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| Dr. Rick Shearer and I at DTL |
Penn State University has been a good PA neighbor and friend
to me and other practitioners in the distance education field. At the Distance Teaching and Learning Conference, I ran into Rick Shearer and asked him to
lend his voice to our series. Rick is Director of Penn State's World Campus
Learning Design. Dr. Shearer has been involved in the distance education field
for over 25 years.
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How do we recognize innovation in teaching and learning with
technology?
I believe the best description of innovation in teaching and
learning is related to the idea that innovation is a process where we use new
technologies to solve existing problems in our learning environments. So in
essence we likely have innovation happening everywhere and we want it to happen
organically and not in a managed way. Thus instructional designers daily are
using new tools to solve instructional problems in our online courses. What we
need is a way to capture these innovations and better disseminate information
so folks do not have to re-invent the wheel.
What challenges might practitioners and researchers face
when evaluating innovation? Do you have ideas for how to overcome these challenges?
The biggest challenge is finding a way to pilot an
innovation and then to also be able to walk away from it if it doesn’t work.
Thus, how can you run small pilot studies on technology innovations in courses
and then evaluate the effectiveness without getting into long-term contractual
relationships with vendors. Often it is easy to get an innovative idea into a
course, but much harder to stop using it if it does not meet the need in
helping students reach the stated learning outcomes. Also, in piloting these
innovations and technologies we must allow time over several semesters to
evaluate the impact and we cannot get caught up in running out to adopt the
next shinny object that has come along. We must take a more measured approach
to our testing and evaluation of the innovations.
Can you point to some promising innovations in teaching and
learning?
If we know of innovative solutions they probably are not
innovative anymore, thus a better question may be about problems where we need
technologies to address them.
Key areas where I see a lot of innovative approaches
happening in the future will be around learning analytics (not predictive
analytics) where we explore ideas of personalized learning paths and
mastery-based approaches. What do these look like in today’s connected world,
where we value the social aspect of learning.
Also, how will the distance education community move in
order to provide verification of our students for the DOE and possibly for upcoming
requirements of the reauthorization of the higher education act.
Another area that is already emerging, but needs more work
is the integration of social presence type tools in our courses that are
seamless, but also protect the privacy and rights of our students.
Are there some effective research initiatives or studies our
readers should examine? If not, why do you think that is the case?
Unfortunately there are few places for practitioners to
publish their work. Most journals are research oriented and require full
studies that are difficult for practicing IDs to take on.
Although AECT has recently provided a venue for practical
type research/reports, we need more options available for these types of
practical studies.
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