Education 2.0 & 3.0

Technology is not a replacement for great teachers but technology in the hands of great teachers is transformational. #edtech #education #technologyineducation

In the wake of the 2020 summer of racial reckoning, faculty and educators have increasingly felt the pressure to examine the role of institutions of higher education and their teaching in challenging white supremacy and oppression. Many educational institutions and academic associations published statements condemning police brutality and racism; signaling that academia was embarking on a journey of self-reflection and renascence. Despite the efforts of many faculty across the United States to display their commitment to racial justice, curricular and campus reforms have been slow to come.

• We specialise in delivering effective learning experiences for adults which fit around their lives, whether it’s a busy mum in London working toward her degree, or a primary school teacher in a remote area in Kenya, improving her classroom practice. Over 70% of our students remain at work while studying.
• We use appropriate technology to break down barriers – for those with disabilities, isolated or economically challenged. 
• We are open – we aim to remove all barriers to education and set no entry qualifications. 
• We use a mixture of business models (free, fee, and donor support) to provide scalable and sustainable solutions.
• We deliver quality learning experiences on scale to over 170,000 students. Of the UK learners, 61,000 are eligible for financial support and 44% start undergraduate study without the entry qualifications they would need at a conventional university.

But there are also teachers in classrooms right now that don’t have the gift of design–that is, they can’t start fresh at audience and purpose: who am I teaching, and why? They are given content in the form of standards, and often given packaged standards in the form of curriculum. The assessment form is out of their hands, and even scheduling and pace with regard to scope-and-sequences and related maps.

The Flipped Learning reverses the traditional classroom methodology. Learners’ can learn at their own pace and become the owners of the learning process.

The Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework allows us to understand the importance of utilizing web 2.0 in teaching and learning. Social annotation tools such as Hypothes.is allow teachers to fulfil the three essential UDL components: engagement, representation, and action & expression through thoughtful use of the platform.

Social annotation tools such as Hypothesis and Voice Thread, when used well, boost student engagement, enhance critical thinking, expand reading comprehension, and increase student interaction. Of the several social annotation tools currently available, our institution uses Hypothesis. Hypothesis’ motto—“Making reading active, visible and social”—sums up why we think social annotation is so valuable for our students: it engages students and invites them to read and think together as a group by sharing real-time annotations of websites or PDFs (Hypothesis, 2021). The richly multimodal, interactive nature of Hypothesis offers instructors a platform through which they can employ the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to improve engagement and accessibility for all learners.

Amanda Piekart (Director of Research and Instructional Services at Berkeley College, USA) and Jessica Kiebler (Instructional Services Librarian at Pace University, USA) have run their podcast The Librarian's Guide to Teaching since October 2019, and have now reached episode 34 (23 February 2021, Tech tools roundup "Amanda and Jessica review some tech tools that can be used by library professionals in the classroom"). Episode 33 was on Teaching about algorithms, episodes 31 & 32 covered 21 instruction tips for 2021. The website for the podcast is here https://librariansguidetoteaching.weebly.com/

Whether you’ve taught online a lot or a little, chances are you didn’t enjoy it as much as teaching in person. Maybe you didn’t experience that fizz after a particularly invigorating face-to-face class. Indeed, according to a 2017 Educause survey, only 9 percent of academics prefer to teach “in a completely online environment.” That means a whopping 91 percent of us don’t. And I suspect that a good majority of that 91 percent would prefer to teach anywhere but online.