ABSTRACT Educational institutions at all levels and locations face constant pressures to incorporate the latest technology into their offerings for students and teachers. Many K-12 school districts in the U.S. have embraced SMART boards, tablet computers, and "bring your own device" (BYOD) implementations so that precollege students are now accustomed to technology-rich learning environments. U.S. higher education, in general, has been slower to adopt computer use as part of the in-class learning experience. Anecdotally, it appears that technology has taken hold in project-focused or problem solving-oriented small classes rather than in large lecture classes. In order to better understand the use of tablet computers in a large urban research institution, Boston University's classes that use tablet devices were observed and the faculty members who taught the classes were interviewed. Tablet computers were used in a number of small (fewer than 60 students) engineering, medicine, business, fine arts, and hospitality classes. Faculty members reported that maintaining students' focus on the course material was a consistent challenge. In addition, faculty members bore the costs of teaching with technology-whether it was in the time to teach themselves the technology and evaluate alternatives, the need to arrive early or stay late in order to set up and put away the technology, or the negative comments about technological failures that surface on course evaluations. The breadth of these fields and the consistency of these findings support the notion that these observations may be generalizable to other colleges and universities
