It's All Learning...

During our holiday break, I am continuing to develop several online courses for our university. As I work on designing the curricula and creating the objects and assignments, I am firmly convinced that more emphasis must be placed on prompting university faculty to spend additional time updating their skills to utilize 21st Century technologies in their instruction.

I find that I spend as much time mentoring adjunct faculty and assisting in technical course development, as I do teaching and assisting my own graduate students. All higher education faculty should endeavor to work toward using these new technologies and blending technical applications and content-specific opportunities into their instruction--whether they teach online, blended, or face-to-face courses. Upgrading technical skills should be included in university contracts toward continuous faculty professional development.

Soon there will not be a differentiation between online learning, blended learning, or Web assisted learning--it will all just be referred to as "learning." Education will use all of these options and resources to provide differentiated instruction for all students.

Bill Gates sees the demise of strictly "on campus" learning, too. At a conference in August he said: “Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university." It is already true that MIT and other universities now offer excellent lectures online at no cost. How will universities begin to reinvent themselves to assist our new digital student learners?

According to the online article in TechCrunch, Mr. Gates believes that"no matter how you came about your knowledge, you should get credit for it. Whether it’s an MIT degree or if you got everything you know from lectures on the web, there needs to be a way to highlight that. "

The article summarized many of Gate's remarks:

• Educational institutions are still vital for children, K-12.
  
• He is positive about charter schools, where kids can spend up to 80% of their time deeply engaged with learning.
• Colleges need to be less “place-based." "It’s just too expensive and too hard to get these upper-level educations. And soon place-based college educations will be five times less important than they are today."
  
• Gates said that technology is the only way to bring education back under control and expand it. (Siegler, 2010)
  

"Place-based" instruction often is not student-friendly or conductive to student learning. Listening to lectures is not conducive to critical thinking and deeper learning. Human beings shut down and stop listening after 20 minutes. As most students would attest, online or blended courses usually allow students to make their own schedules, save transportation time and energy, allow for translation and transcripts of sessions, and assist them to learn new technologies or applications at their own pace, skills they will probably continue to use after their university course ends.

While I may not totally agree with Mr. Gates that all our higher-level learning will use free online opportunities, I do believe that more of our courses and student learning must embrace new Web instructional resources, open source software and technology applications. I intend to help my colleagues learn to be able to see and use these technical opportunities in their courses.

Now, I'm back to creating the assignments for Unit 2.

Happy New Year!

mj