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Predicting the future is a fool’s errand. But that shouldn’t keep us from trying to imagine what lies ahead. After all, it is often an inspiring vision of the future that drives change.
There has been much recent talk about the future of residential universities. Even though such forecasts are fraught with peril, let me offer several predictions of what lies ahead.
Expanded Experiential Education
Everything old is new again. Ideas are continuously recycled and revived. This is certainly the case in education.
Take the notion of experiential education -- learning acquired outside the traditional classroom setting. Examples include study abroad, internships, mentored research, field experiences, clinical opportunities, public performances, and service learning opportunities.
These real world, hands-on experiences can give students insight into the world of work and future careers, help them develop job-related skills, and contribute to the welfare of their community.
But so far, experiential learning is largely an “add-on.” Except for a handful of institutions, like Drexel or Northeastern, it is not embedded in the curriculum or regarded as an intrinsic and essential element in the educational experience.
Implanting experiential learning in the pathway to a career makes sense. At a time when too many students drift for years after graduation, experiential learning might help them define their future direction. But that will require them to unpack their experience and engage in a process of reflection and critical analysis. It will require much more mentoring. As John Dewey put it, “Experience plus reflection equals learning.”
Technology-Enhanced Education 2.0
Too often, technology-enhanced education consists of little more than PowerPoint slides, clickers, chat, computer-based drills, multimedia presentations, podcast lectures, or audio and video clips.
Then there are the somewhat more advanced uses of technology, which typically involve social networking and collaboration or the creation of blogs or wikis.
Next generation technologies include interactive simulations, virtual laboratories, and truly immersive learning environments involving augmented or virtual reality. These technologies allow students to conduct an experiment virtually or traverse a historical site or engage with a case study – or create a virtual museum exhibition, a digital story, or contribute to an online, multimedia encyclopedia.
In the B.S. in Biomedical Science program at the new University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, students participate in virtual rounds organized around 16 diseases and conditions. The point is to study these from multiple perspectives: From the point of view of the community of care, of the patient, of history, biology, epidemiology, In a variety of courses, the students draw upon these materials and write up their observations and analyses.
Technology-enhanced education 2.0 requires next generation infrastructure – infrastructure that can support immersive highly interactive multimedia, powerful social experiences, and variable pace and term-less educational models.
Some doubt that such infrastructure exists. A blogger recently described "11 EdTech Advances That Will Not Happen by 2020." These included:
- A Communications Platform That Will Cut Down on E-Mail
- A Mobile Learning Platform that Will Displace The Browser Based LMS
- Instructor Accessible Analytics That Will Enable Data Driven Teaching
- A Learning Object Repository That Is Actually Used
- An Enterprise Educational Online Discussion Tool As Good As Consumer Communications Platforms
- An Online Meeting Platform That Actually Cuts Down On the Number of Face-to-Face Meetings and Conferences
All of these are actually being piloted right now.
Slack, for example, is a messaging tool that allows teams to organize communication into channels, share files, including documents, images, and spreadsheets, add comments, and send and receive notifications.
The UT System’s digital learning platform, TEx, is, at once, an e-Learning system, a stack of services, and a data collection and analytics display system. Unlike current LMS’s, TEx does not organize instructional content or assessments into separate files, folders, or tabs. It incorporates its own note taking and indexing tools.
TEx can consolidate data from multiple silos, including the Student Information System, the Learning Management System, the Constituent Relationships Management System, and various apps, allowing access to unprecedented intelligence about student engagement, persistence, pace, performance, social interactions, and self-efficacy moves. These data will, in turn, allow for the personalization of content, pace, and instructional pathways; the identification of bottlenecks; timely interventions when students are confused or disengaged; and continuous improvements in the learning experience. TEx’s dashboards alert students and faculty when learners are off-track, allowing interventions in real time.
Meanwhile, searchable content repositories, like Intellus’s learning platform, combine indexing and analytics algorithms to support personalized instruction and learning and make a wide range of pedagogical tools, readings, and instructional videos available on demand.
Learning by Doing
Students might annotate a text or play or work of art, map and analyze data, visually represent change over time, document a neighborhood or community. The web can then make student projects and research publicly accessible.