7.1. INTERACTIVE INSTRUCTION

Multitasking millennials expect the latest technologies wherever they go, and that includes the classroom. They may have to turn off their cell phones, iPods, and game players when they reach the classroom door, but they certainly don't expect the multimedia experience to stop there.

Indeed, millennials are the driving force behind a push in education to provide both technology and entertainment that will hold students' attention long enough to get through a 45-minute lesson. Some teachers and corporate recruiters worry that all the multimedia bells and whistles are diluting the academic content and weakening students' basic reading, writing, and math skills. Nevertheless, schools are plunging ahead with more interactive and multisensory teaching techniques.

To keep students actively focused on the lesson, some K-12 school districts are playing to their love of games and their text messaging skills. Forget paper-and-pencil quizzes. Now, teachers are handing out clickers to students, who punch in their answers to questions and see a tally of the entire class's responses on a big screen in the front of the room. Besides their appealing interactive technology, the remote-control gadgets let teachers monitor everyone's performance, including quiet students who don't normally raise their hands.

The Internet is making it easier for teachers to find tools to motivate this video generation. You Tube-like Web sites, for example, provide them with short, ready-made videos to play in class. Videos on the Teacher Tube site might include "Eggsplosion," a lively chemistry experiment involving filling an egg with hydrogen gas and lighting it; images of spheres, cubes, cones, and other shapes flashing on the screen to the beat of dance-club music; and a history teacher's version of the game show Jeopardy. Schools sometimes even assign online instructional videos as homework to help reinforce a math or science concept.

At the university level, schools are embracing technology in a variety of ways because they know that college students will simply walk out on a dry lecture and never return. Wireless Internet access is now common across many campuses, allowing students to log on almost anywhere. Schools are putting more lectures in audio and video formats that students can download to their computers or iPods, and professors often post class notes and other information online for students to access at their convenience. The downside of such handy online lessons: more empty seats during the live class.

For the students who do show up for class, the amount of innovation and technology may surprise them. Hoping to capture the fleeting attention of the easily distracted millennials, colleges are adopting more entertaining and interactive approaches, such as videos, podcasts, audio clips, blogs, computer games, and talk-show formats that encourage more discussion than a straight lecture. There also are classroom role-playing simulations that are more interactive than a printed lesson.

"How do you hold students for a two-hour class when they have two-minute attention spans?" asks Lenie Holbrook, an associate professor of management systems at Ohio University, who incorporates movies and music into some of his classes. "We have no choice but to change our approach as our audience changes." To spark discussion of everything from control to career planning to work-life balance, he plays recordings of songs by Janet Jackson, Pink Floyd, John Mayer, and the Police. He also shows clips from movies, such as the animated Madagascar, which he uses to examine the liabilities of group decision making.

Universities are concerned about reaching millennials outside the classroom, too. Some professors have moved to "virtual office hours," chatting with students online by text, microphone, or Webcam. To try to provide reliable sexual information to millennial students, Indiana University's Kinsey Institute has expanded beyond its weekly column in college newspapers and created the Kinsey Confidential blog, three-minute podcasts, and a Kinsey Facebook group.

Some business schools are linking up with technology companies to create a multimedia learning experience. Socalled serious games are being tested at Brandeis University's business school in Waltham, Massachusetts, in partnership with IBM. The three-dimensional video game Innov8, for example, was designed to teach students a combination of business and information technology skills. In France, the HEC School of Management joined with Apple Inc. to give all M.B.A. students a video iPod for access to lectures, notes, tutorials, library resources, and other information. Students can also view recordings of their own class presentations on the iPod and work with professors and coaches to polish their communication skills.

Second Life, the three-dimensional virtual world with more than 13 million "residents," called avatars, has begun attracting the attention of more colleges and business schools. For business schools, Second Life provides the opportunity to study a virtual economy with its own marketplace and money. That appealed to Insead, which has actual business school campuses in France and Singapore. The school has established a virtual Second Life campus with plans to offer an M.B.A. class on entrepreneurship in which students can develop and test business plans in the online community. "We recognize the growing importance of the digital marketplace and want all of our participants to have the opportunity to experience it firsthand," says Antonio Fatas, dean of Insead's M.B.A. program.

Case studies remain a primary teaching tool in business schools, but Yale University's M.B.A. program is creating more cases with multimedia content rather than printed materials. For example, a study of the high-stakes takeover battle for Equity Office Properties Trust includes an online trove of newspaper articles, news videos, financial documents, stock charts, video interviews with the principals in the case, securities analysts' reports, even Google maps and photographs of Equity's office buildings. "This generation thinks in hyperlinks," says Joel Podolny, dean of the Yale School of Management. "If I give a student a 20-page case study, he complains that it's too long. Yet he has no problem with more than 1,000 pages worth of content that he can navigate through online."

But this plugged-in generation's technology can be a mixed blessing for professors. To enrich the classroom learning experience, students can delve deeply into the financial performance of a company by opening spreadsheets on their laptops and mining for data on the Internet. But they also can surreptitiously send an instant message, play online games, or check out a classmate's Facebook page, missing out entirely on the professor's lecture and class discussion. There also are concerns that students can use laptops, cell phones, and even social networking groups to cheat more easily. Some professors are circulating around their rooms more often to observe students' behavior up close and are even cutting off Internet access during their classes to keep students from getting distracted or cheating.