Today I facilitated a faculty development workshop at Aurora University, sponsored by the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and the IT Department. I always enjoy sessions like this, particularly with the ability to focus our discussions squarely on technology in support of teaching and learning. The session was titled “Emerging Trends in Educational Technology and Implications for Faculty”. Below are very rough notes, slides, and a follow-up.
Apparent Dilemma and Challenge
Building off of previous presentations at ITC Network, there is an apparent dilemma:
- One one hand, little has changed: Despite all the hype and investment in ed tech, there is only one new fully-established LMS vendor in the past decade (Canvas), and the top uses of LMS are for course management (rosters, content sharing, grades). Plus the MOOC movement fizzled out, at least for replacing higher ed programs or courses.
- On the other hand, everything has changed: There are examples of redesigned courses such as Habitable Worlds at ASU that are showing dramatic results in the depth of learning by students.
The best lens to understand this dilemma is Everett Rogers’ Diffusions of Innovations and the technology adoption curve and categories. Geoffrey Moore extended this work to call out a chasm between Innovators / Early Adopters on the left side (wanting advanced tech, OK with partial solutions they cobble together, pushing the boundary) and Majority / Laggards on the right side (wanting full solution – just make it work, make it reliable, make it intuitive). Whereas Moore described Crossing the Chasm for technology companies (moving from one side to the other), in most cases in education we don’t have that choice. The challenge in education is Straddling the Chasm (a concept I’m developing with a couple of consulting clients as well as observations from e-Literate TV case studies):
This view can help explain how advances in pedagogy and learning approaches generally fit on the left side and have not diffused into mainstream, whereas advances in simple course management generally fit on the right side and have diffused, although we want more than that. You can also view the left side as faculty wanting to try new tools and faculty on the right just wanting the basics to work.
The trend in market moving away from walled garden offers education the chance to straddle the chasm.
Implications for Faculty
1) The changes are not fully in place, and it’s going to be a bumpy ride. One example is difficulty in protecting privacy and allowing accessibility in tools not fully centralized. Plus, the LTI 2.0+ and Caliper interoperability standards & frameworks are still a work in progress.
2) While there are new possibilities to use commercial tools, there are new responsibilities as the left side of chasm and non-standard apps require faculty and local support (department, division) to pick up support challenges.
3) There is a challenge is balance innovation with the student need for consistency across courses, mostly in terms of navigation and course administration.
4) While there are new opportunities for student-faculty and student-student engagement, there are new demands on faculty to change their role and to be available on the students’ schedule.
5) Sometimes, simple is best. It amazes me how often the simple act of moving lecture or content delivery online is trivialized. What is enabled here is the ability for students to work at their own pace and replay certain segments without shame or fear of holding up their peers (or even jumping ahead and accelerating).
Slides
Follow-Up
One item discussed in the workshop was how to take advantage of this approach in Aurora’s LMS, Moodle. While Moodle has always supported the open approach and has supported LTI standards, I neglected to mention a missing element. Commercial apps such as Twitter, Google+, etc, do not natively follow LTI standards, which are education-specific. The EduAppCenter was created to help with this challenge by creating a library of apps and wrappers around apps that are LTI-compliant.
“The best lens to understand this dilemma is Everett Rogers’ Diffusions of Innovations and the technology adoption curve and categories.”
I realize those are only rough notes and maybe they represent the opinions of your Aurora gathering rather than your own but I wonder whether Rogers really is the best lens. The categories he uses, at least as they are conventionally understood, seem like caricatures rather than deeply sympathetic portraits of the people he is trying to describe. Take for example the way “Laggards” (which itself seems like a biased/loaded term) is described on Wikipedia:
Laggards: “They are the last to adopt an innovation. Unlike some of the previous categories, individuals in this category show little to no opinion leadership. These individuals typically have an aversion to change-agents. Laggards typically tend to be focused on “traditions”, lowest social status, lowest financial liquidity, oldest among adopters, and in contact with only family and close friends.”
There are some grains of truth in the above description but I don’t think that so called laggards would either describe themselves this way or would think that they have low social status or have no opinion leadership. Take for example two of the most well known conservative adopters of ed-tech technology in recent years: David Noble and Langdon winner. Those theorists of technology actually have a lot of academic influence (at least as much perhaps as Rogers depending on how you measure it) and Roger’s caricature hardly begins to fathom the political and social and economic reasons why they’ve looked with gimlet-eyes at ed-tech innovation and the whole confounded notion that tech progress somehow equates to social or educational progress. To cross that chasm one needs to understand those “laggards” on their own terms (and probably dispense with the whole laggard terminology too).
To that end maybe use Rogers, but expand beyond that to include the pantheons and paradigms of the so-called laggards. They’re not simple knee-jerk weak-minded reactionists who are averse to risk. They have have a set of frameworks and positions that are as deeply thought out as the ones on the left side of Mind-wires’ cartoon.
Luke, these are the rough notes of what I presented, so it is my usage of Rogers’ work as applicable and not coming from the participants (I’m the guilty party).
You make some good points, but I would not characterize Rogers’ categorizations as ‘caracitures’, at least based on the meaning “in order to create a comic or grotesque effect”. No categorization is 100% accurate nor do they apply in every point. But they can be very useful to describe typical attributes, as long as the overall model holds. In my opinion, Rogers’ model has held up quite well over time. But, as both Moore and I are trying to do, these models and categories can be extended as learn more and apply in specific fields.
So picking two specific examples does not kill a model, nor does terminology that some might not agree with (particularly the “lowest social status” that you have highlighted). For every David Noble, I could probably give you at least 50 “laggards” who do fit the description. Rogers, by the way, did not use the category ‘laggards’ in a pejorative sense to mean “simple knee-jerk weak-minded reactionists”.
The challenge in my mind is to adapt and apply the model with slight revisions (or abandon if it doesn’t prove descriptive). Perhaps the laggard terminology could be updated to make this more useful, but I will strongly argue that the model applies quite well.
A final point – I think part of the disconnect here, and one that I should address in the future, is to be more clear on the “innovation” in mind. I do not think ed tech for technology’s sake is an innovation. It is the useful and appropriate application of technology to improve education that I have in mind. One example used in the workshop was the usage of Smart Sparrow and Piazza within the Habitable Worlds course that seems to be leading to deeper understanding of concepts and what one workshop participant labeled “autonomy” – students taking ownership of their learning, learning how to learn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxZ4YVw2_NI
Another example from the workshop is a course at Middlebury College that flipped the classroom with YouTube video (discovering this on their own and not jumping on a bandwagon). Simple changes that led to “pedagogical breakthroughs”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udc3OMyE4Hs
My slides, at least without the context of the actual talk or workshop, do not capture this nuance. I need to update graphics to avoid this misunderstanding.
Shorter version – I do not mean using Udacity MOOC for remedial courses at SJSU. With that example, I would be proud to be a laggard.