Learning Innovation

It's somewhat of a core tenet amongst our edtech crowd that we should be platform agnostic. Mac, Windows, Linux - our e-learning materials will work as long as you can fire up a browser.

Our students want to interact with their courses on mobile devices. The problem is that we have built our online platforms mostly around the browser. The LMS providers are all putting out mobile apps, but so far I have found that these apps offer a poor experience compared to the browser.

Have you experimented with building a course yet with the new iTunes U Course Manager?

An understanding of the causes and consequences of economic inequality may be one of the most important issues for any educated person to grapple with, yet the number of our students who read The Price of Inequality is most likely very small.

Whispersync is Amazon's new feature that allows for Kindle e-books and Audible audiobooks to sync up. This makes perfect sense, as Amazon owns Audible, and can leverage common platforms and accounts to provide a seamless reading experience across e-book and audiobook reading methods.

Does it seem to you that every edtech vendor and educational software provider is pitching some new social tool? Yes, learning is social. We get it. But does your educational platform really need to be social as well?

One of the best aspects of working an academic technology gig is the opportunity to work with edtech companies. Even if you are a hardcore roll-your-own / build it local / open source / edupunk true believer, eventually you'll find yourself scouting around for an edtech vendor partner to meet your campus IT needs.

I hope that you will be able to join us on Monday, 9/24 for a discussion of the IHE and Babson Survey Research Group's excellent report Digital Faculty: Professors and Technology, 2012.