Online Course | Designing a Collaborative Instructional Technology Support Model
Part 1: March 7, 2018 | 1:00–2:30 p.m. ET
Part 2: March 14, 2018 | 1:00–2:30 p.m. ET
Part 3: March 21, 2018 | 1:00–2:30 p.m. ET
Faculty need a variety of instructional technology support—instructional design, content development, technology, training, and assessment—to name a few. They don’t want to go to one place for help, find out they’re in the wrong place, and be sent somewhere else—digitally or physically. Staff don’t want to provide help in silos or duplicate what other units are doing.
So, how can academic service providers collaborate to offer the right instructional technology support services, in the right place, at the right time, in the right way? In this course, instructional technologists, instructional designers, librarians, and instructional technology staff will learn to use a tool called the Service Center Canvas that does just that.
Learning Objectives:
During this course, participants will:
Explore the factors that influence how instructional technology support services are offered in higher education
Answer critical questions about how your instructional technology support services should be delivered relative to broader trends and institutional goals
Experiment with ways to prototype new services and/or new ways of delivering them
Identify potential implementation obstacles and ways to address them
NOTE: Participants will be asked to complete assignments in between the course segments that support the learning objectives stated below and will receive feedback and constructive critique from course facilitators on how to improve and shape their work.
Course Facilitators
Elliot Felix, Founder and CEO, brightspot strategy
Felix founded and leads brightspot, a strategy consultancy that reimagines places, rethinks services, and redesigns organizations on university campuses so that people are better connected to a purpose, information, and each other. Felix is accomplished strategist, facilitator, and sense-maker who has helped transform over 70 colleges and universities.
Adam Griff is a director at brightspot. He helps universities rethink their space, reinvent their service offerings, and redesign their organization to improve the experiences of their faculty, students, and staff, connecting people and processes to create simple and intuitive answers to complex questions. He has led projects with a wide range of higher education institutions including University of Wisconsin–Madison, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and University of California, Berkeley.
U.S. Education Secretary spared no words in her critique of education reform efforts during the Bush and Obama administrations. “I don’t think there is much we can hold onto, from a federal level, that we can say was a real success,”
This is not the first time DeVos has praised personalized learning. The education secretary visited Thomas Russell Middle School in Milpitas, Calif
Her vision of personalized learning has plenty of detractors. Educators and administrators have already begun to voice their reservations about personalized learning in schools. At a gathering of educators in Oakland last October speakers decried what they described as the privatization of public education through the introduction of technology initiatives such as personalized learning. More recently, former AltSchool educator Paul Emerich wrote a blog post titled, “Why I Left Silicon Valley, EdTech, and ‘Personalized’ Learning,” where he offered critiques of the personalized learning movement in his school. The post touched on concerns about his workload and interactions with students.
Parents are raising pressure too. In at least two states, their concerns over screen-time and digital content used in online educational platform has forced districts to suspend the implementation of technology-enabled personalized learning programs such as Summit Learning.
De Vos pointed to previous federal-led education funding programs as a “carrot” that made little or no impact. Her critique is not unfounded: A report published last year by the Education Department’s research division found that the $7 billion School Improvement Grants program made “no significant impacts” on test scores, high school graduation rates or college enrollment.
Common Core is currently adopted in 36 states, according to EdWeek’s Common Core Tracker, last updated September 2017.
++++++++++++++++
DeVos: ‘Common Core Is Dead’; A Large Online Charter School Is Shut Down
One of the largest online charter schools in the country closed this week amid a financial and legal dispute with the state of Ohio.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in a keynote address this week to the American Enterprise Institute.
She also cited a survey by the American Federation of Teachers that 60 percent of its teachers reported having moderate to no influence over the content and skills taught in their own classrooms. That same survey also noted that 86 percent of teachers said they do not feel respected by DeVos.
By creating engaging 360° tours, students are not only learning these new tools for themselves but are also helping local organizations see the possibility of VR for marketing and public relations.
some key takeaways from the projects that we have seen:
Let the students lead: In all of these projects, students are taking the initiative. The institutions are providing the technology, the space, organizational vision, and in some cases, academic credit. At NYU Tandon, students organized the entire conference, doing publicity, registration, catering, and scheduling (see figure 4). They brought in a diverse group of speakers from academic, tech, and startup backgrounds. The event included TED-style spotlights, talks, workshops, and demos.
Don’t compromise on space: Brown University’s Granoff Center for the Creative Arts is designed to encourage cross-discipline collaboration. The Tandon event used the main auditorium and the flagship NYU MakerSpace. Space influences behavior and is crucial in driving collaboration and active participation. In addition, to produce VR and AR/MR experiences students need access to high-end technology and, in some cases, motion-capture studios and 360° cameras.
Create opportunities for social impact: Many of these programs are open to the local community or have been designed to have an impact outside higher education. At Emporia State, students are using VR and 360° video to help local businesses. The Gaspee Affair VR experience at Brown University will become a resource for teaching middle and high school students.
Showcase student work: So often in education, the work students do in a course is only seen by others in the same class. Like the example at Texas A&M, all of these experiences have a connection with their campus or larger community. VR and AR engender a level of excitement that gets students engaged with each other and encourage peer learning. It’s worth it to seek out opportunities to bring this work to community events.
+++++++++
more on VR in education in this IMS blog
ECAR collaborated with 157 institutions to collect responses from 13,451 faculty respondents across 7 countries about their technology experiences. ECAR also collaborated with 124 institutions to collect responses from 43,559 undergraduate students across 10 countries about their technology experiences. Please see the 2017 student and faculty studies hub for more about this year’s research.
When it comes to meeting technological support needs, students’ default modality is DIY. Students are more than twice as likely to figure out solutions to technology problems on their own, to search online sources, or to ask a friend than they are to use their campus help desk. Contacting the vendor or company to fix a technology problem is the last resort.
Laptops are king, smartphones are queen, and tablets are on the way out.
Students’ experiences with their instructors’ use of and approach to technology in the classroom are a mixed bag. A majority of students said most of their instructors have adequate technology skills, use technology to enhance learning, and encourage the use of collaborative technology tools. However, students said fewer faculty use technology for sophisticated learning tasks (e.g., engagement, creative and critical thinking), and relatively few faculty ask students to use their own devices for in-class work.
Students are choosing sides in the online versus face-to-face debate. For the fourth year in a row, the number of students preferring a blended learning environment that includes some to mostly online components has increased. The number of students preferring completely face-to-face or completely online courses continues to dwindle. The number of students expressing no preference has been cut by more than half since 2014.
Students are satisfied with features of their LMS…except when they aren’t.Students have favorable opinions about the basic features and functionalities of their LMS. But, the more sophisticated the task and the more engagement required of students, the less happy they tend to be. This may be a function of the tools, the instructors who use them, or both.
Students would like their instructors to use more technology in their classes.Technologies that provide students with something (e.g., lecture capture, early-alert systems, LMS, search tools) are more desired than those that require students to give something (e.g., social media, use of their own devices, in-class polling tools). We speculate that sound pedagogy and technology use tied to specific learning outcomes and goals may improve the desirability of the latter.
Students reported that faculty are banning or discouraging the use of laptops, tablets, and (especially) smartphones more often than in previous years. Some students reported using their devices (especially their smartphones) for nonclass activities, which might explain the instructor policies they are experiencing. However, they also reported using their devices for productive classroom activities (e.g., taking notes, researching additional sources of information, and instructor-directed activities).
The Next 10 Years: Helping STEM Students Thrive series, on January 10th, from 12-1:30 PM ET. The topic will be learning spaces with the following guest speakers:
Jeanne L. Narum, Principal, Learning Spaces Collaboratory
Jeanne will discuss what she has learned about what works, why and how it works in achieving sustainable institutional transformation in the world of planning spaces for learning in the undergraduate setting.
Lisa Stephens, Sr. Strategist- SUNY Academic Innovation – University at Buffalo
Rebecca Rotundo, Instructional Technology Specialist, University at Buffalo
Lisa and Rebecca will share their experience in FLEXspace (Flexible Learning Environments eXchange) an open education repository project which has expanded to over 2,600+ users from 1,200+ educational institutions across 42 countries.
Xin Li, Associate University Librarian, Cornell
Xin will share information about the Library’s initiative to install a Portal on the Cornell campus in Sept. 2018, with the goal to engage faculty, students, and the community in live conversations with Portal users in different countries, cultures, or life circumstances, such as what others do for STEM education.
This collaboration between Cornell University and the University at Buffalo featuring the perspectives of national thought leaders and institutional representatives about expanding the participation of women in undergraduate STEM education at different scales.
This interactive, online series features a different topic per month. Each session kicks off with an introduction by our distinguished thought leaders followed by institutional representatives from Cornell University and the University at Buffalo who will share insights from their campuses. Participants may join the conversation, ask questions, share experiences, build networks and learn more about:
· Innovations that can expand female or underrepresented minority student participation and success in STEM undergraduate education.
· Effective evidence-based STEM teaching practices commonly adopted at research universities.
· Unique institutional and cultural challenges to achieving STEM diversity.
My note: where I work, such effort will be dismissed as “this belongs to public libraries.”
Does it? What does your academic library do to excel patrons in information technology.
where I work – not much. All is “information literacy” in its 90ish encapsulation.
Research from the Yale Center of Teaching and Learning highlights the ups and downs of classroom tech use, including the juxtaposition of increased engagement from using familiar platforms for assignments and decreased motivation and grades from limitless internet exposure, eSchool News reports.
Educators must ensure a cautious approach to tech use that doesn’t make students overly reliant upon it to complete tasks and solve problems, using social networking and collaborative platforms as a means to an end rather than the be-all solution.
Before adopting and implementing it, educators should consider how any given piece of classroom technology will improve studying, what the possible pitfalls are and how to avoid them, how it will help meet goals or close gaps, and how it will improve workflow, according to eSchool News.
2018 Special Focus: Education in a Time of Austerity and Social Turbulence 21–23 June 2018 University of Athens, Athens, Greece http://thelearner.com/2018-conference
Theme 8: Technologies in Learning
Technology and human values: learning through and about technology
Crossing the digital divide: access to learning in, and about, the digital world
New tools for learning: online digitally mediated learning
Virtual worlds, virtual classrooms: interactive, self-paced and autonomous learning
Ubiquitous learning: using the affordances of the new mediaDistance learning: reducing the distance
Theme 9: Literacies Learning
Defining new literacies
Languages of power: literacy’s role in social access
Instructional responses to individual differences in literacy learning
The visual and the verbal: Multiliteracies and multimodal communications
Literacy in learning: language in learning across the subject areas
The changing role of libraries in literacies learning
Languages education and second language learning
Multilingual learning for a multicultural world
The arts and design in multimodal learning
The computer, internet, and digital media: educational challenges and responses
++++++++++
PROPOSAL: Paper presentation in a Themed Session
Title
Virtual Reality and Gamification in the Educational Process: The Experience from an Academic Library
short description
VR, AR and Mixed Reality, as well as gaming and gamification are proposed as sandbox opportunity to transition from a lecture-type instruction to constructivist-based methods.
long description
The NMC New Horizon Report 2017 predicts a rapid application of Video360 in K12. Millennials are leaving college, Gen Z students are our next patrons. Higher Education needs to meet its new students on “their playground.” A collaboration by a librarian and VR specialist is testing the opportunities to apply 360 degree movies and VR in academic library orientation. The team seeks to bank on the inheriting interest of young patrons toward these technologies and their inextricable part of a rapidly becoming traditional gaming environment. A “low-end,” inexpensive and more mobile Google Cardboard solution was preferred to HTC Vive, Microsoft HoloLens or comparable hi-end VR, AR and mixed reality products.
The team relies on the constructivist theory of assisting students in building their knowledge in their own pace and on their own terms, rather than being lectured and/or being guided by a librarian during a traditional library orientation tour. Using inexpensive Google Cardboard goggles, students can explore a realistic set up of the actual library and familiarize themselves with its services. Students were polled on the effectiveness of such approach as well as on their inclination to entertain more comprehensive version of library orientation. Based on the lessons from this experiment, the team intends to pursue also a standardized approach to introducing VR to other campus services, thus bringing down further the cost of VR projects on campus. The project is considered a sandbox for academic instruction across campus. The same concept can be applied for [e.g., Chemistry, Physics, Biology) lab tours; for classes, which anticipate preliminary orientation process.
Following the VR orientation, the traditional students’ library instruction, usually conducted in a room, is replaced by a dynamic gamified library instruction. Students are split in groups of three and conduct a “scavenger hunt”; students use a jQuery-generated Web site on their mobile devices to advance through “hoops” of standard information literacy test. E.g., they need to walk to the Reference Desk, collect specific information and log their findings in the Web site. The idea follows the strong interest in the educational world toward gaming and gamification of the educational process. This library orientation approach applies the three principles for gamification: empowers learners; teaches problem solving and increases understanding.
Similarly to the experience with VR for library orientation, this library instruction process is used as a sandbox and has been successfully replicated by other instructors in their classes.
The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative has just launched its 2018 Key Issues in Teaching and Learning Survey, so vote today: http://www.tinyurl.com/ki2018.
Each year, the ELI surveys the teaching and learning community in order to discover the key issues and themes in teaching and learning. These top issues provide the thematic foundation or basis for all of our conversations, courses, and publications for the coming year. Longitudinally they also provide the way to track the evolving discourse in the teaching and learning space. More information about this annual survey can be found at https://www.educause.edu/eli/initiatives/key-issues-in-teaching-and-learning.
ACADEMIC TRANSFORMATION (Holistic models supporting student success, leadership competencies for academic transformation, partnerships and collaborations across campus, IT transformation, academic transformation that is broad, strategic, and institutional in scope)
ACCESSIBILITY AND UNIVERSAL DESIGN FOR LEARNING (Supporting and educating the academic community in effective practice; intersections with instructional delivery modes; compliance issues)
ADAPTIVE TEACHING AND LEARNING (Digital courseware; adaptive technology; implications for course design and the instructor’s role; adaptive approaches that are not technology-based; integration with LMS; use of data to improve learner outcomes)
COMPETENCY-BASED EDUCATION AND NEW METHODS FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF STUDENT LEARNING (Developing collaborative cultures of assessment that bring together faculty, instructional designers, accreditation coordinators, and technical support personnel, real world experience credit)
DIGITAL AND INFORMATION LITERACIES (Student and faculty literacies; research skills; data discovery, management, and analysis skills; information visualization skills; partnerships for literacy programs; evaluation of student digital competencies; information evaluation)
EVALUATING TECHNOLOGY-BASED INSTRUCTIONAL INNOVATIONS (Tools and methods to gather data;data analysis techniques; qualitative vs. quantitative data; evaluation project design; using findings to change curricular practice; scholarship of teaching and learning; articulating results to stakeholders; just-in-time evaluation of innovations). here is my bibliographical overview on Big Data (scroll down to “Research literature”: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/11/07/irdl-proposal/ )
EVOLUTION OF THE TEACHING AND LEARNING SUPPORT PROFESSION (Professional skills for T&L support; increasing emphasis on instructional design; delineating the skills, knowledge, business acumen, and political savvy for success; role of inter-institutional communities of practices and consortia; career-oriented professional development planning)
FACULTY DEVELOPMENT (Incentivizing faculty innovation; new roles for faculty and those who support them; evidence of impact on student learning/engagement of faculty development programs; faculty development intersections with learning analytics; engagement with student success)
GAMIFICATION OF LEARNING (Gamification designs for course activities; adaptive approaches to gamification; alternate reality games; simulations; technological implementation options for faculty)
INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN (Skills and competencies for designers; integration of technology into the profession; role of data in design; evolution of the design profession (here previous blog postings on this issue: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/10/04/instructional-design-3/); effective leadership and collaboration with faculty)
INTEGRATED PLANNING AND ADVISING FOR STUDENT SUCCESS (Change management and campus leadership; collaboration across units; integration of technology systems and data; dashboard design; data visualization (here previous blog postings on this issue: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=data+visualization); counseling and coaching advising transformation; student success analytics)
LEARNING ANALYTICS (Leveraging open data standards; privacy and ethics; both faculty and student facing reports; implementing; learning analytics to transform other services; course design implications)
LEARNING SPACE DESIGNS (Makerspaces; funding; faculty development; learning designs across disciplines; supporting integrated campus planning; ROI; accessibility/UDL; rating of classroom designs)
MICRO-CREDENTIALING AND DIGITAL BADGING (Design of badging hierarchies; stackable credentials; certificates; role of open standards; ways to publish digital badges; approaches to meta-data; implications for the transcript; Personalized learning transcripts and blockchain technology (here previous blog postings on this issue: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=blockchain)
MOBILE LEARNING (Curricular use of mobile devices (here previous blog postings on this issue:
MULTI-DIMENSIONAL TECHNOLOGIES (Virtual, augmented, mixed, and immersive reality; video walls; integration with learning spaces; scalability, affordability, and accessibility; use of mobile devices; multi-dimensional printing and artifact creation)
NEXT-GENERATION DIGITAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS AND LMS SERVICES (Open standards; learning environments architectures (here previous blog postings on this issue: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/03/28/digital-learning/; social learning environments; customization and personalization; OER integration; intersections with learning modalities such as adaptive, online, etc.; LMS evaluation, integration and support)
ONLINE AND BLENDED TEACHING AND LEARNING (Flipped course models; leveraging MOOCs in online learning; course development models; intersections with analytics; humanization of online courses; student engagement)
OPEN EDUCATION (Resources, textbooks, content; quality and editorial issues; faculty development; intersections with student success/access; analytics; licensing; affordability; business models; accessibility and sustainability)
PRIVACY AND SECURITY (Formulation of policies on privacy and data protection; increased sharing of data via open standards for internal and external purposes; increased use of cloud-based and third party options; education of faculty, students, and administrators)
WORKING WITH EMERGING LEARNING TECHNOLOGY (Scalability and diffusion; effective piloting practices; investments; faculty development; funding; evaluation methods and rubrics; interoperability; data-driven decision-making)
Elliot Felix, Founder and CEO, brightspot strategy
Adam Griff, Director, brightspot strategy