Louis Arias – Staff Writer
Ed-Tech is a fancy name for technology that supports education. But Ed-Tech is changing the face of higher education through a systematic focus on study and ethical practices.
New technologies like AI, machine learning, and educational software are sending rigid bell schedules, credit requirements, age-based grade levels and physical specifications to Wikipedia’s “History of Higher Education” page.
It’s about time.
When considering how colleges prepare Americans for the job market, the current system performs poorly. The accompanying chart tells a sad story. According to the Census Bureau, in 2010 large numbers of Americans were underemployed and just 27 percent of college graduates had jobs related to their majors.
Higher education has a notoriously hard time adjusting to change. Fortunately, it seems to have caught on to the idea that “instruction MUST be taught in traditional classrooms” is an obsolete notion. Adaptive Learning is one of the technologies now seriously being considered.
With the opening of the high-tech Gale Lemerand Student Center, DSC President Dr. Thomas LoBasso was asked if the new building was designed with Adaptive Learning in mind.
His response was, “This building has just three classrooms, but their design is totally new. The seating can be moved around, they have the latest AV technology and full wall whiteboards. The building also has numerous study rooms designed for collaborative activities. Before we designed it, we brought a student panel together to make sure we were building what students need, not necessarily what we wanted. ”
Adaptive Learning combines computer science and cognitive psychology to offer a transformative/personalized experience for students with different skill sets. It is disruptive. It shakes up the role of professors and creates philosophical shifts in teaching approaches. It even requires classroom remodeling. Like other new educational technologies, it is not without controversy.
Angela Estrella, a professional development associate at Stanford University, voiced a valid concern many parents have regarding such technology. In a February 2016 article in EdSurge, she said, “Not every click needs to count, and sometimes you need a clean slate. I’m concerned about the large amount of data being collected on our kids and how it’s being used to shape learning trajectories.”
Tech giants such as Apple, Microsoft and Google also are serious about this technology.
Jaime Casap, Google’s Education Evangelist, was the keynote speaker at DSC’s 11th Annual Academic Excellence Symposium on March 1. Asked how the algorithms that determine each student’s personalized instruction are controlled, he said, “That question reveals the problem. For the challenges that this next generation faces, students must learn to decide what they need to learn to solve the problem they will be confronted with in the future. The educator’s role is not to decide what they must learn, but to teach them how to learn.”
Through personalized instruction students control their own destinies as they navigate through curricula and coursework. Adaptive learning does not support micromanagement and requires the development of trust between instructors and students. For this technology to succeed, a paradigm shift is mandatory. Making that shift will be harder for instructors than for students.
Today, lives and identities of students are tied to technology, but teens moving into the college world within the next couple of years are “cloud computing natives.” They expect their apps to be available from any screen on mobile devices and in many sizes and forms beyond “old school” laptops.
The trend to online and hybrid classes forces colleges to adapt teaching and delivery of programs to fit such models. But technology is both a blessing and curse for educators. Academic dishonesty has evolved and the fact that learning is moving toward team collaboration doesn’t make matters easier.
Challenges don’t stop there. Technology also brings up social justice issues, such as inequality of access to digital educational content, and accessibility/disability issues.
Challenges and all, Ed-Tech’s tsunami promises to disrupt the whipping out of uniform, creatively restricted workers trained for a labor market that can no longer accommodate them. It is well worth the gambit.