This image would be much more humorous if it wasn’t for the fact that this is an unfortunate and accurate representation of what is happening in our educational systems. Because we have been focusing on the technology and not the learning and have been attempting to gauge the effectiveness of applying today’s technology based on yesterday’s standards we are going nowhere in a hurry. Papert (1993) likened this to:
Attaching a jet engine to an old-fashioned wagon to see whether it will help the horses. Most probably it would frighten the animals and shake the wagon to pieces, “proving” that the jet technology is actually harmful to transportation. (p. 29)
Most people would chuckle at Papert’s example and ask how can anyone or any group be so naive or foolish? Yet, by trying to improve our passive traditional teacher-centered pedagogy with the application or addition of technology, we have essentially strapped a technological jet engine to our classrooms. Perhaps we should be pleased that we are at least not harming the animals (the teachers and students) and haven’t shaken our classrooms (the wagons) into pieces as the ‘no significant difference’ test results would show.
Unfortunately, we have the tendency to make similar mistakes when it comes to curriculum planning and instructional design. We all too often look to the content to be covered, update our terminology to reflect the current trends (individualized instruction, flipped classroom, blended learning, genius hour, 20% time, etc.), and then simply add in some new trendy activities to our well-established routines. We also bolt on some technology for added benefit. In minutes you have a new lesson plan, unit plan, or course plan. If you are fortunate enough to have a text book which chapter headings can be used to structure the content delivery steps—all the better.
However, if you really want to create significant learning environments by giving your learners choice, ownership, and voice through authentic learning opportunities then you have to build your courses and programs differently. You can’t just bolt on new activities to your existing curriculum. You have to look at doing things differently by using the backward design mythologies that require you to start with a big hairy audacious goal (BHAG) which you construct by imagining what your learner will look like, become, or be able to accomplish by the end of the course or units of instruction. I have outlined this process in greater details in the post, 4 Keys to aligning outcomes activities, and assessment.
Be forewarned… this is not going to be an easy process. Leon Festinger (1957) has argued that we seek or strive for psychological consistency and are motivated to reduce the cognitive dissonance that comes from dealing with contradictory information or ideas. It is not uncommon to feel psychologically uncomfortable when we are asked to do things differently than what we are accustomed. We look for ways to conform and align what we are doing with what we believe and if we can’t find this alignment we become uncomfortable. When this happens people will either change their beliefs to align with their actions or change their actions to align with their beliefs.
Fortunately, you get to choose how you are going to deal with this situation. If you are put in a position where you are asked to experiment or apply a different approach to creating your course or other units of instruction you have two choices. You can temporarily suspend your traditional content coverage beliefs about course design and adopt the new course design methodologies at the beginning of the process and then the actions of creating your BHAG and aligning outcomes, activities and assessments will fall into place and your discomfort may be limited or reduced. In contrast, if you maintain your traditional beliefs and choose to focus on content coverage you will find that you will not only be uncomfortable with the new course design process you will also not be able to create a BHAG nor align the outcomes, activities, and assessments that are so important to creating significant learning environments.
If you really want to get the most out of any learning opportunity you have to fight through the cognitive dissonance and experiment with the new ideas and processes to see if they really can make a difference. If you aren’t willing to do this with your course or unit design then you really do run the risk of bolting new more powerful ideas onto an antiquated foundation. Don’t your learner’s deserve more?
References
Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Papert, S. (1993). The children’s machine: Rethinking school in the age of the computer. New York, NY: Basic books.
New Media Consortium (NMC) and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative have held an ongoing series of conversations and dialogs with hundreds of technology professionals, campus technologists, faculty leaders from colleges and universities, and representatives of leading corporations. This process is formally called the Horizon Project, and the project’s Advisory Board considers the results of these dialogs and also looks at a wide range of articles, published and unpublished research, papers, and websites to generate a list of technologies, trends, challenges, and issues that knowledgeable people in technology industries, higher education, and museums are thinking about and compiles the resulting information into an annual Horizon Report.
The project uses qualitative research methods to identify the technologies selected for inclusion in each annual report, beginning with a survey of the work of other organizations and a review of the literature with an eye to spotting interesting emerging technologies. The Horizon Project expressly focuses on technologies not currently in widespread use in the Academy. In a typical year, 75 or more of these technologies may be identified for further investigation.
I have been reviewing the Horizon Reports since there were first published in 2002 and since 2006 have been following how mobile learning could be viewed as a disruptive innovation and a catalyst for change in higher education. By 2013 and 2014 mobile learning was only given a small mention and the reports focused more on what is possible with mobile learning than just the technology itself. By 2015 mobile learning is only mentioned in the context of BYOD and the emphasis is not on the technology itself but on the fact that we now have ubiquitous access to the worlds information in palm of our hand or in other mobile devices. There is no denying that mobile learning is now widely accepted and we are now exploring what we can do with the flexibility that mobility provides.
This shift away from the technology itself to a focus in innovation in learning is clearly revealed in the experts panels focus on:
advancing learning environments that are flexible and drive innovation.
The language of the following report headings confirms the focus of the 2015 report is clearly on learning innovation and learning environments:
blended learning
learning spaces
measuring learning
blending formal and informal learning
personalized learning
BYOD
flipped classroom
adaptive learning
rewards for teaching
This is a good thing! We are finally focusing on the fact that technology is just a tool that we use to enhance learning and that the best technology disappears and simple empowers us to do what we need to do.
The following infographic provides a summary of the six key trends, significant challenges and the important developments that make up the key sections of the report:
The two short term trends of blended learning and redesigning learning spaces are examples of sustaining innovation and really point to the fact that higher education is simply keeping up with the times in these two areas. Innovative educators have been doing/using blended learning for over twenty years and many of these early adopters would simply state this the the most logical way to use technology to enhance learning and create significant learning environments (see the CSLE section of this site for more details). Similarly many early adopters have been using OER and have been measuring learning for a very long time. We are just able to do this in a more sophisticated manor because of ease of access and big data.
Perhaps one area that deserves special mention is advancing cultures of change and innovation. We (academics) are finally understanding that the technology is the easy part of innovation and the change process and it is the people or more specifically the culture that is the challenging part to move forward. This is clearly a long term problem or challenge and I suggest that it should be moved to the “Wicked Challenges” section along side rewards for teaching.
The Horizon Reports are a very good starting point for a discussion on mobile learning because they discuss emerging technology trends in direct relation to the needs of the learner. The following is a list in reverse chronological order of Horizon Reports summaries starting from the most recent, which was released in February of 2014, back to 2006. The first Horizon Report was released in 2004 but doesn’t have have any reference to mobile technologies, nor does the 2005 report, so neither are included in the summaries.
The key to viewing these summaries is to notice a significant pattern within the reports that points to mobile technologies as the foundation for most advances in the use of technology in education. For example, in the 2010 Horizon report all technologies to watch, except for the Visual Data Analysis, are somewhat or totally dependent on mobile learning. By 2013 and 2014 mobile learning is a given and the reports begin to focus more on what is possible with mobile learning than just the technology itself. Mobile technology is changing the way that we live and this is also changing the way that we learn. The following summary content was extracted from each respective year of the Horizon Report.
Notice the patterns and the significance of mobile technologies and learning in the following:
Important Developments in Educational Technology for Higher Education
The 2014 Horizon report deviated from the previous years by pulling out the key trends and putting them in a context of how they could potentially accelerate technology adoption. The time frame of fast, mid-range and long-range were added to provide an estimate on when these changes could be realized. This change in the report takes into account the reality that there are groups of technologies or interrelated technologies that play a role in the change. For example the integration of online, hybrid and collaborative learning will involve a wide assortment of technologies ranging from simple consumer based social networking tools to more sophisticated enterprise ready web and video conference tools all of which can be access via a mobile device.
Fast Trends: Driving changes in higher education over the next one to two years
Growing Ubiquity of Social Media
Integration of Online, Hybrid, and Collaborative Learning
Mid-Range Trends: Driving changes in higher education within three to five years
Rise of Data-Driven Learning and Assessment
Shift from Students as Consumers to Students as Creators
Long-Range Trends: Driving changes in higher education in five or more years
Another difference in the 2014 report from early reports is the inclusion of the Significant Challenges Impeding Higher Education Technology Adoption section. This section moves well beyond the immediate impact of technology and touches the societal and cultural challenges that higher education faces in moving into the 21st Century. A perpetual problem in this area is the Low Digital Fluency of Faculty. We know from the research and years of experience that this is NOT a technology issue–it is a people or a cultural problem. We also know that changing organizational culture is something that doesn’t happen from the outside but from the inside and that this type of change is very slow. While this is a solvable challenge one could argue that the time required for this to happen should move this challenge into the “Wicked Challenges” category.
Solvable Challenges: Those that we understand and know how to solve
Low Digital Fluency of Faculty
Relative Lack of Rewards for Teaching
Difficult Challenges: Those we understand but for which solutions are elusive
Competition from New Models of Education
Scaling Teaching Innovations
Wicked Challenges: Those that are complex to even define, much less address
Reflections from a Mobile Learning Perspective:
By 2014, the smartphone has reached a saturation level in North America and the practice of accessing information from ones mobile device is a given. The discussion of mobile learning in the report is minimal as is the notion of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) but the report refers to many activities like the flipped classroom, the quantified self, virtual assistants, social media and the integration of all online, hybrid and collaborative learning which are dependent on the ubiquitous use of mobile devices. The 2014 report points to the fact that we are moving well beyond the simple notion of accessing information on mobile devices and moving from consumption to creation. The the mid range trend “Shift from Students as Consumers to Students as Creators” is just one example of how our mobile connected world is providing learners the opportunity to learn all the time and everywhere while they work on real world or authentic learning opportunities or as they create solutions to genuine problems.
Perhaps as higher education moves from the passive educational environment of main lecture points, rubrics, individual competition and standardized testing to an active educational environment of interactive learning, critical and analytical thinking, collaboration and meaningful projects we may then be able to address the “Wicked Challenge” of keeping education relevant.
The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators.
Assessment and accreditation are changing to validate life-long learning.
Both formal and informal learning experiences are becoming increasingly important as college graduates continue to face a highly competitive workforce.
Education entrepreneurship is booming.
Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning, hybrid learning, and collaborative models.
Increasingly, students want to use their own technology for learning.
Massively open online courses are proliferating.
Open is a key trend in future education and publication, specifically in terms of open content, open educational resources, massively open online courses, and open access.
Social media is changing the way people interact, present ideas and information, and judge the quality of content and contributions.
There is an increasing interest in using data for personalizing the learning experience and for performance measures.
Significant Challenges
Appropriate metrics of evaluation lag the emergence of new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching.
Complexity is the new reality.
The demand for personalized learning is not adequately supported by current technology or practices.
Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
Dividing learning into fixed units such as credit hours limits innovation across the board.
Economic pressures and new models of education are bringing unprecedented competition to the traditional models of tertiary education.
Institutional barriers present formidable challenges to moving forward in a constructive way with emerging technologies.
MOOCs have put a spotlight on residential campus education and its unique value; the challenge is to identify and articulate that value in the context of MOOCs and financial issues.
Massively open online courses are compelling, but universities must critically evaluate their use.
Most academics are not using new and compelling technologies for learning and teaching, nor for organizing their own research.
Reflections from a Mobile Learning Perspective:
Mobile learning is finally an accepted practice by 2013 and it is mentioned only in context of Mobile Apps and Tablet computing which are on the year or less adoptions timeframe. Perhaps the most significant perspective from this years report is that we are starting to see the beginning of the disruption of higher education by mobile and online technologies. The challenge of getting students information has not only been solved but the move to digital media in every industry other than education is putting huge pressure on institutions and academics to adopt. Similarly, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have garnered national attention and are clearly putting pressure on higher education to consider signficant changes. Unfortunately most institutions are unable to move forward with effective ways to deal with new technologies. Perhaps the most damming indictment on higher education is that:
Most academics are not using new and compelling technologies for learning and teaching, nor for organizing their own research.
This would explain why education entrepreneurship is booming as organizations outside of academia are looking to satisfy the need that is currently not met. The only thing saving higher education from a full disruption that we have seen in music, newspaper, travel and other industries is that institutions still maintain control over the parchment. However, with the emergence of badges and other forms of recognition and the sobering fact that we have created a class of overeducated and underemployed generation perhaps this control may soon be disrupted as well.
The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators.
Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning, hybrid learning and collaborative models.
People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to.
The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized.
There is a new emphasis in the classroom on more challenge-based and active learning.
The world of work is increasingly collaborative, driving changes in the way student projects are structured.
Significant Challenges
Appropriate metrics of evaluation lag the emergence of new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching.
Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
Economic pressures and new models of education are bringing unprecedented competition to the traditional models of tertiary education.
Institutional barriers present formidable challenges to moving forward in a constructive way with emerging technologies.
New modes of scholarship are presenting significant challenges for libraries and university collections, how scholarship is documented, and the business models to support these activities.
The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making, coaching, and credentialing.
People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to.
The world of work is increasingly collaborative, giving rise to reflection about the way student projects are structured.
The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized.
Critical Challenges:
Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
Appropriate metrics of evaluation lag behind the emergence of new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching.
Economic pressures and new models of education are presenting unprecedented competition to traditional models of the university.
Keeping pace with the rapid proliferation of information, software tools, and devices is challenging for students and teachers alike.
Reflections from the Mobile Learning Perspective:
Mobility is a technology to watch in a year or less for the past three years. The reason we are still looking to mobility as a technology to watch over the next year, and that many of the key trends have not changed, is that unlike PC technology which has an eighteen to twenty-four month processor upgrade cycle and much slower upgrade cycle on the OS and related software, mobile devices are advancing much more rapidly. We have seen a new and significantly improved version of the iPhone each year since its release in 2007 and the release of the iPad in spring of 2010 changed everything (to quote Apple) and changed it again in the Spring of 2011 with the release of the iPad 2. When you factor in the equally explosive and rapid growth in Android phones and tablets the impact of mobility society is unlike anything else we have seen.
The publishers have also recognized that mobility and the cloud are making the deployment of ebooks a reality. Even though ebooks are still in their infancy and what we consider an ebook today will be a fraction of what will be available even two to three years down the road the impact of ebooks on education is starting to take effect. Partnerships between the major content management system (CMS) providers and publishers, the move of many academic journals to the electronic format, digitization of library resources, and the digitization of millions of books by Google is bringing us to the point where digital learning is finally a reality.
Because People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to we have become dependent upon cloud-based computing and our notions of IT support are decentralized. Our expectation for IT have shifted from anytime anywhere to all the time and everywhere. The demands of cloud and mobile based computing have put extreme pressures on traditional universities and only those institutions that are able to help their students, faculty and staff flourish in this new mobile computing environment will survive.
The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making, coaching, and credentialing.
People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to.
The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized.
The work of students is increasingly seen as collaborative by nature, and there is more cross- campus collaboration between departments.
Critical Challenges:
The role of the academy — and the way we prepare students for their future lives – is changing.
New scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching continue to emerge but appropriate metrics for evaluating them increasingly and far too often lag behind.
Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
Institutions increasingly focus more narrowly on key goals, as a result of shrinking budgets in the present economic climate
Reflections from the Mobile Learning Perspective:
There is no denying that mobile computing is a technology to watch over the next year. Nor is there any doubt that electronic books will also be something to watch given the recent flurry of ereader releases over the past 6 months and most recently at the Consumer Electronics Show. We need to do more than just watch!. The Key Trends section of the report stresses the fact that people expect to work and learn wherever they are. Thanks to the Cloud and all that it offers we live in an “all the time everywhere” type of world but is academia doing enough to keep up with, or even address, these advances?
Mobile Phones were introduced as a technology to watch in two to three years back in the 2007 Horizon Report and again in the 2008 report but for the most part we are still at the early pilot stage in 2010 with these technologies. The examples of mobile technology implementation that we see in the 2010 report point to very small pockets of experimentation and other than ACU, very few institutions are experimenting with broad scaled adoption of mobile learning devices within their institutions. Given its nature, can academia hope to keep up with the rapid changes the move to mobile is pushing everyone to?–this is perhaps our biggest challenge.
Increasing globalization continues to affect the way we work, collaborate, and communicate.
The notion of collective intelligence is redefining how we think about ambiguity and imprecision.
Experience with and affinity for games as learning tools is an increasingly universal characteristic among those entering higher education and the workforce.
Visualization tools are making information more meaningful and insights more intuitive.
As more than one billion phones are produced each year, mobile phones are benefiting from unprecedented innovation, driven by global competition.
Critical Challenges:
There is a growing need for formal instruction in key new skills, including information literacy, visual literacy, and technological literacy.
Students are different, but a lot of educational material is not.
Significant shifts are taking place in the ways scholarship and research are conducted, and there is a need for innovation and leadership at all levels of the academy.
We are expected, especially in public education, to measure and prove through formal assessment that our students are learning.
Higher education is facing a growing expectation to make use of and to deliver services, content, and media to mobile devices.
Reflections from the Mobile Learning Perspective:
Other than Smart Objects all the technologies to watch have mobility at their foundation. Perhaps the most significant aspect to the 2009 Horizon report is the the Critical Challenges section that clearly identifies Higher Education’s need to adapt. The statement “students are different, but a lot of education material is not” sums up our challenge. Academia is expected to deliver services to a mobile student population and prepare them for the challenges of the 21st Century but many of our teaching and research practices are mired in the 20th, and some would argue the 19th, century.
Our scholarship of teaching and learning, research and assessment practices must all adapt to these changes if we wish to keep up with the pressures of globalization and increased mobility of our learners and ultimately society.
Significant shifts in scholarship, research, creative expression, and learning have created a need for innovation and leadership at all levels of the academy.
Higher education is facing a growing expectation to deliver services, content and media to mobile and personal devices.
The renewed emphasis on collaborative learning is pushing the educational community to develop new forms of interaction and assessment.
The academy is faced with a need to provide formal instruction in information, visual, and technological literacy as well as in how to create meaningful content with today’s tools.
Significant Trends:
The growing use of Web 2.0 and social net- working—combined with collective intelligence and mass amateurization—is gradually but inexorably changing the practice of scholarship.
The way we work, collaborate, and communicate is evolving as boundaries become more fluid and globalization increases.
Access to—and portability of—content is in- creasing as smaller, more powerful devices are introduced.
The gap between students’ perception of technology and that of faculty continues to widen.
Seven Megatrands identified in the past 5 years:
The evolving approaches to communication between humans and machines;
the collective sharing and generation of knowledge;
computing in three dimensions;
connecting people via the network;
games as pedagogical platforms;
the shifting of content production to users;
and the evolution of a ubiquitous platform.
Reflections from the Mobile Learning Perspective:
2008 was a pivotal year for the development of Mobile Learning and the Seven Megatrands identified in the previous 5 years of the Horizon reporting confirmed that society had started moving in a direction that would radically change all our lives. Like the earlier and past years mobile technologies of some sort were identified as needing to be watched but it was very clear by late 2007 and early 2008 that we were living in a mobile world. The evolution of a ubiquitous platform was a mobile platform because people started to connect and communicate with each other at work and at play in ways that we had never seen before. The explosive growth of Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and other social networking sites was happening because people could not connect to their networks all the time from anywhere.
The iPhone 3G was released in the summer of 2008 and ACU initiated its Connected project in the fall of 2008 and put an iPhone or iTouch into the hands of over 1000 freshman who entered the institution. When these freshmen received their devices there were less than 3000 apps in the app store but by the end of their first year (April 2009) there were over 35,000 apps. In hindsight (this is being written in January of 2010) the ACU gamble on the iPhone was accurate but to the leadership of ACU it wasn’t a gamble because all megatrands that the Horizon Reports as well as many other sources had been pointing to was the need to make this sort of move toward a broad scale adoption of mobile learning.
The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication
Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming
Key Trends:
The environment of higher education is changing rapidly
Increasing globalization is changing the way we work, collaborate, and communicate.
Information literacy increasingly should not be considered a given.
Academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship.
The notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are pushing the boundaries of scholarship.
Students’ views of what is and what is not tech- nology are increasingly different from those of faculty.
Critical Challenges:
Assessment of new forms of work continues to present a challenge to educators and peer reviewers.
There are significant shifts taking place in scholarship, research, creative expression, and learning, and a profound need for leadership at the highest levels of the academy that can see the opportunities in these shifts and carry them forward.
While progress is being made, issues of intellectual property and copyright continue to affect how scholarly work is done.
There is a skills gap between understanding how to use tools for media creation and how to create meaningful content.
The renewed emphasis on collaborative learning is pushing the educational community to develop new forms of interaction and assessment.
Higher education is facing a growing expectation to deliver services, content and media to mobile and personal devices.
Reflections from the Mobile Learning Perspective:
This is the second year that Mobile Phones were identified as a technology to watch and was also the year that social networking and user created content were identified as key indicators of change. This is also the year that the Horizon researchers started to explicitly challenge academia to keep up with these rapid changes. Key gaps were identified in the understanding of how to use tools for new media creation and more importantly how to use to those tools to make meaningful content. The Horizon group also started calling for leadership in the educational community to not only recognize these opportunities but challenged them to embrace these changes to move the academy forward.
Dynamic knowledge creation and social computing tools and processes are becoming more widespread and accepted.
Mobile and personal technology is increasingly being viewed as a delivery platform for services of all kinds.
Consumers are increasingly expecting individualized services, tools, and experiences, and open access to media, knowledge, information, and learning.
Collaboration is increasingly seen as critical across the range of educational activities, including intra- and inter-institutional activities of any size or scope.
Critical Challenges:
Peer review and other academic processes, such as promotion and tenure reviews, increasingly do not reflect the ways scholarship actually is conducted.
Information literacy should not be considered a given, even among “net-gen” students.
Intellectual property concerns and the management of digital rights and assets continue to loom as largely unaddressed issues.
The typical approach of experimentally deploying new technologies on campuses does not include processes to quickly scale them up to broad usage when they work, and often creates its own obstacles to full deployment.
The phenomenon of technological “churn” is bringing new kinds of support challenges.
Reflections from the Mobile Learning Perspective:
2006 was the first year the the Horizon Reports identified “Phones in their Pockets” as a technology to watch and placed it in the two-three time frame. The seeds for mobile computing were also be sown with technologies like social networking, personal broadcasting and off on the far horizon augmented reality environments and devices. A key trend of mobile and personal technology as a platform for the delivery of all kinds of services was also significant.
References:
2014 Horizon Report Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Estrada, V., and Freeman, A. 2013 Horizon Report. Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium, 2014.
2013 Horizon Report Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Cummins, M., Estrada, V., Freeman, A., and
Ludgate, H. 2013 Horizon Report. Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium, 2013.
2012 Horizon Report Johnson, L., Adams, S., and Cummins, M. 2012 Horizon Report. Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium, 2012.
2011 Horizon Report Johnson, L., Smith, R., Willis, H., Levine, A., and Haywood, K., 2011 Horizon Report. Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium, 2011.
2010 Horizon Report Johnson, Laurence F., Levine, Alan, Smith, Rachel S. and Stone, Sonja. 2010 Horizon Report. Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium, 2010.
2009 Horizon Report Johnson, Laurence F., Levine, Alan, and Smith, Rachel S. 2009 Horizon Report. Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium, 2009.
2008 Horizon Report Johnson, Laurence F., Levine, Alan, and Smith, Rachel S. 2008 Horizon Report. Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium, 2008.
2007 Horizon Report Johnson, Laurence F., Levine, Alan, and Smith, Rachel S. 2007 Horizon Report. Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium, 2007.
2006 Horizon Report Johnson, Laurence F. and Smith, Rachel S. 2006 Horizon Report. Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium, 2006.
Blended learning has been around since the mid to late 90’s. I developed and instructed my first blended course back in 1994-95 and we referred to this form of instruction as alternative delivery or computer-mediated instruction. Today you will also see terms like hybrid, technology-mediated instruction, web-enhanced instruction, mixed-mode instruction and the current flavor of the day the flipped classroom. The term blended learning really took hold when Bonk and Graham published the first Handbook of Blended Learning back in 2005.
In a blended course a significant amount of the course work has been moved online. Face2face time or seat time has been reduced. The online components of the course are done instead of face2face time and not in addition to. If well designed, a blended course can offer the best of both worlds. The online components of the course can be used for information transfer with the goal of preparing the students for the limited and valuable face2face where the instructor can lead students much deeper into the learning objectives of the course. This enables the instructor to lecture less which changes their role from sage on the stage to a guide on the side as they lead the students through discussions and other collaborative activities in the face2face setting.
The primary reason I encourage my colleagues to use these resources is that they have put a priority on purposeful design and start from the learning outcomes/objectives. So many other resources start with the blending activities but until you are clear on what you want your students to learn/do (based on the course learning outcomes) you run the risk have having great blending activities but no alignment to the learning outcomes. If you want to take your learners deeper then you need to start with your learning outcomes.
Even though these resources were developed in 2008 they are still current because they address the fundamental design issues that really haven’t change significantly. Other than the incorporation of social media into courses all the examples would apply to the present day.
I encourage you to review all the resources on the site but if you are pressed for time then consider reviewing the following resources in this order:
Ten Questions: “Ten Questions for Blended Course Redesign” presentation by Alan Aycock
Student support: “Helping your students in a blended course” presentation by Alan Aycock
Backwards design: “Designing a learning module for a blended course” presentation by Alan Aycock
Integration: “Strategies for integrating online and face-to-face in blended learning” presentation by Alan Aycock, Tanya Joosten, and Amy Mangrich
Content delivery: “Content delivery in blended and fully online courses” presentation by Amy Mangric.
The example presentations and other related presentations make more sense once you have the pedagogical foundation to appreciate why things are being done. You also don’t have to listen to the presentation but can view the slides and the transcript which could save you some time
For a more recent perspective on blended learning and a really good definition of the newer models you should look at
WARNING – this site has a K-12 focus and if you follow the Resources link to their Blended Learning Universe http://blendedlearning.org/resources/. While these resources do have a K-12 focus the principles still apply to higher education.
Additional Higher Ed focused resources you can consider include:
It doesn’t take much encouragement for me to share my passion for using YouTube to enhance the learning environment. In the YouTube in the Classroom workshop at the Learning and Teaching Centre at British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) on November 5, 2014 we explored using YouTube and other media to enhance the face2face, flipped, hybrid or blended and fully online settings.
The following are all the Youtube clips and related links used in the workshop:
Perhaps one of the best talks on learning & education – My favourite TED Talk
This just one of many TED talks that I recommend. If you go to TED.com and filter by “Most viewed” you will see Ken Robinson’s talks as well as Simon Sinek’s talk about Why and many more amazing talks.
My blog post The Power of Media in informal learning offers the insights that I have found in using media to help my two sons in their pursuit of becoming professional downhill racers.
Finally, to easily download video clips from youtube and embed them into your Powerpoint or Keynote programs (educational acceptable copyright permitting–check with your department or library) you can use the site clipconverter.cc
After spending two full days in the Creating Significant Learning Environment (CSLE) workshop with some highly motivated faculty from School of Business at BCIT I am convinced that the future is very bright for BCIT students. Our primary focus was creating significant learning environments that would take advantage of technology to enhance learning. We explored using technology to enhance the face2face, flipped, hybrid or blended and fully online settings. All the technology related activities were grounded with well defined learning outcomes and we continually looked at the balance in aligning the outcomes with effective technology enhanced activities and assessments which confirmed the learning outcomes would be achieved.
The following are all the Youtube clips and related links used in the workshop as well as several of my favourites that we unable to view due to the lack of time.
Perhaps one of the best talks on learning & education – My favourite TED Talk
This just one of many TED talks that I recommend. If you go to TED.com and filter by “Most viewed” you will see Ken Robinson’s talks as well as Simon Sinek’s talk about Why and many more amazing talks.
My blog post The Power of Media in informal learning offers the insights that I have found in using media to help my two sons in their pursuit of becoming professional downhill racers.
Finally, to easily download video clips from youtube and embed them into your Powerpoint or Keynote programs (educational acceptable copyright permitting–check with your department or library) you can use the site clipconverter.cc
