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Chapter 7
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-9455-2.ch007
ABSTRACT
A 21st Century Classroom is a learning environment that incorporates current critical thinking, problem
solving, communication, and collaboration skills into traditional core knowledge instruction. Fostering
this space will enable students to integrate core subjects and lead to a deeper understanding of global
awareness and greater economic, civic, health and environmental literacy. Skeptics have argued that
transforming higher education, especially to attenuate its cost is something, which we know, but we
cannot get it. However, information technology is a way to achieve this required transformation. This
chapter explores explore how information technology might help achieve this transformation to advance
higher education, and its prospects for success.
1. INTRODUCTION
Information Technology (IT) means the use of hardware, software, services, and supporting infrastructure
to manage and deliver information using voice, data, and video (North Dakota Information Technology
Department, 2014). IT also included the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW). IT is an essential ele-
ment for endorsement and assessment of courses taught in higher degrees. IT also provides support to
teachers for communicating with various stakeholder and to students to adapt to new environments. Both
teachers and students view IT as a change agent for producing a large, positive impact on their camps
lives. IT provides numerous learning services for both faculty and students. Higher education institu-
tions (HEIs) must include exchange of knowledge as part of these learning services. This exchange of
knowledge occurs among faculty, students, and staff that are specialists in their relevant fields of knowl-
edge. As such, the HEIs as whole can benefit from this pool of specialized knowledge to improve their
decision making. In order better educate citizens so that they are able to live in an ever more complex
IT in Higher Education-
Possibilities and Prospects in
an Era of Economic Crisis
Amir Manzoor
Bahria University, Pakistan