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The keynote at the CUNY IT Conference was an enjoyable presentation from Chuck Dziuban, the Principal Investigator of the Distributed Learning Impact Evaluation and Professor of Educational Foundations at the University of Central Florida. Dziuban theorizes the emergence of new teaching technologies, and has a boatload of data to back up his conclusions. As a historian who fancies himself rigid, I’m no great fan of explaining historical developments through the concept of “generations,” though I have to admit I found Dziuban’s research that broke down satisfaction with online learning practices by age intriguing. The most interesting conclusion, to me, was that the younger a student, the less likely they are to be satisfied with what their faculty are doing in online courses. Since most college faculty are older, this very fact calls into question the ways that faculty evaluate their own online teaching, and illuminates the challenge we have going forward in designing online teaching tools that intimately connect with students. We keep getting older, while the students stay the same age. To download Dziuban’s Powerpoint, chock-full-of-stats, click here.