1.4: Imagining Technology in Education Tomorrow

Following Stephenson’s example from The Diamond Age, we will imagine how emerging technologies from the foreseeable future can help us meet instructional needs in the online environment. Being educators, we will start with the instructional needs when making predictions. To do this, we will focus on needs related to helping students successfully meet the learning objectives: sharing resources, facilitating activities, and conducting assessment strategies.

Sharing Resources

Almost all online instructors begin the teaching and learning process with sharing resources with students. Currently, this process requires instructors to create new and/or find existing resources that relate to the topics being studied and then to disseminate them to the students. Unfortunately, some end the process with just sharing resources instead of going further to facilitate interactivity or to assess student performance. Students may miss opportunities to participate in robust, collaborative learning experiences. Here are some ways in which we think the resource sharing process will change.

User-created content

Learners will not only have the opportunity to add value to structured courses through the use of emerging technologies such as blogs and wikis; many of them will create their own content which can be massaged and developed through group participation. Ordinary people will become creators and producers. Learners will truly begin to take control. Examples can be seen at the website called Wifi Cafés, where Internet users can add the locations of their favourite Internet cafe to an open list, and Current TV, where people—mostly nonprofessionals—create television segments and shows. Similarly, students, parents, teachers, and others will continue to create and disseminate educational content on a large scale. Instructors will require students to create content to share with their peers.

User-created content provides a challenge, in that it will be difficult to verify the accuracy of each educational resource. Educators often comment that Wikipedia, while very useful, is made by experts and non-experts alike, potentially decreasing its credibility. While research conducted by Nature magazine determined that Wikipedia comes close to the Encyclopedia Britannica in terms of accuracy of science entries (Giles, 2005), it also shows that collaborative approaches to knowledge sharing require facilitation and editing. No matter what printbased or online source students use to substantiate their course work, they should use multiple sources to check the validity, reliability, and potential bias of information.

To counter this problem, educators will adopt a practice used by eBay and other commercial websites (see the description of similar rating systems in Intelligent Searching above). Namely, people can rate individual pieces of educational content. Users who share educational content will have a dynamic profile that changes each time someone rates their contributions. For example, someone with high ratings would have the title of “trusted content provider”. Experts would have an equal opportunity to check the accuracy of user-created content.

The “Long Tail”

In October 2004, Chris Anderson of Wired magazine published an article outlining the long tail of business. The term “long tail” refers to a statistical concept of the very low part of a distribution where the population “tails off.” The long tail marketing idea is that the Internet is capable of reaching tiny markets, which were previously ignored by marketers because they were too expensive to reach. Online companies can use the Web to sell a vast range of products from mainstream popular items right down to the singularity of one unique unit (Anderson, 2004). Statistically, the sum of the less popular items can outnumber the sum of the popular items.

This “long tail” will also apply to learning. More resources—commercial, instructor- and user-created—are already increasingly available for learners who have, up to now, been somewhat marginalized. English as a second language, international learners, gifted, learning disabled, and physically challenged students, and people with behavioural disorders will all benefit. For example, a website that offers resources for learning disabled students is http://www.npin.org. An excellent site for gifted students is www.hoagiesgifted.org.

In general, more user-created educational content becomes available every day. Of course, these usercreated resources will draw fewer learners than popular websites like Discovery School or the Exploratorium. However, the accumulated total of learners who use the less popular educational resources—the long tail—will outnumber the learners who visit the popular sites.

Facilitating Interactivity

How instructors approach the design of their courses is profoundly affected by their teaching styles (Indiana State University, 2005). The lecture-based approach to teaching is most often used in on-campus courses, and it is what instructors are most familiar with. Findings from research have shown that the lecture-based approach often fails to engage students in online courses (Ally, 2004; Conrad, 2004; Gulati, 2004). Instructors unfamiliar with other instructional strategies need time to explore them while conceptualizing how they will design their online course.

The opportunity to design, develop, and teach in a new medium opens the door to learning new pedagogies. Applying new approaches may affect how instructors perceive their teaching role. In distance education this role shift is often described as a transition from a lecturer to a facilitator (Brown, Myers & Roy, 2003; Collison, Elbaum, Haavind & Tinker, 2000; Conrad, 2004; Maor & Zariski, 2003; Young, Cantrell & Shaw, 2001). This transition is a process that takes time and support, and often it isn’t considered when instructors are asked to develop an online course. During the development process, instructors are often surprised at how much is involved in course development and in conceptualizing their role and how they will teach. If the design of the support infrastructure takes this transitional process into consideration, it can positively influence how instructors view their role and, subsequently, how they design their course. This in turn may also affect student success rates in online courses.

As instructors design or redesign their courses to incorporate emerging technologies they may find that their role and that of their students change. In the example of an online course where there is “no there there,” a student cannot sit passively at the back of the classroom. To be present and seen in an online class, students must be active and involved. Similarly, an online instructor cannot stand in front of the class and conduct a lecture. Because the online environment differs from a physical classroom, the instructor’s role changes as well. For some instructors, shifting from a lecturer to a facilitator role can be a major change in teaching style. Facilitating interactivity in an online course places the instructor alongside the students instead of in front of the classroom.

Designing courses with activities that encourage collaboration, communication, and project-based learning can help instructors step out of the lecturer role. Web 2.0 technologies can be a resource for instructors as they construct new modalities in how they teach and how their students learn. Interactivity can be stimulated by a variety of techniques, ranging from posing questions to be discussed in groups to involving students in projects that include the creation of wikis, blogs, and podcasts.

Forum participation via cell phone

In the future, learners will use cell phones to participate in threaded discussion forums. Instructors and students will use cell phone web browsers to navigate and read threads. Text-to-voice software will read threads to users, giving options such as press 1 to reply, press 2 to hear next message, press 3 to hear previous message, etc. Teachers and learners will use cell phone text message capabilities or voice-to-text software to dictate the thread content. The latter concept requires voice-to-text technology to improve.

For students who prefer it or who don’t have a computer, this technology has the potential to provide more flexibility for learning. ClearTXT is a good example of a company that has already started working in this direction. However, voice recognition software still needs to be dramatically improved.

Assessing Performance

Chapter 14, Assessment and Evaluation, discusses various assessment strategies, so we will focus on how emerging technologies will enable instructors to assess student performance in new, more authentic, ways. As audio, video, and computer applications improve, it will be easier to assess certain knowledge, physical skills, and even attitudes. Virtual reality technologies will also enable students to demonstrate the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to evaluate themselves using methods that they choose (for more, see Chapter 11, Accessibility and Universal Design).

Voice recognition and intelligent tutoring applications

Today, students can record MP3 audio files to demonstrate proficiency in speaking another language. Tomorrow, students will be able to hold conversations with intelligent tutoring programs that use voice recognition software to analyze their phrases before responding, making corrections, or changing levels of difficulty to accommodate their needs. In non-language situations, instructors can use the same combination of applications to assess law student responses in mock court cases or drama student responses during readings.

At other levels, voice recognition and intelligent tutoring will provide multiple avenues for assessing students’ true abilities, reducing the overemphasis on standardized, written tests. Primary school students can demonstrate proficiencies such as spelling aloud or reciting poetry, and secondary students, by answering questions about government or literature.

Electronic portfolios

An e-portfolio is a digitized collection of documents and resources that represent an individual’s achievements. The user can manage the contents, and usually grant access to appropriate people. Currently, there are a variety of e-portfolio types with varied functionality. E-portfolios are increasingly being used for coursework and other assessment purposes.

While electronic portfolios exist today, very few, if any solutions have reached their full potential. Administrators want a tool that allows them to aggregate student results for accreditation audits and other institutional assessments. Principals, deans, and department chairs want a tool that lets them assess program effectiveness via student work. Namely, they want to see if students can achieve program objectives, and, if not, where the department, college, or school falls short. Instructors, advisors, and counselors want to assess student performance and to guide students through the learning process over time. This could be throughout a four-year period at a university, or during a particular degree program. Finally, students want to be able to bridge to careers by using electronic portfolios to demonstrate their skills, knowledge, and attitudes that pertain to job opportunities.

Emerging technology will enable us to make such a tool, or a collection of tools, and integrate them with other infrastructure pieces that improve workflow. For example, students transferring from a two-year community college to a four-year university can use an electronic portfolio to demonstrate required competencies. By this means a student can avoid taking unnecessary classes, and advisors can help the student plot a course after a quick review of the materials and reflections.

Some of the challenges raised by this idea revolve around the electronic portfolio process, rather than the tool or tools. For instance, organizations may need to clarify what constitutes evidence of competence or even what learning objectives and prerequisites are critical in a particular field. Electronic portfolios may very well inspire changes to long-standing articulation agreements that will not work in the future.

The Learning Environment and E-learning 2.0

Whether a classroom is on ground or online, for the learning environment to be stimulating, reinforcing, easy to access, relevant, interactive, challenging, participatory, rewarding, and supportive, it should provide input, elicit responses, and offer assessment and feedback. In an online learning environment, these elements are even more critical because learners are working outside of the usual classroom social environment.

The Internet itself has always had the capacity to be a learning medium. Services such as Google and Wikipedia are probably used more frequently as learning tools than any formal courses or learning management systems. Web 2.0 provides new opportunities for learners through participation and creation. In a 2.0 course, instructors will no longer be able to rely simply on presenting material; they will be involved in a mutually stimulating, dynamic learning environment.

E-learning 2.0 is the application of the principles of Web 2.0. Through collaboration and creation, E-learning 2.0 will enable more student-centred, constructivist, social learning with a corresponding increase in the use of blogs, wikis, and other social learning tools.

Rosen (2006) offers a perspective of what a 2.0 course would look like: they “should never be a hodge-podge assembly of old methodologies delivered through new technologies. They should be a true ‘2.0 course,’ rather than a self-propelled PowerPoint presentation or CBT training presented on a PDA. 2.0 courses provide just-in-time training. They are used as a resource—not a one-time event. A 2.0 course lasts 15 to 20 minutes, runs smoothly on any configuration of device (high resolution, portable) or PDA, and delivers smoothly on all versions of web browsers. Finally, 2.0 courses incorporate the best-of-breed techniques from web design and instructional design” (p. 6).

The term e-learning

Distance learning, distributed learning, online learning, e-learning, virtual learning, asynchronous learning, computer supported collaborative learning, web-based learning . . . these are a few of the many terms used to describe learning in environments in which students and instructors are not physically present in the same location. In burgeoning fields, it is commonplace that a variety of terminology is used to describe a new phenomenon. Clark and Mayer (2003) chose the word e-learning and described its functionality:

[T]he “e” in e-learning refers to the “how”—the course is digitized so it can be stored in electronic form. The “learning” in e-learning refers to the “what”—the course includes content and ways to help people learn it—and the “why”—that the purpose is to help individuals achieve educational goals. (p. 13)

The term e-learning, as well as some of the other terms, will eventually disappear. Electronic delivery will become just one of the options which we will consider to optimize learning for people.

Broadband

What we call broadband today is just a beginning of the kind of network access we will see in the future. Universities are connected by a fibre optic network that works up to 10 gigabits/second. That is 10,000 times faster than the typical broadband download of 1 megabit/second. There will be a next generation of broadband which will enable speeds 10 times greater than we have now and enable downloading of high definition movies and TV shows, VoIP, video telephony, full resolution streamed video and audio and the creation of unimagined learning environments.

Learning management

E-learning 2.0 will be a challenge for learning management systems (LMS, also called course management systems). At the time of this writing, most LMS solutions are designed for Web 1.0, with minimal capability for a fully functioning interactive environment. Nevertheless, LMS vendors will gradually incorporate Web 2.0 capabilities. At this time, education LMS solutions are ahead of corporate solutions in this respect. In the immediate future, LMS solutions will continue to be primarily administrative tools and only secondarily real learning tools. Users will be challenged to find ways to use them so that they facilitate learning. For more information on learning management systems, see Chapter 7, Learning Management Systems.

Eventually, we will be able to find almost anything online. Ten years ago, a colleague said that everything current and worthwhile was already online. This is more true now with Project Gutenberg and Google Books putting libraries of books online, universities making their course materials available (e.g., MIT’s Open CourseWare), communities creating knowledge repositories with wikis, and blogs making almost everyone’s opinions available whether we want them or not.

The challenge will be for learners (all of us) to manage information overload. Much of this will happen beyond the scope of any locally installed learning management system. Google and other search engines will evolve to provide tools for people to manage it all.

Content will be organized as reusable learning objects, much as they are in learning content management systems but on a much broader scale. Wikis and folksonomies may help solve this. Simply put, a folksonomy is a collaborative method of categorizing online information so that it can be easily searched and retrieved. More commonly, it is called tagging. This term is often used in websites where people share content in an open community setting. The categories are created by the people who use the site. To see how tagging operates, go to sites such as Flickr or Del.icio.us. Learning object repositories such as ARIADNE and learning object referratories such as MERLOT facilitate the exchange of peer-reviewed learning materials in a more structured way.

Personalization and context-aware devices such as GPS (global positioning system) units will also help. Personalization is the ability of a website to adapt to its users, like Amazon.com does when it suggests other books you may like, or for the user to adapt the website for his or her own purposes like Google does when it allows you to customize what you see on its website. RSS feeds are a way of personalizing information you receive from the Internet. GPS units can locate the user so that information can be customized for that location. For example, a user who lives in Chicago but is visiting New York would receive weather information for New York.