Teaching and imparting knowledge is unquestionably a difficult profession. It doesn’t need to be made any harder by technology that works against the teacher or lecturer at the front of the classroom rather than with them – but this is exactly what is happening.
Teachers are losing up to an hour of their working day as they switch between apps, frequently having to sign into anywhere up to thirty of them individually every single day.
Switching between apps is a huge frustration for teachers, as different parts of different classes and lectures are stored in different, disparate parts of their school, college or university’s IT networks. There are too many places where they may need to look to find documents they have saved or files that are essential to the teaching and learning experience.
Then there’s the issue of collaboration, which is vital in the classroom. While most educational institutions will almost certainly have an intranet as a way of sharing information, a significant proportion of teachers have given up on them and simply don’t use them. They say the information they need is hard to find on the traditional intranet, that their designs are clunky and outdated and that they just don’t add value to their already-stressful working day.
Finally, like in most jobs, teachers are bound by their institutions when it comes to the technology that they have at their disposal to do their jobs. The seats of learning manage their devices, which means that productivity inevitably suffers if the hardware develops an issue.
It all adds up to what can be termed ‘technostress’ – the 'dark side of ICT use - and there is now research on its effects on university lecturers . Similarly, although many Generation Z students will be digital natives who have lived with technologies for their entire lives, their reliance on it in the classroom or lecture theatre may be overwhelming as it turns them, to all intents and purposes, into ‘telecommuters’ like their parents who may have had to work from home during the pandemic[1].