ed. We welcome Sasha Thackaberry with this post summarizing observations at last week’s WCET conference in Denver. We met Sasha while consulting at Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C) and were impressed with her breadth of knowledge. We’ve asked her to provide her own take on the WCET conference.
It was my first time at the WCET Annual Meeting in Denver. I was extremely fortunate to attend and thrilled to present with Luke Dowden, whom I met for the first time at the conference. To hang on to some of the great learning, I wanted to create a brief recap of the conference and some thoughts on the next evolution of edtech in higher ed.
One theme that emerged from the conference was that higher education is moving beyond an era of traditional online courses and programs toward a more simultaneously disaggregated and integrated future. This evolution is creative, messy, and occurring on multiple fronts, with the twin drivers of tightening budgets and the need for college-ready graduates propelling new models of learning and teaching. Individual and highly specialized innovations are converging to create entirely new ecosystems of learning, both pedagogically and architecturally.
The overall tenor of the conference was future-forward. Not focused on limitations, instead the sessions and keynotes centered around a common theme: We can rebuild it. We have the technology…. We can make it better, stronger, faster, (and cheaper.)