Unlike business schools, where the best of the best have embraced executive training and where the best faculty vie to teach these courses, the best faculty at our best engineering schools studiously avoid involvement in continuing education. The Role of IT in Pedagogy Let me turn now to pedagogy. So far, this hasn't happened. As someone who has watched the development of computers for nearly 40 years, I know that the first use of IT developments is always to automate, in basically the same way, what we are already doing. The important, even profound, uses are when we do something different and better.
Educational technology seems mired in that first use - predominantly automated drill.
A system, called Plato, developed at the University of Illinois when I was a graduate student there in the early 1960s, contained most of the ideas in today's computer-assisted instructional systems. I don't find it surprising that many professors still depend on overheads, whiteboards, and lecture for much of the teaching they do. Yet, at the same time, we know from research in learning that the lecture format is far from optimal. I interpret these results mostly as a condemnation of the lecture format, which is somehow failing to exploit the benefits of personal interaction. In particular, the team-oriented design projects used by many schools, and which I applaud, could be dramatically expanded through the use of simulation and virtual reality.