Teaching and Learning blog

This series, produced with The Edtech Podcast, explores the implications of and questions around future tech for education. Listen for insights from experts — including contrarians — from across industry, research, and academia. Get caught up with episodes 1-5. 

How do we get beyond the tick-box or bubble filling exercise of exams and tests, whilst also measuring ‘progress’? In episode 6, we review ideas around ‘invisible assessment’ and question who benefits from ‘traditional’ and re-imagined forms of assessment, including games-based assessment. Can ‘tests’ be fun and should they be? How do we measure collaboration?

Subscribe to the Future Tech for Education on iTunes.

This series, produced with The Edtech Podcast, explores the implications of and questions around future tech for education. Listen for insights from experts — including contrarians — from across industry, research, and academia. Get caught up here with  episode 1,  episode 2, episode 3, and episode 4. 

In the latest episode of our Future Tech in Education podcast series, we dip into the world of VR and mixed reality to uncover what high-cost, high-risk learning opportunities are being made more accessible to all by this technology.

Plus, we wrap our co-curated mini series with practical suggestions for educators: be mindfully skeptical, resist fear, understand that you can start small and grow, and avoid technology for technology’s sake. This last one is harder than it sounds. Many new technologies wow us but do not have useful application to education. Learn how to make the most of technology.

Subscribe to the Future Tech for Education on iTunes. 

Being a full-time educator takes commitment, organization and time — lots and lots of time. It’s rare to find an educator at any level who finishes his or her day once class is dismissed. With limited time to focus on the many aspects of quality course instruction, educators need the best tools to maximize their time.

Ideally, leveraging said tools should focus on automating the most common tasks to which educators devote the majority of their time. Find out how leveraging the right digital learning platform can help with creating personalized lesson plans, student engagement and monitoring student progress.

Developing a lesson plan is one of the most important tasks for educators. Lesson plans set the tone for the entire course from the outset. Creating a lesson plan personalized for each course and each group of students is immensely time consuming. Educators are expected to create new and engaging plans for each day, often with very little feedback with which to work.

Engaging with students

Keeping students engaged – in class and out of class – is vital for receiving feedback on teaching materials and assessing the concepts students retain and those they struggle to understand. Traditional methods of engagement, i.e. fostering group discussions and question-and-answer periods, are particularly difficult in larger classrooms. Students get distracted more easily and educators struggle to create a rapport with each individual.

With digital learning educators can now utilize the devices students already bring into the classroom, think smartphones, tablets and laptops, to engage them in more sophisticated tasks to help develop critical thinking skills. MyLab creates a platform where students submit answers on a web-enabled device and receive immediate feedback from their instructors.

Revel assignments completed prior to class allow instructors to use classroom time more efficiently for group work and discussion Increased dialogue and feedback between students and educators can make even large classes seem more personal.

Monitoring student progress

Keeping track of student progress allows an educator to know whether students are learning on pace with the lesson plan and completing all assignments. Traditional methods used to monitor progress – homework assignments, quizzes and exams – take time to develop on the front end and time to review on the back end.

In larger classes especially, it may take several days or even weeks before students receive grades from previous assignments and exams. Delayed feedback is outdated and can be difficult for students to apply to future work.

Monitoring student achievement is easier than ever before with Revel, a platform that saves hours of time by tracking assignment completion and automating analytics. A trending column, for example, demonstrates whether students’ grades are improving or declining, making it easy to identify students who need extra attention.

Additionally, students have the opportunity to increase their own accountability by viewing real-time progress reports. With faster feedback, students can keep up with the pace of the course and address areas of difficulty as soon as they arise.

We’ve all had it happen. You spend countless hours preparing for a lecture only to watch students lose focus and disengage from class. From cellphones to that one student who manages to derail class (likely for a full 20 minutes after alerting class to the first snowfall out the window), it’s almost impossible to teach a class without some type of distraction.

As instructors, we’re tasked with a lot. Achieving maximum comprehension, information retention and improving test scores are just a few of the challenges faced in addition to maintaining student attention.

If you’re ready to take back your class time and refocus attention on course material, you’ve come to the right place. Keep reading to find out how you can leverage digital learning in your classroom to fight these distractions and foster student engagement.

Teaching your classroom in a one-size-fits-all mindset

In any classroom, there are students who learn at a different pace than the planned syllabus. Some students grasp concepts quickly, and may become bored by too much classroom time spent on a topic, while others struggle to keep up.

There are countless reasons why a student may fall behind – whether it’s an overloaded schedule or something happening in their personal life. Regardless of the reason, a student who’s struggling to keep up, is increasingly likely to disengage from class and runs the risk of falling even further behind.

When students can master basic subject level concepts away from the classroom, professors are able to refocus class time on engaging students by expanding on core concepts.

Drowning in a sea of outdated class resources

Let’s face it. No student wants an instructor who bogs them down with dozens of different paper handouts and online portals that may or may not have been constructed during the dawn of the internet.

For many students, keeping track of materials for all their classes, including textbooks and paper handouts, can be a struggle. And a student who forgets one of the 80 “essential” materials for class that day may be unable to participate.

Traditional materials like textbooks are a stark contrast to other media that students today are more familiar with. Today’s students are used to the internet, where simple keyword searches produce immediate results and relevant information on any internet-connected device.

Confining all classroom materials in an online learning management system simplifies organization by placing all class and student materials in one place. With the necessary materials easily accessible, students are free to focus on learning and staying engaged in the classroom (unless someone breaks out a fidget spinner, at which point we can’t help you).

Lecture format classes

Keeping students engaged can be particularly difficult in a large lecture setting. With dozens, or even hundreds of students in just a single class, it’s no surprise to find professors standing at the front of the room talking for the entire period and hoping that some small fraction of their wisdom is being absorbed.

Obstacles like acoustics for students in the back, or those who take advantage of class setup to escape on social media, are just a few of the challenges faced.

If this scenario sounds familiar to you, trust us when we say you’re not alone. One of the best ways to foster greater engagement in a lecture-style class is through interactive question-and-answer sessions and peer discussions supplemented by an online learning platform.

With a solution like this, professors can break a large class into groups quickly and easily, while receiving instant feedback to tailor lessons to student preferences.

Avoiding new technology

With the prevalence of social media and smartphones, it’s no surprise that today’s students expect to be constantly connected. Interacting with the world through their smartphones and tablets, it’s quite common for disconnect to occur when professors use outdated technology.

With news apps and social networking platforms enabling information to spread like wildfire, today’s students are used to information in real time. When the internet provides them the information that they need instantly, it’s common for them to lose patience with textbooks written years before their time.

Instead, professors can leverage the devices with which students are already familiar and which they bring to class, to provide a more interactive learning environment. An online learning platform makes it easy for professors to pose questions and receive immediate feedback from each student in the classroom (rather than one or two), and adjust their instructional strategies in real time.

Students today use technology more than ever — whether for research, studying or chatting every second of the day with friends. It’s no surprise that leveraging the ubiquity of digital communication can help produce countless benefits in the classroom for students and educators alike.

Online assessments have the power to give students rapid feedback, while digital tools allow instructors to provide multimedia learning experiences. Video explanations, games, online note-taking and other features all work to help keep students engaged as they read and study. With the power of digital, educators can analyze test scores and tailor instruction to suit students’ strengths and weaknesses.

Expand learning opportunities

When teaching a subject like geology or art, it’s hard to fully convey the power of a volcano or the expansiveness of a work of art with photos alone. By incorporating videos and other digital assets, course instructors can fully engage students. With digital examples in geology for example, instructors won’t just tell students how landslides happen; they can show them.

Video demonstrations allow students to take virtual field trips whenever they want, at their own pace and on their preferred devices. This video tour of the Pantheon leaves a much more lasting impression than any descriptive words ever could. Tour options take them to places they could never explore in person — at least not as part of a classroom.

In addition to learning through experiences students also need concrete skills for success. Critical thinking is an important skill that applies to almost any field, and writing can be one of the best ways to master it. 

This series, produced with The Edtech Podcast, explores the implications of and questions around future tech for education. Listen for insights from experts — including contrarians — from across industry, research, and academia. Watch episode 1,  episode 2, episode 3.

Technological change is exponential, which means it will only impact our lives more and more quickly. Among the aspects of our lives undergoing change, language usage is one of the ones being altered most drastically. New technologies also create new opportunities for learning. How must we adjust and what can we take advantage of?

Subscribe to the Future Tech for Education on iTunes.

Digital learning and technology has a short and turbulent history as creating cultural, social, generational, and socio-economic divides. The swiftness of change in society due to technological advances has disrupted just about everything we do, but in education, the disruption is perhaps the most important to consider.

There is a discontinuity in how education is evolving compared to the realities of career and society. Higher education attempts to be responsive to these changes, but the course corrections are often slow and/or don’t align well with the actual trajectory of the modern world. The solution is not clear-cut, but there are many ways higher education is trying to keep pace.

Here are 5 trends that are helping higher education to align better with the actual needs of students:

1. Online and hybrid classes have become a very popular part of the landscape at many institutions of higher education. The mix of flexibility and the infusion of technology such as video-conferencing software, cloud-based office suites such as Google’s Gsuite or Microsoft’s 365, and the use of learning management systems such as Blackboard or Desire to Learn. While the technology serves the purpose of adding flexibility and leveraging resources, the experiences students gain from working and learning in this environment align closely with the modern workplace.
2. Digital Delivery of learning materials is the obvious evolution for higher education, and one that has been painfully slow. While the ability to deliver what we used to think of as a “textbook” as a digital resource has long been possible, many programs still rely heavily on student and faculty use of printed media. It doesn’t have to be this way, and some schools are beginning to take a hard look at the way materials are used in courses. In many cases, the switch can be easy. For instance, Pearson Education is one of the leaders in providing access to digitally delivered learning materials. The digital catalogs available for students and faculty are massive and growing every day. At this point, any move toward digital delivery is a positive one. This transition would modernize the higher ed experience and probably save students some money.
3. Internships and outside experiential learning built into degree programs have continued to be a popular route due to the development of personal and social skills, but internships have a secondary yet powerful consequence: they also help instructors and program chairpeople stay current. There is a lot to be said for programs where internships, programming, and instruction are woven together in ways that a more traditional, sanitized, classroom experience cannot replicate.
4. Student voice and choice is changing the landscape of post-secondary education. There is a great power in programs willing to allow for a variety of student voice and choice in the learning experience, not just for the capstone, but throughout the learning journey of the students. This seems to be far more accepted in vocational and advanced degree programs, and I’d like to see it sweep through the undergraduate experience as well.
5. Embracing the learner, not the system, is really the key to the survival of many post-secondary programs. While the integration of learning technology, internships, diverse media delivery and student voice make for an increasingly intimate and individualized experience, it can’t survive in a vacuum. The evolution to embrace learner needs, especially when those needs run afoul of traditional practice, needs to be valued. Whether differentiated by time, place, pace, or method of delivery, individualized instruction can happen now in ways that would have been impossible or impractical even ten years ago. Not only can professors use their LMS platforms to deliver multimedia-rich learning options, but there are many options for curricula and review material already assembled and ready to use, such as Pearson’s Revel and MyLab/Mastering products.

Disruption is the constant today, and post-secondary programs will need to continue to find ways to attend to the gap between what they deliver and what students actually need. They need to be nimble and responsive to the world they are preparing students for.

While the familiar may have a certain nostalgia to some professors and instructors, these disruptions represent the best potential for future growth of programs, institutions, and the individuals. Unlike any other time in history, higher education faces a shift from tried and true to a constant reinvention to meet the fluid demands of both the working world and an ever-changing student body.

This article was originally published on Dr. VonBank’s LinkedIn Pulse page and has been reposted here with permission.

This series, produced with The Edtech Podcast, explores the implications of and questions around future tech for education. Listen for insights from experts — including contrarians — from across industry, research, and academia.

Technology is a part of almost every aspect of our lives: buildings can be 3D printed, cars can drive themselves, and algorithms can direct our education.

In the third episode of this series (catch episode 1 and episode 2), we explore how do we react to, interact with, and create with the tools of technology? It’s essential that we understand how these function and what the implications.

We also look into the changing world of work and how we can best prepare.

View on YouTube

For more information, check out the Pearson Future Skills report.

Subscribe to the Future Tech for Education on iTunes.

This series, produced with The Edtech Podcast, explores the implications of and questions around future tech for education. Listen for insights from experts — including contrarians — from across industry, research, and academia. Subscribe to the Future Tech for Education on iTunes here.

Smarter digital tools, such as artificial intelligence (AI), offer up the promise of learning that is more personalized, inclusive and flexible. Many see the benefits of AI, some are skeptical – but it’s crucial we understand what these tools can do and how they work.

In the first episode of this series, we talked about the how to navigate the challenges and opportunities tech brings to the future of education. In episode two, we explore: What is AI and what is it not? What’s the difference between narrow AI, general AI, and super-intelligence? What type of AI is used now in education? What type do people fear? What questions might teachers want to use when thinking about AI in education?

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For more information, check out the report, Intelligence Unleashed: An argument for AI in Education.