a learning management system (LMS) is never the solution to every problem in education. Edtech is just one part of the whole learning ecosystem and student experience.
Therefore, the next generation digital learning environment (NGDLE), as envisioned by EDUCAUSE in 2015 … Looking at the NGDLE requirements from an LMS perspective, I view the NGDLE as being about five areas: interoperability; personalization; analytics, advising, and learning assessment; collaboration; accessibility and universal design.
Interoperability
Content can easily be exchanged between systems.
Users are able to leverage the tools they love, including discipline-specific apps.
Learning data is available to trusted systems and people who need it.
The learning environment is “future proof” so that it can adapt and extend as the ecosystem evolves.
Personalization
The learning environment reflects individual preferences.
Departments, divisions, and institutions can be autonomous.
Instructors teach the way they want and are not constrained by the software design.
There are clear, individual learning paths.
Students have choice in activity, expression, and engagement.
Analytics, Advising, and Learning Assessment
Learning analytics helps to identify at-risk students, course progress, and adaptive learning pathways.
The learning environment enables integrated planning and assessment of student performance.
More data is made available, with greater context around the data.
The learning environment supports platform and data standards.
Collaboration
Individual spaces persist after courses and after graduation.
Learners are encouraged as creators and consumers.
Courses include public and private spaces.
Accessibility and Universal Design
Accessibility is part of the design of the learning experience.
The learning environment enables adaptive learning and supports different types of materials.
Learning design includes measurement rubrics and quality control.
The core analogy used in the NGDLE paper is that each component of the learning environment is a Lego brick:
The days of the LMS as a “walled garden” app that does everything is over.
Today many kinds of amazing learning and collaboration tools (Lego bricks) should be accessible to educators.
We have standards that let these tools (including an LMS) talk to each other. That is, all bricks share some properties that let them fit together.
Students and teachers sign in once to this “ecosystem of bricks.”
The bricks share results and data.
These bricks fit together; they can be interchanged and swapped at will, with confidence that the learning experience will continue uninterrupted.
Any “next-gen” attempt to completely rework the pedagogical model and introduce a “mash-up of whatever” to fulfil this model would fall victim to the same criticisms levied at the LMS today: there is too little time and training to expect faculty to figure out the nuances of implementation on their own.
The Lego metaphor works only if we’re talking about “old school” Lego design — bricks of two, three, and four-post pieces that neatly fit together. Modern edtech is a lot more like the modern Lego. There are wheels and rocket launchers and belts and all kinds of amazing pieces that work well with each other, but only when they are configured properly. A user cannot simply stick together different pieces and assume they will work harmoniously in creating an environment through which each student can be successful.
As the NGDLE paper states: “Despite the high percentages of LMS adoption, relatively few instructors use its more advanced features — just 41% of faculty surveyed report using the LMS ‘to promote interaction outside the classroom.'”
But this is what the next generation LMS is good at: being a central nervous system — or learning hub — through which a variety of learning activities and tools are used. This is also where the LMS needs to go: bringing together and making sense of all the amazing innovations happening around it. This is much harder to do, perhaps even impossible, if all the pieces involved are just bricks without anything to orchestrate them or to weave them together into a meaningful, personal experience for achieving well-defined learning outcomes.
Making a commitment to build easy, flexible, and smart technology
Working with colleges and universities to remove barriers to adopting new tools in the ecosystem
Standardizing the vetting of accessibility compliance (the Strategic Nonvisual Access Partner Program from the National Federation of the Blind is a great start)
Advancing standards for data exchange while protecting individual privacy
Building integrated components that work with the institutions using them — learning quickly about what is and is not working well and applying those lessons to the next generation of interoperability standards
Letting people use the tools they love [SIC] and providing more ways for nontechnical individuals (including students) to easily integrate new features into learning activities
My note: something just refused to be accepted at SCSU
Technologists are often very focused on the technology, but the reality is that the more deeply and closely we understand the pedagogy and the people in the institutions — students, faculty, instructional support staff, administrators — the better suited we are to actually making the tech work for them.
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Under the Hood of a Next Generation Digital Learning Environment in Progress
The challenge is that although 85 percent of faculty use a campus learning management system (LMS),1 a recent Blackboard report found that, out of 70,000 courses across 927 North American institutions, 53 percent of LMS usage was classified as supplemental(content-heavy, low interaction) and 24 percent as complementary (one-way communication via content/announcements/gradebook).2 Only 11 percent were characterized as social, 10 percent as evaluative (heavy use of assessment), and 2 percent as holistic (balanced use of all previous). Our FYE course required innovating beyond the supplemental course-level LMS to create a more holistic cohort-wide NGDLE in order to fully support the teaching, learning, and student success missions of the program.The key design goals for our NGDLE were to:
Create a common platform that could deliver a standard curriculum and achieve parity in all course sections using existing systems and tools and readily available content
Capture, store, and analyze any generated learner data to support learning assessment, continuous program improvement, and research
Develop reports and actionable analytics for administrators, advisors, instructors, and students
If you listen to management pundits, “collaboration” is all the rage. While the term is a bit fuzzy, what’s usually meant by “collaboration” is 1) plenty of ad-hoc meetings and 2) open-plan offices that increase the likelihood that that such meetings take place.
Rather than improving their own performance, mediocre employees socially isolate top performers, spread nasty rumors about them, and either sabotage, or attempt to steal credit for, the top performers’ work. As the study put it: “Cooperative contexts proved socially disadvantageous for high performers.”
During a Dec. 8 Future Trends Forum video chat hosted by futurist Bryan Alexander, several liberal arts technology leaders spoke about their efforts to define their colleges’ approach to digital innovation.
As an example of a more promising liberal arts partnership, Eshleman pointed to LACOL, the Liberal Arts Consortium for Online Learning. LACOL’s nine member institutions comprise Amherst, Bryn Mawr, Carleton, Haverford, Pomona, Swarthmore, Vassar, Washington and Lee and Williams. LACOL is an effort to create an experimental framework that supports project work across the nine campuses. There are interesting experiments happening on each campus, and LACOL provides opportunities to use a digital network to take those to a new level, said Elizabeth Evans, LACOL’s director, who joined Eshleman on the Future Trends Forum virtual stage to describe the consortium’s setup.
This involves a multi-campus team of faculty and instructional designers, all organized around a central project, which has its ups and downs, she added.
She said she has learned to keep the focus off of technology initially. She asks faculty members to think about what have they wanted to do around student learning and why. “It is about that first, and technology second,” she stressed, adding that she has moved away from quantitative evaluation of projects and more toward storytelling.
Disruptive innovation has been a buzzword since Clayton Christensen coined it back in the mid 1990s.
Here are four key things to remember when assessing whether the next new company is likely to disrupt your business:
1. The common understanding of disruption IS NOT disruption according to Christensen
A great article by Ilan Mocharidiscusses the misuse of the word disruption when referring to business. As he clarifies, disruption is “what happens when the incumbents are so focused on pleasing their most profitable customers that they neglect or misjudge the needs of their other segments.”
2. Disruption can be low-end or new-market
These differences are laid out in Disruptive Strategy with Clayton Christensen. Low-end disruption refers to businesses that come in at the bottom of the market and serve customers in a way that is “good enough.” In other words, they put their focus on where the greater profit margins are.
The main difference between the two types of disruption lies in the fact that low-end disruption focuses on overserved customers, and new-market disruption focuses on underserved customers.
3. Christensen’s disruption is a process, rather than a product or service
When innovative new products or services – iPhone, Tesla’s electric cars, Uber, and the like – launch and grab the attention of the press and consumers, do they qualify as disruptors in their industries? Writing in Harvard Business Review,Christensen cautions us that it takes time to determine whether an innovator’s business model will succeed.
4. Choose your battles wisely
If you are a current incumbent and want to be on the lookout for a possibly disruptive emerging business, the clarification of what disruption is certainly helps.
Understanding disruption is also helpful if you are looking for opportunities to start or scale your business
NoteBookCast is a free whiteboard tool that will work in the web browser on a laptop, iPad, Android tablet, and Windows tablet. NoteBookCast is a collaborative whiteboard tool. You can invite others to join your whiteboard by entering the code assigned to your whiteboard. You can chat while drawing on NoteBookCast whiteboards. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to use NoteBookCast.
Web Whiteboard makes it easy to include a whiteboard in your Google+ Hangout. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how easy it is to use Web Whiteboard in a Google+ Hangout.
Stoodle is a free collaborative whiteboard tool hosted by the CK12 Foundation. You can use text chat while sharing your whiteboard. Registration is not required in order to use Stoodle. In the video embedded below I demonstrate the features of Stoodle.
The reputations of Asian universities, and Chinese universities in particular, are on the rise. China’s World Class 2.0 project, announced in August 2015, aims to strengthen the research performance of China’s nine top-ranked universities, with the goal of having six of those institutions ranked within the world’s top 15 universities by 2030.
After two decades in which China has been largely an exporter of students to Australia, Canada, the US and the UK, it is now increasingly attracting international students to study at its universities. And what is true of China is true of other countries too. Global flows of students are an increasing feature of the world’s higher education systems.
You can see the recruitment of international students as an exercise in soft power, in global engagement , in global citizenship, a great exercise in language learning , the practical application of a challenge thrown down by the great American social anthropologist Clifford Geertz.
Certainly, my friends who lead universities in Australia, Canada and New Zealand are delighted when they read politicians’ rhetoric about making it harder for international students to come to the UK.(my note, this is a Guardian article, but applies perfectly with Bush Junior politics and with the rhetoric of Trump)
The International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning (IJMBL) provides a forum for researchers in this field to share their knowledge and experience of combining e-learning and m-learning with other educational resources. Providing researchers, practitioners, and academicians with insight into a wide range of topics such as knowledge sharing, mobile games for learning, collaborative learning, and e-learning, this journal contains useful articles for those seeking to learn, analyze, improve, and apply technologies in mobile and blended learning. The journal spans theoretical, technical, and pedagogical issues in mobile and blended learning. These embrace comprehensive or critical reviews of the current literature, relevant technologies and applications, and important contextual issues such as privacy, security, adaptivity, and resource constraints.
Topics Covered
Comprehensive or critical reviews of the current literature
Evaluation of mobile or blended learning in practice
Future of mobile or blended learning
Knowledge Sharing
Learner interaction/collaborative learning
Mobile games for learning
Mobile or blended learning applications
Mobile or blended learning applied at different levels of education from pre-school to tertiary and beyond
Pedagogical and/or philosophical underpinnings of mobile or blended learning
Privacy and security issues
Related research in learning, including e-learning and pedagogical approaches
Resource constraints in the delivery of mobile or blended learning
Reviews of the application of mobile or blended learning in multiple contexts
Role of Wikis, blogs, podcasts, messaging, other online tools, and Web 2.0 components in learning delivery
Roles of mobile, pervasive, and immersive technologies in education
Technologies that directly or indirectly support mobile or blended learning systems (devices, networks, tools etc.)
Theoretical approaches to mobile or blended learning solutions
Use of mobile or blended learning in professional environments
Mission
The primary mission of the International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning (IJMBL) is to provide comprehensive coverage and understanding of the role of innovative learning theory and practice in an increasingly mobile and pervasive technological environment. As technology enables a more seamless experience of device supported learning worlds that may integrate mobile, embedded, augmented, and immersive technologies, we may expect to see increasing interest and activity in blended approaches to learning. IJMBL brings together researchers at the forefront of this field, in both technology and pedagogical practice and assists them in the development and dissemination of new approaches to both mobile and blended learning.