Thus if faculty and communications technologies are to become true partners in community college learning endeavors, administrators and policy makers must be fully committed to staff development. This means planning and allocating adequate resources for courseware development and review, plus the development of the new skills required to incorporate the technologies into the course and to transform the learning environment into one in which technology enhances learning. Leadership is required to change faculty from conveyors of information to directors of learning environments or to any of the specialized functions mentioned earlier. These are the questions central to education. The process of incorporating technology into education should encourage teachers to ask these questions again and again.
Technologies offer opportunities for new strategies to implement the answers.
Technologies, however, will not take the place of professionals asking the critical questions, nor will anything developed for technologies be really successful unless core questions are confronted first. Perhaps technology's primary gift to community college faculty is the demand that faculty look again at the essentials of teaching and learning. Academe's Inadequate Response to the Implications of the New Technology. This publication was prepared with funding from the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education, under OERI contract. The opinions expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the positions or policies of OERI or the Department of Education.