When I started my undergraduate education 21 years ago, computers were a luxury and talking to the professor meant coming to office hours — emails were not a thing. A student’s room would be filled with course syllabi, lecture notes and marked papers.
Some individual professors have gone as far to as try to ban laptops, but banning laptops in the classroom violates human rights legislation as some students require technology to accommodate their disabilities. Making exceptions for those students while banning technology for everyone else would violate their right to privacy.
Four hundred and seventy-eight students and 36 instructors took our survey. Following this survey, we held discussion groups with eight students and six instructors to chat about possible solutions for managing technology. Twenty-four per cent of instructors who answered our survey used some form of technology in class. Instructors differed in their views on the impact of technology in class and most believed that technology does not have a negative impact on learning when used for class activities.
But about one-third of students and instructors remained undecided about the role instructors should play, probably because they were unsure how to mitigate the negative impact of technology use on other students.