Excerpt from “Use of digital technologies in judicial reform and access to justice cooperation — from HiiL (The Hague Institute for Innovation of Law)
On 11/15/2021,
in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, Access to Justice (A2J), Africa, Asia, Australia, Blockchain, bots, Canada, change, communities of practice, Europe, future, game-changing environment, global / globalization, ideas, India, innovation, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, law schools, Legal operations, legal reform, legal technologies, legislatures / government / legal, platforms, policy, political science, society, UK, United States, vendors, Virtual courts and law firms, vision/possibilities,
by Daniel Christian
On 11/12/2021,
in 21st century, accreditation, Alternatives, business side of he, change, changing business models, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, CMS/LMS, colleges, content development, aggregation, repositories, cost of getting a degree, credentialing, dangers of the status quo, Daniel S. Christian, education reform, future of higher education, game-changing environment, generational differences, higher education, ideas, innovation, instructional design, leadership, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, lifelong learning, marketplaces, New "Amazon.com" of Higher Education, new business models, platforms, professional development, reinvent, society, staying relevant, strategy, student-related, surviving, traditional / tradition, trends, United States, universities, using teams, vision/possibilities,
by Daniel Christian
Why Aren’t Professors Taught to Teach? — from techlearning.com by Erik Ofgang
Professors are experts in their subject matters but many have limited training in actually teaching their students.
Excerpt:
“A lot of faculty are just modeling their instruction after the instruction they’ve received as an undergraduate or graduate student,” says Tanya Joosten, senior scientist and director of digital learning at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the lead of the National Research Center for Distance Education and Technological Advancements.
As a perpetually short-on-time adjunct professor, I understand those who worry about mandatory training and required course reviews, but Pelletier stresses that she’s advocating for a more organic shift and that a top-down approach isn’t best. “That’s not as collaborative and generative as really just embracing that we have these two different kinds of experts, one type of expert is an expert in their subject, and the other expert is an expert in teaching and learning,” she says. More attention is needed to meld these two kinds of expertise.
From DSC:
It’s not just that colleges and universities are big business — if you have any remaining doubts about that perspective, take a moment to look at this new, interactive database to see what I mean. But it’s also that this type of business often rewards research, not teaching. And yet the students over the last several decades have continued to pay ever-increasing prices for skilled researchers, instead of increasingly skilled teachers.
Image from Inside Higher Ed
Would people put up with this with other types of purchases? I don’t think so. I wouldn’t want to…would you? Would we like to pay for something that we aren’t getting — like paying for all the extra options on a new car, but not getting them?
What goes around, comes around.
But by allowing this to have occurred, a backlash against the value of higher education has been building for years now. In many learners’ minds, they are questioning whether it’s worth taking on (potentially) decades’ worth of debt. At a minimum, the higher the price of obtaining degrees and/or other credentials becomes, the less Return on Investment (ROI) is realized by the learners (i.e., the purchasers of these goods and services). So while getting a degree is often still worth it, the ROI is going down. And this doesn’t address how relevant/up-to-date the educations are that these learners are receiving, which the employers out there will take issue with.
From an Instructional Designer’s perspective, it isn’t just time that’s the issue here. There continues to exist a tiered hierarchy within higher education. Faculty see themselves as more knowledgeable because they are teaching and because they are the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). But they are not expert teachers. Many full-time faculty members don’t listen to people who are knowledgeable in the learning science world, and they often don’t value that expertise. (This can be true of administrators as well.) But when a fellow faculty member (i.e., their “true peer” from their perspective) suggests the same idea that Instructional Designers have been recommending for years, they suddenly open their eyes and ears to see and hear this seemingly new, wonderful approach.
Some possible scenarios
Thus, a wave has been building against traditional institutions of higher education — readers of this blog will have picked up on this years ago. Once alternatives significantly hit the radar — ones that get the learners solid, good-paying jobs — there could be a mass exodus out of what we think of as traditional higher education. At least that’s one potential scenario.
For example, if a next-generation learning platform comes along that offers teams and individuals the ability to deliver lifelong learning at 50% or more off the price of an average degree, then be on the lookout for massive change. If professors and/or teams of specialists — those who are skilled in instructional design and teaching — can go directly to their learners — it could be an interesting world indeed. (Outschool is like this, by the way.) In that scenario, below are two potential methods of providing what accreditation agencies used to provide:
- Obtaining the skills and competencies being requested from the workplace to “pass the tests” (whatever those assessments turn out to be)
- Voting a course up or down (i.e., providing crowd-sourced rating systems)
Other possible scenarios
Another scenario is that traditional institutions of higher education really kick their innovation efforts into high gear. They reward teaching. They develop less expensive methods of obtaining degrees. They truly begin delivering more cost-effective means of obtaining lifelong learning and development “channels” for educating people.
And there are other possible scenarios, some of which I could think of and many I would likely miss. But to even ask the solid and highly-relevant question as plainly stated in the article above — Why Aren’t Professors Taught to Teach? — that is something that must be dealt with. Those organizations that use a team-based approach are likely to be able to better answer and address that question.
On 11/11/2021,
in ideas, pedagogy, productivity / tips and tricks, professional development, teaching & learning,
by Daniel Christian
Teaching Tip Infographics — from scholarlyteacher.com
On 11/11/2021,
in communications, computer science, emerging technologies, future, game-changing environment, generational differences, ideas, innovation, internet, Metaverse, platforms, technology (general), telecommunications, tools,
by Daniel Christian
Also see Matthew Ball’s Metaverse Primer (excerpt below from this page) — with thanks to Annie Zhang for this resource:
“The Metaverse is a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds which can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.”
Jacob Navok: Computing and Network Needs of the Metaverse — from hellometaverse.fm by Annie Zhang
Excerpt:
to progress towards this vision of the metaverse, jacob is focused on tackling the hard problem of improving concurrency. how do you get millions of people to concurrently be participating and interacting in one live experience with no lag?
he breaks this down the problem into two components:
-
limitations of the traditional network to handle multiplayer experiences: coordinating, say, positional data of where you and all the other players in a game, gets very complicated, especially when latency needs to be low. meaning, if you want to see everything that everyone is doing at all times, coordinating the traffic of that data is very difficult
-
with more connection, internet speed slows: the internet was not built for true real time communication, but rather optimized for cost and routing efficiency. when you load a fb page, it’s okay if it takes 10 milliseconds, but when you are in a shooting game, a delay of 10 milliseconds is a matter of life or death
Everything You Need To Know About The Metaverse — from protocol.com by Janko Roettgers
Excerpt:
Silicon Valley has a new favorite buzzword: Ever since Mark Zuckerberg announced earlier this year that Facebook’s future would be in the metaverse, everyone has been rushing to figure out what a metaverse even is. And when Facebook rebranded as Meta in October, metaverse fever swept the tech industry. From Microsoft to Nvidia, every company is suddenly in the metaverse business, and seemingly overnight, countless people became metaverse experts.
But what actually is the metaverse? Why does it matter, and who needs to worry about it? If the metaverse is truly “the next chapter for the internet,” as Zuckerberg put it, it’s important to understand and define it so as not to be caught flat-footed when (or if) the metaverse wave catches on.
On 11/11/2021,
in Apple, collaboration, content development, aggregation, repositories, curriculum, education, education technology, experimentation, Hyflex learning, ideas, innovation, instructional design, K-12 related, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning preferences, platforms, remote teaching and learning, society, strategy, student-related, teachers, teaching & learning, vendors, videoconferencing,
by Daniel Christian
How to Support Students and Families through Technology and Innovation — from thejournal.com by Jeremy Davis
Excerpt:
Here are just a few district-wide innovations that resulted from the pandemic:
- Worked with our local public access television station to broadcast district updates and educational resources. We contracted with Discovery Education to post some of their content to local channel 3 for students without home Internet access, and we built a television studio where our Innovation team worked with district teachers to produce content for local cable from 8–3 every week day.
DC: Which reminds me of this idea/graphic:
- Students were provided with Internet hotspots to ensure every student in the district could access the content and the video conferencing lessons with their teachers.
- The Educational Services department created an amazing curriculum and summer school program where students could log in and complete curricular activities as enhancements to the curriculum and throughout the summer.
- Created videos of “how” we could do both live and online teaching at the same time to help teachers feel more comfortable with the new way of teaching.
On 11/05/2021,
in Canvas - and other Instructure-related items, CMS/LMS, colleges, communities of practice, community colleges, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, Daniel S. Christian, digital learning, education, education reform, education technology, elearning, higher education, ideas, instructional design, IT in HE, K-12 related, law schools, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning spaces, learning theories, liberal arts, online learning, online media, pedagogy, platforms, research, student teaching/teacher education, student-related, teachers, teaching & learning, teaching online, tools, training / L&D, United States, universities, vision/possibilities,
by Daniel Christian
From DSC:
I was reading about a Ph.D. who was currently doing some research into the science of learning. This person had been teaching in a School of Education for years, but just (relatively) recently embarked on a Ph.D. During this person’s research, they came across a lot more information regarding the science of learning.
If this was true with someone who had been in education for years (and I can relate to that as well), it made me wonder:
- How can we better get the word out to our learners re: how they can maximize their Return On Investment (ROI) from their studying time and efforts…?
Then I thought, why couldn’t we put these tips directly into our banners on our CMS’s and LMS’s and/or link our banners to some other web pages/resources that provide such best practices and tips for our learners!?! This could occur within the corporate training world as well.
Examples:
Along these lines, we should have 11×17 (or larger) posters like this plastered in every hallway of every learning space out there:
On 10/27/2021,
in colleges, community colleges, Daniel S. Christian, education, education reform, Europe, experimentation, higher education, ideas, K-12 related, learning, Learning Experience Design, universities,
by Daniel Christian
An excerpt from Eva Keiffenheim’s Learn Letter re: A New Education Paradigm (emphasis DSC)
Here are a couple of underlying assumptions within our current education paradigm:
- assessment through standardized testing and grades
- outcome-focus on academic achievements
- the purpose of education is to produce future workforce
- teachers and professors are the unique source of knowledge
- an inherent dominance (adults > children; professionals > students)
- lectures and listening are a valid form of learning
- subjects exist in hierarchies (math, languages > art, music)
- content should be delivered in discrete subjects
I invite you to question the current paradigm: How would schools and universities look like so that all young people can flourish?
From DSC:
Eva’s reflections remind me of what I was trying to say the other day about how ideas start out as fragile…but if they take hold, they become very powerful. Today’s education paradigms are a great example of that. These paradigms have deep roots that are very hard to change.
On 10/26/2021,
in 24x7x365 access, Canada, face-to-face, ideas, instructional design, K-12 related, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, learning preferences, online learning, quality, student-related, teaching & learning, United States, youth,
by Daniel Christian
Why we need some humility about online learning – and about face-to-face teaching — from tonybates.ca by Tony Bates
Excerpt:
Those of us who have been fighting to get online learning accepted over the last 20-25 years have argued strongly the merits of online learning. We have argued that not only can it increase access, especially for older, working and lifelong learners, but it can also teach as well, and under certain circumstances, even better than face-to-face teaching. Covid-19 in particular showed the value of online learning, allowing students to continue their learning, even during a pandemic.
The limits of online learning
However, Covid-19 also taught us that online learning has its limits. When there was no access to face-to-face learning, we found that online learning was not able to help certain students. We also found that there are important aspects of face-to-face or campus based learning that cannot easily be replaced by online learning. Let’s look at some of these limitations.
We need to not only accept that both online learning and face-to-face teaching have equal value, but also to strive to understand what each does best. This will vary by subject matter, by types of students, and by instructors’ training and experience. We all have a lot to learn.
Also from Tony, see:
