Should Historians Become Programmers? Limitations and Possibilities of Computer-Assisted Instruction in the United States History Survey

Abstract

TEACHING WITH THE COMPUTER and multimedia courseware has the potential to revolutionize instruction in today's college classroom by making it more interactive. Interactive multimedia courseware can transform teaching by helping students direct the ways they learn. This is especially important in community colleges. Since two-year colleges usually operate as open-enrollment institutions, they are particularly susceptible to the broadest range of individual learning styles, and such teaching tools can help accommodate these differences. Peter Sacks has written about the problem recently in his book Generation X Goes to College, arguing that getting students to take responsibility for their learning is a key challenge facing community college faculty.1 If and when technology transforms the nature of classroom instruction, it will transform the role of the teacher. What is at stake is the very nature of how courses, the teachers, students, and the classroom are conceived and what role computer-assisted instruction may play in this transformation. On the broadest plane, multimedia courseware may be critical to the way the college defines itself in the future.