Group items tagged

ECAR has surveyed undergraduate students annually since 2004 about technology in higher education. In 2013, ECAR collaborated with more than 250 higher education institutions to collect responses from more than 112,000 undergraduate students about their technology experiences and expectations. The findings are distilled into four broad themes to help educators and higher education institutions better understand how students experience technology on their respective campuses and the ways in which new, better, or more technology can impact students' relationship with information technology.

"Tool designers who want to intervene in the new world of letters should look first to the social history, and to the social future, of reading. The web has made newly visible the diversity of interest groups among the general population of readers; it has also made the members of those groups more visible to each other, enabling them to define themselves and their needs in ways that perhaps change their behavior. The new and changed audiences that have emerged in the digital domain include data miners, professional readers who read scientific papers for industry, scientists on the semantic web, wiki contributors who treat their activity as leisure, and high school and college/university teachers who want to use digital tools to engage students or experiment with flipped-classroom pedagogy. "

"OER provides a relevant example of how pedagogy can point toward a richer way to integrate technology into our courses and our teaching philosophies. Surely many faculty are doing marvelous things with drones in the curricula. But the cutting edge in ed tech shouldn't align as much with the flashy new trick as with technology's ability to help us more richly collaborate with our students and more effectively share the fruit of those collaborations with the wider publics that our universities serve."

"Accessibility policies frame standards and expectations for how a college or university's programs, services, and facilities serve the needs of people with disabilities. Some policies are aspirational in nature and relatively short on specific mandates, while others are much more prescriptive in stating standards, rules for compliance, and sanctions for behaviors that fall short. Accessibility policies constitute a statement of values that the institutional community subscribes to, and they serve as guidelines for how the institution intends to ensure the equitable treatment of all members of the campus community."

"To enable learning environments of greater quality, scale, and power, with continuous and instantaneous digital connections to information, services, and communities, the learning management system of today must be reimagined. New systems are needed that capitalize on the transformative possibilities of technology to personalize instruction and integrate the diverse resources that support learners."

"The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) confers numerous rights upon data subjects who are located in the EU, including the "right to be forgotten." It also requires that covered organizations put significant processes and safeguards into place regarding the collection, use, and processing of personal data of data subjects located in the EU. Failure to comply with GDPR can result in an enforcement action and significant financial penalties. Due to both the borderless application of GDPR and the concept of territoriality, the regulation has broad implications for organizations around the globe, including US colleges and universities."

Multi-institutional perspective on ADA compliance.

"As a former K-12 teacher and a current educator in higher education, I grappled with the idea of creating a Facebook account to communicate and become "friends" with my students. I was less concerned with using Twitter because of the difference between "following" and "friending." In my youth I was told by parents and teachers, "I'm not your friend." They said this to distinguish between the roles of friends and adults in the rearing of a child. An assumed level of respect was maintained between teacher-student and parent-teacher when such boundaries were made clear. Today's shift in learning environments to learner-centered classrooms thus raises these questions: Do educators now want to be friends with their students? Do students actually prefer not to be friends with their teachers?"

This year's study, which was released last month, reflects well on instructors. Faculty members, contra their reputation for being change-averse, appear to be adapting well to the expectations of technology-thirsty students, according to the authors. "More students than ever gave positive marks for their instructors' use of technology," they wrote.

The open educational resources model, including textbooks, has emerged as a response to rising text prices, a need for greater access to high-quality learning materials, the proliferation of e-reader devices, and a trend in publishing toward electronic media. Many contend that educational resources should be open and that instructional models increasingly depend on open content. Open textbooks can be offered by commercial publishers or found in open repositories. Open resources can promote active learning through student interaction with the text, particularly when they contribute to authorship. Although open textbooks face questions about the accuracy and reliability of their content, they allow higher education instructors to design content for their courses on an as-needed basis, choosing from an array of books, articles, videos, audio recordings, and readings.

Institutional leaders want inexpensive projects that do everything they desire and are available yesterday. Experienced project managers know, however, that a Reality Triangle (see Figure 2) operates as an immutable law of nature in the inherent trade-offs between resources (cost), scope (features), and time: only two of the three can be controlled.

Badges represent a way of acknowledging achievements or skill acquisition more granular than a college degree. The resources below provide an overview of the uses of badges and their implications for how individual accomplishments can be awarded, recognized, and shared.

What does this emerging landscape of educational delivery models look like? I have categorized the models not just in terms of modality-ranging from face-to-face to fully online-but also in terms of the method of course design (see Figure 1). These two dimensions allow a richer understanding of the new landscape of educational delivery models. Within this landscape, the following primary models have emerged: ad hoc online courses and programs, fully online programs, School-as-a-Service, educational partnerships, competency-based education, blended/hybrid courses and the flipped classroom, and MOOCs (see Figure 2).

I opened my portion by emphasizing that the current IT-driven disruption is not actually about information technology but is, rather, about pedagogy. I'll take this opportunity to state my view again: the focus of this disruption should be on teaching and learning. However, I believe that there is value in having the IT organization take an active role in helping the institution to embrace this change, even going so far as to move onto "point" for change.

Looking for something different from the current hysteria of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)? A digital storytelling course started by Jim Groom at the University of Mary Washington (UMW), ds106 was set loose as an open course in January 2011. Yet the UMW catalog does not include such a course. Its actual course designation is CPSC 106 (Computer Science)-a small but telling example of how ds106 plays with and questions the norm.

Higher education institutions and other organizations interested in supporting learning are experimenting with digital badges to guide, motivate, document, and validate formal and informal learning.

"The effective implementation and use of adaptive learning systems requires a broad, more inclusive conversation among institutions, vendors, and other stakeholders to realize the benefits of next-generation personalized learning."

"personalized learning that routinely provides opportunities for students to become co-creators and curators of content as part of the learning process should become a normative learning objective and expectation. Assessments that not only allow but expect learners to demonstrate curricular mastery through knowledge application, rather than knowledge consumption, are likely to become increasingly important over the horizon. "

"the same student being tracked and evaluated while using an adaptive courseware product has a digital footprint and legacy that extends well beyond the parameters of a singularly focused electronic learning environment."

"Though there are likely many other issues than covered here, a resourceful start is a classification system based on three primary ethical concerns: shifting powers, archiving the future, and building trust. Likewise, it is noted that the focus on microcredentialing should be as a concept rather than as a specific technology, protocol, or practice."