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

Mainstreaming the disruption

This slide deck I presented at a senior leadership conference at Griffith University last week.

The essence of my argument is that the higher education sector is entering a perfect storm with the problems of student indebtedness, budget deficits and graduate unemployment looming large, combining with the disruptive innovation from the non-university private sector providing what appear to be viable alternatives to a traditional university education.

The solution, I believe, is to ‘mainstream the disruption’. To sit back and continue with business as usual would be a courageous decision (to borrow from Sir Humphrey Appleby).

The Indian International University 2017: A Retrospective

The ubiquity of m-learning

Image source: mobl21.com

I spoke with a group of training professionals at a large company last week and, for the first time in a long time, I found myself presenting the argument that there is more interactivity in an online class than in a face-to-face (F2F) class. I’ve had to do this on many occasions over the years, but I hadn’t realised that this question had all but disappeared off the radar.

That so few people now would venture to suggest this in the post-Web 2.0 era is testimony, perhaps, to the maturity of online learning. But it’s not just about the increasing popularity of social networking per se. The growing sophistication of handheld devices — or what we used to call ‘mobile phones’ — has added fuel to the social media fire, such that connectivity and interaction levels have reached fever pitch.

In an F2F setting, interaction will always be limited to the number of people who can talk at once. In an online setting, numerous conversations take place concurrently, more people can participate, and they participate with people they perhaps wouldn’t otherwise have participated with.

This is facilitating student engagement on a scale few educators could have dreamt of just a few years ago — myself included. I poured scorn on the idea that anyone would want to read a large amount of text from a mobile device, but then that was before iPhones and iPads, and the advent of ‘the App’. Astonishingly, Apple now claims to have 140,000 apps in the App Store, and some 40,000 of these are educational apps.