digital skills – Davey Moloney

read

| May 27, 2019

https://www.tonybates.ca/2019/05/26/the-coming-crisis-in-canadian-post-secondary-education-1-external-developments/ by

I don’t normally get excited about talk of digital technology disrupting higher education, especially when that talk originates from south of the Canadian border.

MOOCs are an interesting and useful development, but they have settled into a niche for continuing education and corporate training rather than disrupting the current system.

There have been many claims for how artificial intelligence is going to revolutionise higher education. However, at the moment there’s not a lot of AI applications out there that go much beyond pretty standard learning analytics and quantitative assessment and feedback. (If you know of any more interesting applications of AI in HE send in an article for the special edition on AI in HE in the International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education.)

However, digital technologies are already disrupting both the economy and society, and public higher education in Canada is ripe for disruption, not directly but in insidious ways.

As we shall see in the second post in this series, Canadian universities and colleges are mostly absorbing digital technologies into their regular teaching, rather than using it to disrupt the system. But that is just my point. We need to start rethinking the curriculum, rethinking the way we teach, and how we organise our institutions, to take full advantage of what digital technologies can offer.

More importantly, we need to do this to prepare our students better for a digital society and most important of all, if our institutions don’t change, they will eventually be undermined by large multinational online corporations that can do more cheaply and effectively many of the things that universities and colleges are presently doing. The loss to society though if this happens would be immense.

What Canadian post-secondary institutions need to do to avoid negative disruption or even extinction is to make themselves fit for purpose in a digital age. This is what I want to discuss over the next three posts

You can see a presentation on this topic that I made at CNIE 2019 here.

read

daveymoloney

| May 3, 2019

Read "Rethinking the purpose of online learning: 5. Setting priorities" by Tony Bates

In this post I want to set priorities, but before doing that, I need to add a couple of other purposes which I took for granted. Indeed I should have started with these... The most important reason for online learning for most institutions was to increase student access, with 95% of institutions rating it as either important (23%) or very important (72%). Closely linked in second place was the opportunity to access students from outside the regular catchment area (88%). This is no surprise: student access and flexibility have always been a priority for online learning, bringing in new students, and enabling students with part-time or full time responsibilities in work and/or family to pursue their studies. Also rated as important (82%) was to increase the rate of credential completion, presumably by allowing students to take courses online that would not otherwise be available on campus because numbers were capped or courses were not offered on campus in some semesters. A high proportion of institutions (77%) also rated student retention highly. I interpret this to mean that although completion rates for individual courses may be slightly lower for online than campus-based courses, the flexibility they provide allow more students to complete overall. Getting down the list we see the value of online learning for ‘providing pedagogic improvements’ (71%), a pretty general category that might include developing skills for a digital society. Ranked at the very bottom of reasons offered to institutions was to reduce or contain costs, but even here 47% of institutions ranked this as important. It is important though to remember that this question asked for opinions. Although the survey went to institutional leaders, such as Provosts, it is probably answered by several different people in the same institution. Knowing their opinions is valuable, but it’s not quite the same as identifying actual priorities in terms of resource allocation, for instance.

📜 Read “Rethinking the purpose of online learning: 5. Setting priorities”

by Tony Bates

read

daveymoloney

| April 9, 2019

Read "hands-on digital skills" by Melissa Highton

This blog is another about some more institutionally provided technologies. #openblog19 At University of Edinburgh we know that our people are our strength. This is a place of knowledge creation, and a place of knowledge sharing. It is a place in which we invest in the digital skills of our staff and students. It is true in any job that there is a need for learning and development and when you work in the digital sector the need is even more urgent in a rapidly changing environment. As Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services I am lucky to have responsibility not only for the institutionally provided learning technology, but also the institutionally provided digital skills training provision. You know me, I like to have a strategy or framework for such things. Our strategic investment in Lynda.com has been a huge success. The digital skills training team are excellent and they have invested the kind of time and effort in managing this service for the institution which has brought us return in terms of take-up and impact which puts us at the forefront of the UK HE sector. All staff and student at University of Edinburgh are offered an account with Lynda.com. We’ve seen a steady increase over 3 years to the current 15,000 users.

📜 Read “hands-on digital skills” blogpost

by Melissa Highton