28.1 Embedding student expectations  (Page 6/7)

Thankfully I believe that much of this activity will be integrated into the Academic eventually, and that these activities are part of a catalytic process that consumes and nourishes all of the great work being done around “Open Education” (FLOSS, OER, OCW, Social Technologies, Web 2.0, Education 3.0, Commons Based Peer Production, Agile methods, open design patterns, open technology standards, open content licensing, etc…). My only question is how quickly will particular institutions embrace and contribute to the OpenEducation agenda. It looks to me that some are quicker than others. The Open University, UK seems pretty on to it, and based on Terry Anderson’s keynote at Sloan-C this past Wednesday, so does Athabasca.

11. cwc5 - november 8th, 2008 at 2:32 pm

One thing I find interesting is that many people see a real conflict between good teaching and the tenure process. The best teaching is the product of good scholarship — in other words the very things we look down at (research and publication based reward) are what ultimately lead to masterful teachers. I’d love for us to get to the point where we as learning designers and administrators stop saying that we can do our jobs better when they reinvent the tenure process. I’ve heard a colleague of mine say on more than one occasion that his research is his teaching. Our ability to research and share is what drives the advancements in our classrooms.

With that said, I think there are issues with the adoption of technology in an appropriate sense for teaching. This isn’t a problem with the tenure system as much as it is an issue with the reality of time. All of us are squeezed from every direction and taking advantage of emerging trends takes time to learn and feel comfortable with. We need to work harder to make the case for greater adoption, continue to tear down walls between faculty and staff, work harder to make our services easier to use, and perhaps rethink how we do our jobs to support innovative teaching practice.

My friends in the College of Education are building quite the ecosystem to drive new teaching practice into the K-12 environment. It is the work of faculty and administrators (along with help from the learning design community) who will provide the bottom up push to make change real. The students hitting our shores in the next few years will have little patience for out dated practice, so what will we do to address it? I think conversations like this need to push more involvement across our campuses and force us to ask serious questions of each other.

If drs18 is right, that self-motivated students will find little value in coming to our campus, then we have some serious soul searching to do!

12. brettbixler - november 9th, 2008 at 12:05 pm

I too would love to see teaching, scholarship, research, etc. all together as one big happy family in the tenure process - but they aren’t. Building technological infrastructures to facilitate teaching and learning won’t help. A MAJOR culture shift is needed here that has to come from bottom up, top down, and sideways (influences from outside at all levels). Until that happens, we can’t just blithely assume that placing technology in front of faculty is enough. We can’t assume that offering training on the use of these tools is enough. Making adoption easier is not enough.