This project was launched because there is a lack of consensus across the field about how to define digital literacy and implement effective programs. A survey was disseminated throughout the NMC community of higher education leaders and practitioners to understand how digital literacy initiatives are impacting their campuses. The NMC’s research examines the current landscape to illuminate multiple models of digital literacy — universal literacy, creative literacy, and literacy across disciplines — around which dedicated programs can proliferate a spectrum of skills and competencies. These initiatives have the potential to generate more excitement around learning for students, especially as their growing fluency enables deeper connections with others and equips them with a new lens to critically evaluate the world around them.
Explore emerging trends in digital education technology Digital transformation is impacting the education ecosystem, both inside and outside of the classroom. Examine findings from the Digital Education Survey.
Open Badges. Because learning is learning wherever it happens. Joyce Seitzinger is an education technologist and learning designer with 15 years experienc
Although edtech overall has seen quite a few successes in the past years, the global uptake of truly innovative educational technology at universities is still limited. The higher-ed market is traditionally characterized by long sales cycles, many stakeholders with various interests and lack of synergy of technology initiatives. While many startup companies use universities as their launching pads for their innovations (a famous recent example being Snapchat), comparatively few of them develop technologies to enhance actual university functions — learning and research — but instead use universities as socially cohesive environments where launching an app is easy.
When you think about the advance of technology in society in the last decade, the progress has been phenomenal – just take a look at these examples to see how far we have come in such a short space of time. Now, think about education. Think about the technology in your school ten years ago – perhaps a computer suite with an unreliable bank of PC’s; CD-ROMs; discs; slow, irrelevant programs; staff scared of using IT; and so on.
OK, we concede, there are some schools where this is still the picture, but the future of Educational Technologies are a lot brighter, and here is why we think that the next ten years of tech will be staggering. Belt up, and prepare for the voyage…
The new school year is underway, but districts across the country are still struggling to fill hundreds of teaching positions. These teacher shortages are proving especially acute in certain subject areas like special education, science, and mathematics. And particular regions, like rural districts, where it’s difficult to find qualified teachers, are also especially strained. Districts in Oklahoma, for example, one of the hardest-hit states, are still trying to fill more than 500 teaching vacancies—despite eliminating more than 1,500 teaching jobs in the past year, according to the Oklahoma State School Boards Association.
These chronic shortages, in turn, tend to limit the coursework that students can access. For example, two in five high schools don’t offer physics, according to a recent Education Week Research Center analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The numbers are worse in some states than others, with nearly 70 percent of high schools in Alaska and Oklahoma not offering the subject.
Amidst calls to personalize learning and blend K–12 classrooms, all too often we stop short of specifics. When the Highlander Institute and the Clayton Christensen Institute came together last year to plan the 2016 Blended and Personalized Learning Conference, our goal was to organize an event that focused on the tactical and practical. We also wanted an event that put practitioners at the center of the conversation so as to ensure that practices in the field are keeping pace with blended and personalized learning rhetoric.
To that end, we invited over 150 leaders and teachers from around the country to participate in a daylong meeting of the minds in Providence, R.I. These practitioners had demonstrated willingness to innovate in their classrooms and schools, and a number had already seen promising results since implementing blended and personalized models.
Over the course of the conversations, participants shared their best strategies for seeding and scaling innovative instructional models. Far and away, the refrain that came up again and again was not around any one instructional model or software tool; rather, participants continuously stressed the importance of managing change. The following report synthesizes some of the key themes that emerged as these early adopters shared their change management tips from the frontlines.
Though the constant updates can be annoying as twitter just to iterate itself towards monetization and permanent relevancy in a finicky digital landscape, among the changes I like is the ability to embed images. Other channels like tumblr have always had this, but not so with twitter. So when Sam Boswell tweeted the image above–being the right-brain idiot that I am–I clicked, and there was much irony in what I saw. A conceptual framework for learning in digital networks! (Get it? I was learning about digital networks on a digital network? Tough crowd.)
Collaborative problem-solving is a nuanced process that folds overlapping concepts and competencies together–social interaction and knowledge building. This applies to formal training through eLearning or adaptive platforms, or informal participation in social networks (e.g., twitter).
We’ve talked before about learning through social networks. The image is an artifact from a 2010 study by Patrick Griffin from the University of Melbourne in Australia. One thing that makes it interesting is the way it distinguishes between collaboration in problem-solving and learning in digital networks rather than simply making collaborative problem-solving a characteristic of learning in digital networks.
Like meeting your spouse on the Internet, earning a degree online went from unthinkable to mainstream in a few short decades.
Despite their well-documented scandals, we have for-profit universities to thank for popularizing online learning. They pioneered online degree options, and while enrollment in online degree programs at for-profit universities has dipped, overall online enrollments are up thanks to their growth at public and nonprofit universities.
We wanted to understand the emergence of online options at universities with long histories of on-campus instruction. So, using data from the U.S. government’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), we looked at recent changes in the availability of online degrees at nonprofit 4-year colleges and universities.
We found that the number of four-year schools with online degree programs rose significantly. Among top-ranked schools, nearly 75% offer online degrees, and about half are increasing their online degree offerings. The fastest adopters of online learning include both public and private colleges and universities, including some academic heavyweights like Harvard and Johns Hopkins.
In 2013–14, a remarkable 20.5% (154,636) of all Master’s degrees were earned by students in the field of education. Only the field of business boasts a higher percentage of total Master’s degrees (25.5%). It is a fair assumption that most individuals with a Master’s degree in education do not plan to teach in higher education, but rather choose graduate school for (re)certification, career advancement, and/or economic incentives. The percentage drop in the proportion of doctoral degrees earned in education adds credence to the above claim. Doctorates in education trail such fields as social and behavioral science, natural science and mathematics, and computer sciences and engineering.
Given that many individuals that have a Master’s degree in education teach, or will teach, in K-12 classrooms, I feel it is imperative to think about the ideas of digital pedagogy that run rampant in schools of education and teacher preparation programs. How do we prepare classroom teachers to use digital tools and pedagogies? What implicit or explicit assumptions do graduate education programs make about digital learning and pedagogy? How does this affect elementary and primary school students? While it is extremely important to think about how we prepare graduate teachers, I think it is equally important to think about how and what those graduate classes teach K-12 teachers. Graduate schools of education provide a pivotal opportunity for instruction with critical digital pedagogy. If graduate teachers are not trained in, or with, critical digital pedagogy, then classroom teachers may also find this skill set lacking. As a result, young students will remain unexposed to critical digital pedagogy within our schools.
One of the fundamental theses of critical pedagogy rests in the assertion that education is not an ideologically neutral task. A critical digital pedagogy extends this line of thought to include the intrinsic non neutrality of digital tools, practices, and pedagogies. Jesse Stommel writes, “education (and, to an even greater extent, edtech) has misrepresented itself as objective, quantifiable, apolitical.” The misrepresentation Stommel highlights is evident in the pedestrian and positivist digital pedagogy common in graduate schools of education.
Technology advancements have made online learning environments seamless, and our daily and nearly continuous exposure to online modes for communication in almost all areas of our lives seems to have made almost everyone comfortable working online. But is the distinction between online learning and campus-based instruction disappearing? And are all teaching faculty necessarily prepared to teach online?
The lines between online learning and campus-based courses might appear to be blurring over time, but it's important to realize that there are, and always will be, differences. Asking faculty to move their courses online may be deceptively simple. That's why co-authors Judith Boettcher and Rita-Marie Conrad have refined a list of 14 best practices based on core learning principles to help faculty succeed in creating effective online courses.
Here, we've asked Designing for Learning consultant and author Judith V. Boettcher about the development of these best practices and their impact for online learning. [The list of 14 best practices is included at the end of this article.]
Google Australia has launched The Digital Garage, a new free training platform designed to assist small businesses with website creation, online marketing, social media, e-commerce and more.
In a statement launching the product, head of Google Marketing Solutions Australia John Ball described The Digital Garage as “a free training platform from Google to help anyone increase their knowledge of all things digital, from website creation and online marketing, to social media, e-commerce and beyond”.
The Digital Garage, which will be delivered as “bite-size” videos, features 90 training modules covering the aforementioned topics. The Digital Garage will allow business owners to set their own goals as workers undertake the course. Those who complete the course will receive a certificate from Google, supported by IAB Australia.
This qualitative research project by Dr Sonia Livingstone Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE and Julian Sefton-Green Principal Research Fellow at the Department of Media & Communication, LSE, followed a class of London teenagers over the course of a year to find out more about how they are operating in the online digital world.
The study shows how individual students interact (often very differently) with online technology and it examines relationships between home and school identifying some of the (serious) issues and areas of conflict that arise.
"In exploring the lives of these young people within and beyond the bounds of the class and the school, this book offers a rich portrait of young people’s everyday lives. Most simply, we wanted to get beyond the many fearful claims circulating among adults about today’s youth - that they are so immersed in the online world that they cannot concentrate on learning, that they neglect family life, that they disrespect their parents and teachers, even that they no longer establish their own values or sustain a sense of privacy"
In a discussion piece in the English and Media Centre blog, Julian writes:
" ...attempts to use the media across the boundary of home and school were actually seriously policed, or did not function as intended. SIMS worked really well as a form of digital surveillance while all too often the VLE didn't work or wasn't properly understood by either teachers or students. Mobile phones, which could of course be very useful, were forbidden in school. For all the talk about living in a connected world, the students didn't want teachers or parents to have access to their world and the same was true of the adults."
This longitudinal research looks at at experience as well as outcomes, something that is sometimes missing from a great deal of educational research. You can buy the report here or read it free online. The work is shared under a Creative Commons BY NC SA Licence.
Over the last two years, Google has taken its popular applications and outfitted them for the classroom. While many schools and districts continue to use existing learning management systems, such as Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle and Schoology, Google’s Classroom platform is increasingly catching teachers’ eyes.
Many schools already use Google’s suite of productivity tools — Docs, Sheets and Slides. What Classroom aims to provide is a way to package these apps together and add features unique to what teachers and students need. In short, Classroom wants to be a lightweight learning management system.
The number of students who enroll in U.S. community colleges tends to be inversely related to the economy. When the economy is good and jobs are plentiful, potential (and enrolled) students may put off their education in order to work. When the economy is not strong and jobless rates are higher, students may take the opportunity to learn new skills and continue their education. So the community college enrollment decline that we are seeing across the United States is in part a result of this cyclical pattern. However, in a countertrend, community colleges have seen growth in the e-learning field. In fact, according to a 2015 national distance education survey: “eLearning enrollments have accounted for nearly all student enrollment growth at community colleges during the past eleven years.”1
Universities are traditionally seen as exclusive institutions for the few, not the many. But that is changing as a new wave of online courses throws open the doors of academia to all.
Led by world renowned American institutions like MIT and Harvard, this push to democratise learning is being taken up in Australia too.
Learning Designer. Produced by Xube, this video gives an overview of the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) Research Programme's Learning Designer projec
There was a time when Richard Addiscott scoffed at the idea of working in higher education: “My perception was that it was somewhere to go in the twilight of your career. And that tweed jackets with elbow patches and corduroy pants were the order of the day.”
The stereotypes quickly faded when Addiscott arrived at Curtin University in Perth at the beginning of last year, working as director of IT planning, governance and security.
“It reset my thinking,” the former BAE Systems information security consultant told a Gartner Security and Risk Management summit in Sydney. “It’s one of the most forward thinking, dynamic and complex environments a security professional can work in. And that’s only been amplified since joining. It’s far more competitive than I could have imagined.”
Last year, Western Australia's largest university identified a shadow IT problem caused by a lack of trust between the IT department and the fast-moving innovative business units. Addiscott described it as a ‘trust chasm’. But there's now a plan to fill the gap.
Using technology in schools is no longer just about preparing our students for college and career. Not only do they need the skills to navigate and utilize technology, but they need to understand how technology can connect them with people, places, and resources that were previously unreachable.
In 2014, I wrote about strategies for edtech success in the new school year, and in 2015, I wrote about edtech teaching trends for the new school year. Well, I’ve spotted some tools and strategies that have amazing potential to empower students and teachers to engage and learn more with the world beyond their school. So this year, I’m sharing my high hopes for how some of the new powerful tools out there could be used in your school or classroom.
Adaptive learning, which brings the benefits of one-on-one tutoring to large numbers of students with instruction tailored to the learner, has garnered attention since the 1970s.
But while it’s a common topic in education circles and technology is now widely available to make it happen, translating traditional lectures to an adaptive learning format takes time, expertise and budget dollars. In other words, adopting adaptive learning is arduous.
Broadly, adaptive learning involves computers being used for interactive teaching, with the materials adapted based on each student’s needs, as their responses demonstrate.
The World Conference on Computers in Education (WCCE 2017), organised by the International Federation for Information Processing and hosted by the Irish Computer Society, will take place in Dublin on 3rd-6th July 2017.
It is my great pleasure to welcome you to the World Conference on Computers in Education 2017 (WCCE 2017), to be held in Dublin, Ireland, 3rd – 6th July 2017. On behalf of the International Programme Committee (IPC), we ask you to join us for this significant conference. I am delighted that we are being hosted in the heart of Dublin by the Irish Computer Society, who have supported and been responsible for particularly important developments in this field.
Governments, schools and systems as well as the philanthropic community have invested heavily in technology to keep up with the demands of 21st century learners. Even after years of huge public and private investments and the sheer number of technology-in-education initiatives (1:1 computing, e-Rate, P-TECH, STEM), one would think that students’ use of digital tools and technology for learning in K-12 settings would be ubiquitous. It is in fact the contrary. While the pervasive use of tablets, smartphones, laptops and digital education content is expanding around us, in the classroom, students are not actively using these technologies for learning—even within well-equipped classrooms where access is not the problem. AdvancED® research has found that examples of technology being put to use by students to strengthen learning are barely evident in classrooms today.
After conducting over 140,000 direct classroom observations in K-12 schools in the U.S. and across the globe, AdvancED has uncovered that there are still relatively few classrooms in which students’ use of digital tools and technology is a regular part of a student’s school experience.
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