281 completed the survey data, a response rate of 73.3%. Table 2 presents selected demographic data reported as percentages.

We suspected before conducting the survey that the technology profile of MT students was different from that of students in the previous program. A study by Ott (1996), conducted in 1995, gathered information about the expertise levels of students enrolled in the compulsory technology course at the beginning of the semester, helped us to confirm our suspicions. Table 4 presents a comparison of the present survey findings (n=281) with results obtained from students in the previous program (n=101). Differences between the two populations are clear. The 1995 sample included a majority of students who were completing their first degree (79.2%), many of whom were in their first or second year of university (54.5%), and two-thirds of whom had access to a computer at home. A larger percentage of MT students have access to a computer at home (83.6%), and have some prior computer experience with word processing, electronic mail, and spreadsheets than did the 1995 sample.
 

As we examined the information provided by MT students, some interesting trends emerged that have informed our programmatic decision-making. There is, for example, a hierarchical relationship among the three categories of learning outcomes specified by Alberta Education. The content of each category is supportive of, and in some measure prerequisite to, the category that follows. Interestingly, the level of comfort reported by students decreased with each successive category. The items measuring self-assessment of readiness to teach the Alberta Education learner outcomes gathered information using a four-point scale (i.e., 1 = I cannot do this, 2 = I know about this, 3 = I can do this, 4 = I can teach this to students). Not a single student selected I cannot do this for one of the 22 items in Foundational Operations, Knowledge and Concepts. As a matter of fact, for 12 of the 22 Foundational items, over 50% of the students indicated that they were capable of teaching students about the identified concept or issue. They appear to judge themselves considerably less ready to teach items found in the Productivity category, and least ready to teach items found in the Communication, Inquiry, Decision Making, Problem Solving category. Table 5 illustrates this phenomena by providing an example in which the progressive relationship among learning outcomes is easily recognizable.
 
 

TARGETTING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT TO IDENTIFIED NEED AREAS

In contrast to the previous teacher education program, that concentrated on foundational technology knowledge and productivity skills with computers, it would appear that efforts in the MT program need to be concentrated on more sophisticated technical skills and on the integration, communication, decision making, and problem solving aspects of educational technology. One of our challenges is to address these needs within the modus operandi of the new MT program -- mounting additional courses is not an option. Additional challenges include designing professional development that takes into account the hierarchical nature of the categories of Alberta Education learning outcomes, and pragmatic concerns such as universal access, accommodating established timetables, lab and equipment availability, and securing the services of experienced instructors. Our first-round efforts at designing appropriate and efficacious professional development were undertaken with a full knowledge of at least some of these challenges--other challenges emerged along the way!

LECTURES

As part of their campus experience, MT students attend a weekly lecture series on topics identified with each thematic unit. In order to focus on the integration, communication, decision making, and problem solving aspects of educational technology, the authors prepared and presented two of the winter session lectures for first year MT students on integrating technology. The first lecture was designed to unpack and examine learner outcomes in the three sections of the technology curriculum, provide information about locating and acquiring curricular documents and resources on-line, consider cross-curricular integration, and discuss the connection between the needs assessment survey results and upcoming professional development opportunities. One of our desired learner outcomes was that students become motivated and take some initiative with their technology-related professional development. Evidence that we achieved this goal was provided by the fast-moving students who fled lecture early (literally ran, with pigtails flying behind them) to be the first to sign up for our first series of technology workshops.

The second lecture about integrating technology was delivered by two innovative principals, one each from an elementary and a junior high school. We invited the principals to talk with students about how educational technology was being integrated in their schools, the types of technology knowledge and skill that today's teachers need, and what attributes they look for when interviewing prospective teachers. One of our goals was to provide authentic images of technology integration from kindergarten to grade nine. Student reactions to examples of elementary students' PowerPoint presentation skills, web page and media development capabilities, and accomplishments with hypermedia included awe, surprise, respect, and concern about personal competency. A second goal was to motivate students to take seriously both the provincial requirements for interim certification, and also the school-based expectations for teacher competency with the new technology curriculum. Both principals indicated that they want to increase the critical mass of technology skills for their existing staff by hiring new teachers who possess at minimum the competency to integrate all grade six level learning outcomes. The principals also indicated that the technology skill requirements and expectations for new teachers are rising because of the need to provide professional development for existing staff. Both of our goals were accomplished; students encountered authentic images of technology integration with students, and they left the lecture hall with the understanding that developing technology skills was not an option if they wanted to increase their marketability as a new teacher.

TECHNOLOGY SKILL AND INTEGRATION WORKSHOPS

Teachers often complain that technology workshops are ineffective because they are like "drinking water from a firehose". Typical scenario: the expert instructor points, clicks, and gabs enthusiastically while the newbies watch in uncomfortable and defeated silence. One goal for our workshops was to preserve the instructor enthusiasm and modeling, while increasing the time students spent playing with the applications!

Roblyer & Erlanger (1999) provide some insight into what makes technology training most useful for teachers. The guidelines they summarize call for hands-on integration, training over time, modeling, mentoring, and coaching, and post-training access. Using these guidelines as our framework, we organized a series of technology workshops to provide skill and integration training in four "high need" application areas: (1) presentation software, (2) web page design, (3) spreadsheets, charts & graphs, and (4) databases for social science.

We are very fortunate to be able to employ the services of skilled undergraduate and graduate students who have classroom teaching/training experience and expert technology skills to serve as instructors, mentors and coaches for the workshops. As a group, the authors and instructors designed objectives and deliverables for the workshops that emphasized both hands-on skill and integration training. At all levels, skill development is linked to discussion about integration with students across subject areas. To keep with our goal to "use the technology to teach about technology", many of the workshop materials and resources were published on the web. For example, to access some materials that support the Web Design workshops, readers can point to the following two sites:

Providing technology-based professional development in the new MT Program often seems like changing the tires while the school bus is still moving! At first, we underestimated the demand for the technology workshops and scheduled enough access for about 25% of our first year students. Much to our delight (and horror), initial assumptions about demand were quickly shattered when the workshops filled within an hour after our first lecture, and urgent phone calls began pouring in. We hastily scheduled additional workshops to provide universal access for first year students. Before we got that fire out, requests from second year MT students and faculty members for technology workshops began to flare up. Within the constraints of lab availability and timetable challenges, we have managed to organize a series of workshops for all of the second year students. At this time, we are still discussing a number of strategies for providing professional development for faculty members. Finally, the wide range and variability of student's entry-level skills, attitudes, comfort levels and expectations make planning and delivering effective professional development in educational technology a unique challenge in the MT Program.

PROFESSIONAL SEMINAR

The authors are also experimenting with a third approach to increasing the critical mass of technology knowledge and skills among our MT students. We are experimenting with how to integrate the new technology curriculum within the new MT Program framework--literally, integration across the curriculum. Thus, in the form of parallel case studies, the authors have integrated authentic technology requirements into their respective Professional Seminars. With the goal of creating a collaborative on-line community, students are learning how to publish and exchange the results of their coursework and investigations using individual World Wide Web homepages. In addition to creating a web-based, electronic portfolio of their own work, students are working collaboratively to research, design, and produce web-based investigations for school age students using a constructivist framework. As one of our guides, we are using McKenzie's (1998) approach to the development of webquest projects that promote engaged learning, sustained questioning, higher level thinking, problem solving and fresh thought.

As a result of our own efforts to integrate technology requirements in professional seminar, we realize how challenging this task may be for many of our colleagues. Although we both bring a number of years of educational technology experience and bushels of enthusiasm and commitment to bear on our classroom integration efforts, the results are anything but neat and tidy! Computers freeze, network connections are busy or go down, the projector bulb burns out, floppy disks die, and students ask questions that we cannot answer. In the midst of all of this chaos, students create amazing and extensive projects, develop remarkable technology skills, discover the fallibility of technology, overcome their fears, and invent neat ideas for technology integration in their future classrooms.

Prior research has found that many faculty are not intrinsically interested in the technology itself, may want proven applications with a low risk of failure, and expect to see immediate results from their investment of time and resources (Jacobsen, 1998). Faculty, used to being experts in their domain, may struggle with and tend to avoid the symptoms of being a novice in using technology for teaching and learning. It is likely that many of our colleagues will want to skip the initial messy and frustrating experimental learning stage and will instead prefer a set of clear, step-by-step examples and strategies for integrating technology into their teaching tasks. Thus, one of our goals is to generate images of what integrating technology in professional seminar looks like, and share these observations and examples with our colleagues.

WHERE COULD WE, SHOULD WE, GO FROM HERE?

Finding the means of achieving our technology training goals in a sustained and replicable manner now requires the input and engagement of all faculty members. We are the first to admit that our initial efforts have not provided final solutions for addressing the ongoing need for educational technology professional development in the Faculty of Education. Our first efforts to integrate the new technology curriculum within existing components of the MT Program have exposed a number of hurdles to jump before full technology integration becomes feasible. Support and resources for student professional development in educational technology must become a permanent part of the MT Program's operating budget. The Faculty of Education needs to develop a technology integration plan that focuses on increasing critical mass by investing in the professional development of faculty members. Sufficient support and training has to be made available to faculty in order to increase the critical mass of technology knowledge and skill among staff. To make the products or results of the present integration efforts more widespread and our results used more comprehensively, incentives, training, support and reward structures from administration are needed to build a strong human infrastructure that will support and sustain widespread integration of technology for teaching and learning in the MT Program.

As a Faculty, we all need to recognize that in order to drive change we will have to be aware of the culture we promote, and emphasize excellent teaching in our technology integration plan. We have to avoid a wholesale shift in focus from content and inquiry to the technology tools and gadgets. The development of any type of competence or expertise involves a growth process; there is an initial period where more attention has to be invested in learning the new way or developing a base of knowledge, and skills have to be practiced until they become more automatic, more fluent. During our collective learning phase, we have to maintain focus on the underlying reasons for adopting technology. In order to realize the benefits and value of investing in technology, our Faculty's culture must explicitly and intentionally promote educational technology as a way to fundamentally rethink teaching and learning, and as a way to question and explore new approaches to writing, communication, and research.

The web-based survey methodology used in this study presents a new way of looking at an old problem. Our findings suggest that the Internet offers a very promising method for conducting educational research with students. The web-based survey was a feasible method for collecting quantitative data using scaled selected-response items. In previous research, Jacobsen (1998) found web-based survey methods to also be useful for collecting rich, qualitative data using open-ended response items. We will continue to experiment with online survey research methods for future data collection and information gathering needs in our research.

REFERENCES

Alberta Education. (1998). Information and communication technology, kindergarten to grade 12: An interim program of studies. Curriculum Standards Branch, June 1998. [On-line]. Available: http://ednet.edc.gov.ab.ca/techoutcomes/

Alberta Education. (1998b). Teaching quality standard applicable to the provision of basic education in Alberta . Alberta School Act, Section 4 - Ministerial Order - #016/97. Policy, Regulations and Forms Manual Policy 4.2.1. [On-line]. Available: http://ednet.edc.gov.ab.ca/educationguide/pol%2Dplan/polregs/421.htm

Clark, B., and Jacobsen, M. (1998). Educational Technology Needs Assessment Survey Results Report. [On-line] Available: http://www.ucalgary.ca/~dmjacobs/mt/results.html

Crocker, L., and Algina, J. (1986). Introduction to Classical and Modern Test Theory. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace.

Jacobsen, D. M. (1998). Adoption Patterns and Characteristics of Faculty Who Integrate Computer Technology for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Doctoral Dissertation, Educational Psychology, University of Calgary. [On-line]. Available: http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~dmjacobs/phd/diss/

McKenzie, J. (1998). Grazing the Net: Raising a Generation of Free Range Students. Phi Delta Kappan. [On-line]. Available: http://fromnowon.org/text/grazing.html

Mueller, J. H. (1997). Research on-line: Human participants ethics issues. [On-line] Available: http://www.psych.ucalgary.ca/CourseNotes/PSYC413/StudyTools/ethics/online.html

Ott, S. M. (1996). Preservice teachers and computers: A survey of attitudes and experiences. Unpublished Masters Thesis, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Calgary, 1996.

Roblyer, M. D., & Erlanger, W. (1999). Preparing internet-ready teachers: Which methods work best? Learning and Leading With Technology, 26(4), 58-61.

Schmidt, W. C. (1997). World wide web survey research: Benefits, potential problems, and solutions. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments & Computers, 29(2), 274-279. [On-line]. Available: http://or.psychology.dal.ca/~wcs/hidden/SAdocs/survey_research.html

Biographies
 

Michele Jacobsen completed her doctorate in educational psychology at the University of Calgary. She investigated the integration of technology in teaching and learning in higher education, and the gap between early adopters and mainstream faculty, using web-based data collection methods. She was the First Galileo Doctoral Fellow at Banded Peak School where her work included classroom-based research, professional development of inservice teachers, and collaborative liaison with the Faculty of Education at the University of Calgary. She has taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in educational technology in the past six years. Her research and applied interests include the development of expertise in integrating technology for teaching and learning, human computer interaction and interface design, instructional design and courseware development, integrated learning systems, and WWW course development and distance education. Michele Jacobsen is currently a Post Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Computer Science and a Sessional Instructor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Calgary.

Bruce Clark  Self-described as having a foot planted at each of the warm fuzzy and cold prickly poles of education, Bruce Clark is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Calgary.  Currently he leads one of four teams of faculty who work with first year student teachers in the new problem-based teacher education program at the University of Calgary and teaches courses in instructional design in the graduate program.  His research endeavours are divided among the study of conflict in professional education field experiences, professional development for technology integration in school systems, and the development of scenario software for training and curriculum integration.  In a former life he directed the university’s Institute for Computer Assisted Learning .