How to promote digital literacies among faculty

In the recently published NMC Horizon Project Regional Analysis, Technology Outlook for Australian Tertiary Education 2013-18, it stated (p.3) that (shock, horror) there is a need for more faculty training to improve digital media literacy ‘before being asked to teach, and for more professional development opportunities once in the profession’. More significantly, though, the report points out that:

While a lack of adequate training opportunities is a part of the challenge, ultimately a change in the mind sets of disciplines and individual faculty will be required, along with cultural shifts within institutions, before emerging tools and technologies are routinely adopted and implemented as a matter of course.

One way of changing mindsets is for academics to to find some intrinsic motivation to leverage these emerging technologies. As Belshaw argues (slide 28), the trick is to identify an area where important issues overlap with personal interest. In other words, academics will upskill because they want to rather than because they have to. In these circumstances, the efficacy of preservice training/ professional development is likely to be enhanced.

Only after faculty have become au fait with the digital literacies (slides 24-27) and what they bring to their own personal learning environment (PLE), will they be able to respond to the increasing demand for personalised learning from their students. As the Horizon report notes (p.4):

More than ever, students are using ICT and new always-connected mobiles outside of the classroom to explore subjects that personally interest them. Institutions need to leverage and promote these informal learning experiences while integrating them with on-campus learning.

This is why it is important for institutional learning management systems (LMSs) to become more open and accommodate the PLEs of learners (slide 61).

 

The Digitally Connected Worker

Why MOOCs matter

Amid all the hoo-har about MOOCs and the will-they won’t-they debate over their impact on university business models, a piece by Tom Friedman caught my eye the other day on the rise of the ‘celebrity professor’. The stimulus for the Friedman article was a conference he attended last week hosted by Harvard University and MIT where academics and administrators from these two elite US universities discussed the rise of online courses and the ramifications for residential colleges and universities. One outcome, as Inside Higher Ed reports, is that MOOCs are certainly prompting some faculty to pay more attention to their teaching styles than they ever have before.

Friedman notes that not every academic is likely to generate a rock-star following following their entry into MOOCdom, but he issues a grave warning to the rest us mere mortal when he states:

‘The world of MOOCs is creating a competition that will force every professor to improve his or her pedagogy or face an online competitor … When outstanding becomes so easily available, average is over.’

This is why MOOCs matter. I presented at a conference a couple of weeks ago, and I was asked for my advice by a member of the audience on how she might go about dealing with a group of recalcitrant academics in her department who are steadfastly refusing to do anything online. My response was that, pretty soon, it may not be a decision that they get to make. As Friedman notes in his article, Harvard Business School no longer teaches entry-level accounting because there is a professor at Brigham Young University whose online accounting course is so good that Harvard students use that instead.

The Star Alliance model of higher education

Image source: thaicargo.com

I read a great piece, Jailbreaking the Degree, in TechCrunch the other day (courtesy of Meetali Mukherjee).

In essence the author — @davidblake, founder of Degreed — makes the point that a university degree continues to be the most meaningful ‘unit’ of education in the eyes of employers, notwithstanding its inherent inefficiencies (e.g. compulsion to study courses irrelevant to one’s interests or, indeed, those of a prospective employer), yet it need not be so, or at least not in its present form. Sadly, online education providers have yet to make any serious inroads into the higher education monopoly controlled by universities because, as @kevincarey points out, while the business models of these institutions may be different, ‘their product — traditional credentials in the form of a degree — is not’.

But what if you could accumulate credits (courses) towards a degree a bit like you buy music on iTunes? As the Blake article observes, people tend to buy songs not albums. In the same way, it is not possible for an individual to collect different courses from different institutions from around the world, rather than spend three of four years stuck in one place taking what’s on offer from a monopoly provider?

The problem here, of course — as some of the commenters on the Blake piece point out — it’s all about recognition of the qualification. Who would be the awarding body and would employers accept its validity? The solution — with due credit to @gsiemens (see here) — may be the ‘Star Alliance’ model, in which there is a common currency (air miles/ course credits) and all the brands are recognisable in their own right. This may have been what Universitas 21 had in mind ten years ago when U21Global was launched. But this, of course, is history.

Maybe it’s time for a ‘U21Global 2.0′.

Kevin Carey

PeerIndex39

–AUTHORITY 33

–ACTIVITY 40

–AUDIENCE 58

government

The adoption of digital pedagogies in Singapore

I have blogged about Singapore’s FutureSchools projects in the past, and this latest clip from Edutopia would seem to indicate that serious progress is being made. The true success of this initiative, of course, will be the extent to which these practices will be rolled out to all schools in Singapore, and in this respect, professional development will be critical.

An interesting point to emerge from this video is that the approach taken to professional development in the FutureSchools project is to embrace the same participatory learning culture they are nurturing in their classrooms. Using technology, there is group peer observation of class sessions with the dual objective of learning from one another and providing constructive feedback.

More formal education and training in the use of ICTs in the classroom (in K-12 or higher education) is not that widely available. The Asian International College in Singapore is aiming to fix this with the launch if its Postgraduate Certificate in Education (Digital Pedagogies) this year.