January 9, 2009
Educause Names Top Teaching-With-Technology Challenges for 2009
Educause, the higher-education technology group, has released its list of top teaching and learning challenges of 2009.
The top five challenges were selected by a combination of focus groups, surveys of interested professionals, face-to-face brainstorming, and a final vote. The challenges are:
1. Creating learning environments that promote active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation.
2. Developing 21st-century literacies — information, digital, and visual — among students and faculty members.
3. Reaching and engaging today’s learners.
4. Encouraging faculty members to adopt, and innovate with, new technology for teaching and learning.
5. Advancing innovation in teaching and learning with technology in an era of budget cuts.
Educause officials say they will now begin soliciting a volunteers to collaborate on solutions for each challenge using the project’s wiki. —Steve Kolowich
Posted on Friday January 9, 2009 | Permalink |Comments
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All of these seem to be no-brainers, and long past overdue. Having been involved in the use and administration of instructional technologies for the past fifteen years, I have advocated these in both K-12 and higher ed. environments. Now we are almost a decade into the 21st century, and people are still talking about “developing” 21st century skills…?!
— Lee Jan 11, 01:17 PM #
No brainers, indeed, but the trickiest part is that doing the things on this list (engaging learners, for example) does not require technology skills! They require a better understanding of how humans learn and then putting that information to use in our instructional design, utilizing whatever technologies (computers, books, etc.) make sense. Unfortunately, this is much more difficult than teaching someone what buttons to push and when.
— Susan Jan 12, 10:57 AM #
The list certainly seems obvious. But the sub text is a shift of power in the traditional university from fixed rules to engaged negotiation around learning. As we expect informed graduates to be “fluent” rather than just “literate” we are expecting them to be active participants not passive.
— Curt Madison Jan 12, 12:30 PM #
Adopting Open Course Repositories will go a long way to addressing these challenges. When course materials are hidden from public view it’s pretty difficult for them to be peer evaluated.
Perhaps Obama’s stimulus plan could add a line item to funding the publication of course archives from all institutions that receive funding from the federal government!
— Eileen McMahon Jan 12, 02:33 PM #
Unfortunately, here at the College where I work, nothing will change because faculty won’t change (see item #4 in the post). I find such resistance by most faculty to try anything new that I wind up getting discouraged and don’t want to bother to show them anything new. I wind up working with just those who are interested in using technology in their classrooms which is a limited few instead of being able to bring new ideas to the faculty as a whole. We have faculty who can’t even send an email without needing assistance. Until faculty are willing to learn something new, to break out of daily PPT presentations, and to change the way they teach (on occassion), we won’t see any changes here.
— John Jan 12, 03:29 PM #
“PPT Presentations” – heck, I had a faculty member in my doctorate program that used the old over-head projector and put his notes up on that. PPT would have been advanced for him, and he was the Chair of the ED LEADERSHIP DEPT!!!! It drove me nuts!
— Kyle David Jan 12, 05:01 PM #
One of the challenges that we often forget is tailoring the needs of various learners that have varied tech skills. While one learner is ‘advanced’ and sometimes knows more than the instructor, another learner knows very little about technology and needs ‘hand-holding’. Bridging this gap is an issue overlooked often.
Sujan
http://edutechman.blogspot.com/
— Sujan Manandhar Jan 21, 09:33 AM #