Learning Innovation

Adrian Sannier is one of those edtech leaders who is difficult to pigeonhole. An academic working for a big publishing company. A truth-teller operating within a buttoned-down publisher. An idealist operating within the real world of business, profit and loss. Adrian's title at Pearson is Digital Strategist and Senior Vice President of Product - he is the guy behind OpenClass.

Like many of you, I took the time to print out and carefully read Lev Gonick's essay "The Year Ahead in IT, 2013". The entire essay is worth spending time with, as you will find a number of challenging ideas and insights embedded in Gonick's writing.

Michael Feldstein is "an educational technology consultant and a lifelong educator," with previous gigs as "senior program manager of MindTap at Cengage Learning and principal product strategy manager for Academic Enterprise Solutions (formerly Academic Enterprise Initiative, or AEI) at Oracle." He is also a terrific speaker (recommend Michael for any keynote you need keynoted), an excellent and prolific writer, and someone who seems to know everybody else in edtech.

This Hanukkah/Christmas my wife and I gave each other Fitbit Ones, a wearable digital activity tracker that measures steps, distance, calories burned, stairs climbed and sleep.

Phil Hill is a "consultant and industry analyst covering the educational technology market primarily for higher education", and someone that I pay close attention whenever he speaks or writes about edtech. What follows is an edited (for length) version of some of Phil's predictions for edtech in 2013, courtesy of the folks at Zer0 to 5ive, (with whom I worked with to secure and edit the interview).

The fact that MOOCS and online courses have sparked new conversations on your campus about teaching and learning is a terrific development. We should be grateful whenever attention is paid to teaching. The problem is that neither MOOCS or online courses are, in themselves, a strategy to meet the challenges we all face in higher ed. MOOCS and online courses are a means, not an end, and should be understood as such.

The most important change in higher education is not the growth in online learning, the rise of the MOOCS or the mobilization and digitization of curriculum. Rather, it is the change from courses as the product of one (faculty) practitioner to a team approach, where faculty (as subject matter experts) collaborate with learning designers, librarians, media specialists, and technology professionals to design, deliver and evaluate the course.

2012 was a great year for concise nonfiction books due to the growth of platforms such as Kindle Singles, TED Books, and Atavist books. I suspect that we will be seeing many more concise nonfiction e-books come out in 2013.