For those of you who have followed my previous postings on my former reference/personal website, you know that I believe that the bar has risen too high and too fast for one person to do it all anymore. For profit universities have been doing this for years and seem to be doing pretty well (a topic for another post).

Do you ever wonder why people keep suggesting that more faculty development is needed? More teacher training is needed? This is because many of us are continuing to try to make the old system still work for us (like the world before Copernicus, as Sir Kenneth Robinson would say). We do many things for administrative reasons, not pedagogical reasons.

Asking our professors and teachers to do it all is just not wise — and practical — anymore. Furthermore, it negates the fact that we all have our gifts, passions, and interests. Over the last ~10 years in higher ed, I have seen many faculty members who would rather NOT learn about integrating technology into their classrooms. I’ll even say the majority of them have not been interested in doing this. Many of us older folks didn’t grow up using these sort of technologies; so some of us don’t see the incentives/advantages/reasons to integrate various technologies into the classroom.

I believe that we need to move to a different manner of doing things. As I will post later on, I believe that involves several things, but here are just a few of them:

  1. Moving to team-created and delivered content — and using specialists in each area
  2. Use technology to provide better student tracking, customization, and personalization
  3. Provide the students with more control over where they spend their time, the pacing of the learning materials, the manner in which they choose to review the content, etc. — i.e. more choice
  4. Provide the same content in multiple ways, and let the students choose which delivery method/media works for them

Thanks all. So long for now.
Daniel