Emerging Technologies

From OUCEL Wiki

Emerging Technologies Breakout Group

The first point of discussion for our group was that large class sizes are frequently a driver of technology in the classroom. Our group agreed that one of the reasons for adopting technology in a large class was to increase student engagement and that technology certainly had the potential to facilitate this. As with all instructional strategies, however, faculty had to "buy in" and want to adopt the technology.

We also talked about how difficult it has become to stay on top of all of the emerging educational technologies and how, as a result, it is sometimes faculty themselves (as opposed to instructional developers / teaching centres) who drive technology adoption and bring emerging technologies to us. Even within a technology itself (take, for example, screencasting), there can be so many software variations that it is impossible to be familiar with all of them. Along the same lines, we talked about how we need to move away from a model in which we are experts in every educational technology that exists. We discussed the potential of faculty groups and communities of practice wherein instructors could assist each other with technology adoption and troubleshooting.

Lastly, we touched briefly on the limitations of the various Learning Management Systems that our institutions were currently using. As an example, without a streaming server, instructors are limited as to what can be posted for later use (lecture captures, for example). As a result, students are driven away from the LMS to use tools like YouTube for supplemental instruction.

Our final moments of conversation revolved around the potential for cellphones to soon replace clicker techology for classroom use, as well as the value that the whole group saw in eportfolios.