Stevie Rocco: August 2007 Archives
I'm at the Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning this week, and have already gotten some great ideas and connections from other folks out there who think about distributed learning. The keynote this morning was one example. Mark Milliron from the University of Texas-Austin spoke about the seven key conversations we need to have around teaching and learning over the next few years. Much of what he said was really tried and true, and I wanted to share a few thoughts I had in response to his session.
First, Mark pointed out some important distinctions between generations. That teens and young folks don't check e-mail as much as we think they do. That they rely more and more on mobile devices, social networking sites, and instant messaging to communicate with each other. He asked, "Did we ever think that faculty would check their e-mail more than the students do?" It's a valid point.
He also mentioned OER Commons--an open educational resources site that is a combination of Merlot and MySpace. Resources are uploaded/tagged, and then folks can rate them (like RateMyProfessor, for example). It seems to have a lot of promise, as it launched a few months ago and already has 8,000 resources on the site.
The most interesting thing he said, however (to me, anyway), was that we desperately need to catch up on our use of analytics in education. We need to use such analytics to suggest learning and help our students, rather than sending it up the line for some kind of bureaucratic decision that is implemented long after the student is out of the equation. Higher education must work to increase their velocity of data so that it's utilized in a timely manner and for the students' benefit.
The next generation of learning needs to be flexible in order to meet student needs. Information is ubiquitous--so instead of designing individual courses/programs that we send to the student, how do we get the student to the information? The differences are vast between the "feeding the student" model and the "making it findable" model. What kinds of systems will we need to build to get there? I suspect that we will need to use both data mining and analytics, in conjunction with both "new" (social networking) and "old" (e-mail) technology in order to be successful.
