Preface
Lauren Hays; Brett McCollum; and Janice Miller-Young
The role of educational technology in higher education has expanded to its current state of ubiquity. Yet the COVID-19 global pandemic, beginning in 2020, revealed the necessity of developing an increased understanding of how modern technologies are, can be, and should be used to best support student learning. SoTL scholars have spent the past few years asking important questions about the opportunities, barriers, challenges, and ethics of educational technology use during this time of uncertainty, as well as drawing upon established areas of research on related topics such as online education.
We (the editors) believe that now is a good time to pause, reflect on the use of technology in higher education, and pull together insights from multiple areas of scholarship and practice to ask new questions:
- What does the literature tell us about the impact of technology on learning, learning experiences, and learning environments?
- What technology-supported strategies should we keep in our classes?
- What technology-supported strategies do we no longer need?
- What learning opportunities are created or enhanced through the use of technology and generative Artificial Intelligence?
- How can we address issues of equity and technology access that have been raised by using technology in our teaching environments?
The chapters in this book do not answer all these questions, but they provide examples of how SoTL can be used to do so.
When we first met to discuss the vision for this book, we started by looking for other sources that discussed SoTL and educational technology. We quickly realized that a gap exists in this area due to little published work on this topic. Therefore, this book is intended to serve as a foundational text on educational technology and SoTL and aims to support both educators and SoTL scholars in (re)examining their practices through a scholarly lens.
Our primary goal for this book was to fill a gap in the SoTL literature related to educational technology. SoTL emphasizes teaching and learning within a higher education setting. It also involves a diverse community of researchers—e.g., english literature, business, engineering, and nursing—who come with their disciplinary research methodologies, traditions, and contextual problems they aim to address using educational technology. The unique approach of this book is that it emphasizes the range of research approaches used by SoTL scholars to investigate the efficacy, implications, and possibilities afforded by educational technology.
Once the gap was identified, we sent a call for proposals to solicit chapters in the areas of theory, designing and conducting SoTL on educational technology-supported practices, and scholarly teaching with educational technology. We received numerous proposals and selected chapters based on our vision for the book and how they aligned with the three categories. We also wanted a diverse set of scholars involved in the book, as SoTL is an international movement.
This book includes three sections:
- SoTL Foundations
- Reflections on Methodologies and Methods
- Research and Scholarly Reflections on Educational Technology
SoTL Foundations focuses on establishing our vision for the incorporation of theory and a focus on methodological design when conducting SoTL work on educational technology. The fifth chapter in this section focuses exclusively on theory and provides an example of how theory impacts the questions we ask about educational technology in our teaching and students’ learning.
Reflections on Methodologies and Methods examines the methods and methodologies used in SoTL work. The chapters include examples of qualitative and quantitative research and include reflections from the authors about the lessons they learned from designing a SoTL study focused on educational technology.
Scholarly Reflections on Educational Technology focuses on reflections authors have about their use of educational technology for teaching and learning. Chapters include reflections on how they developed projects, how they used educational technology in their classes, and lessons learned. This section includes examples from different subject areas and examples of different types of educational technology. What holds this section together is the focus on using educational technology to improve teaching and learning.
