Introduction: Advancing Digital Equity Through Transformative Teaching and Learning

The Challenges Facing Faculty In Higher Education

Higher education faculty face an ongoing challenge in terms of teaching current and future generations of students as the teaching and learning landscape continues to undergo significant changes in what it means to receive an education in the 21^st century. There exists a long-standing argument that an underlying reason for this challenge is the ongoing disconnect between P-12 schools and colleges and universities that will eventually serve them as well. Specifically, the disconnect manifests in the frustration among students that faculty are disengaged from the latest trends in terms of personalized learning and current technologies such as apps, smartphones, social media, and the like. Conversely, faculty express equal frustration as entering students come with skill sets too discrete to facilitate progressive academic success at the college and university level. Most notably, faculty cite students’ inability to use critical thinking skills to make deeper connections between content and content-based solutions. These disconnects manifest in terms of increases among freshmen failing the first year to students unable to complete their degrees in the typical four-year time frame. There is also apathy on the part of faculty who feel pedagogically restrained as they often deem it necessary to dedicate instructional time to teaching basic technology use (i.e. creating documents, formatting, Internet-searches, presentations, spreadsheets, and the like), problem solving, and critical thinking skills.

These challenges and gaps manifest themselves in three particular areas: 1. A gap in access; 2. A gap in usage; and 3. A gap in digital literacy (Holland, 2019). A significant disparity exists among households in terms of Internet access. This is particularly the case in geographic terms with rural households reporting the least access and usage of the Internet. According to statistics as reported by the Pew Research Center, only 78% of rural residents use the Internet as compared to over 90% usage in suburban and urban areas (Anderson, 2018). Further, via Executive Summary, the National Center for Educational Statistics (2019) reports that while 81% of P-12 students report needing access to the Internet for their schoolwork, only 61% have access in their home. It can be inferred, then, that lack of access results in a gap in usage compartmentalized again according to geographic location and socioeconomic status (SES). The usage gap presents in terms of students with high SES and greater access using current/emerging technologies for tasks requiring metacognitive skills while students with low SES and less access use the same for tasks requiring lesser cognitive demand (Hohlfeld, Ritzhaupt, Dawson, and Wilson, 2017). Gaps in access and usage ultimately result in low digital literacy skills again seen primarily among households with low SES in which parents with less formal education tend to be less technically proficient than their children. While this trend tends to manifest among students from low SES, it is important to note that the lack of digital citizenship and literacy skills is also prevalent among middle, high school, and college students regardless of SES status (Stanford History Education Group, 2019). A significant challenge, then, is presented to faculty in higher education in terms of remediating these gaps to facilitate deeper critical thinking and metacognitive growth among their students.