Edtech and online learning – Page 7

That’s right, we’re not from Texas

Kate Bowles June 29, 2011 2 Comments

End of semester. Winter. Grading and student feedback, plus those odd moments that make you stop and think, like the shine on a wet pavement. Students who write and say that they appreciated being in class with someone whose first language wasn’t English because they learned something about a bigger world. Students whose first language isn’t English writing to say that it was being in an online class that made it possible for them to participate at all. Given the…

Being an academic, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, Student engagement

What we’ve got here …

Kate Bowles June 22, 2011 0 Comments

As the Chilean ash cloud wafts through Australian airspace for a second time, we’re all thrown back into the science of prediction. What will it do next? Nightly news footage of passengers sitting in grumpy heaps in airports has drawn an unusual degree of national attention to Darwin. It turns out that we have one of the world’s nine Volcanic Ash Advisory Centers right here in Australia, and they’ve been putting on their good shirts for the TV cameras night…

Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, Risk

Vertical thinking

Kate Bowles June 6, 2011 0 Comments

The “education vertical” sounds a bit more thrilling than it is. The first time you hear it, it seems to share the weird poetic syntax of “the body electric” and “the life everlasting”. It’s education, on an updraft. A bit of googling fishes up a turn of phrase that has more concrete aspirations. This vertical is both market and solution (“Callista cracks open education vertical“) and it continues intermittently to appear in the promotional talk of software vendors and government procurement….

Being an academic, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, Risk, Student engagement, University marketing

Tablets, tablets everywhere

Kate Bowles May 27, 2011 0 Comments

Ferdinand von Prondzynski, VC at Robert Gordon University, is asking why universities have been relatively slow to mainstream the innovative teaching practices that will match the speedy uptake of mobile and tablet devices by their students. As he puts it, technology-enabled learning shouldn’t be “the preserve of nerds”. The need to break out of the nerd enclave is critical for any institution hovering on the brink of committing to an enterprise-wide LMS contract. This is going to cost so much that…

Edtech and online learning, Risk, Student engagement

Open all hours

Kate Bowles May 25, 2011 2 Comments

Ben Wildavsky has a message for Australian universities. He’s the author of The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World, just out from Princeton U. Press. He’s keen to promote the benefits of free trade in higher education, not least of which is that “knowledge is not a zero sum game”, and that if we create more of it in one country, we don’t lose it in another. Somehow this is calling to mind the joke about…

Australia, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, Internationalisation, Risk, Student engagement

Houston, we need to talk about content

Kate Bowles May 18, 2011 2 Comments

One of the features of Australian life that surprises visiting American students is that we’re watching the same movies and TV shows they just left back home, only with the neat variation that ours are seasons out of date. So they arrive at the airport having been told to expect novelties of all sorts (usually, some variation on kangaroos in the suburbs, laid-back anti-authoritarianism, a funny accent, and sharks), to find that they’ve stepped back in time to their own…

Edtech and online learning, Higher education

Online charlatans?

Kate Bowles May 12, 2011 1 Comment

Today the Sydney Morning Herald has lent its editorial elbow to the effort to figure out whether online learning represents the end of traditional university teaching, in much the same way that the Buggles taught us back in the 70s that video killed the radio star. They way they tell it, defeat is inevitable: In cyberspace, the ivory towers of academia are undoubtedly crumbling. Thrilling stuff. It’s like that middle section of The Lord of the Rings where everything has gone…

Being an academic, Edtech and online learning, Higher education

Online learning in the iron triangle

Kate Bowles April 28, 2011 0 Comments

We’re hearing from every direction that online learning is going to be the solution to the coming bricks and mortar shortage. This week, Swinburne DVC(A) Shirley Leitch writes that: If we are to meet the target of 40 per cent of 25 to 34 year olds holding a bachelor degree by 2025, we need to move beyond bricks and mortar to learner-centred solutions. I’m not so sure that these two things are simple opposites. My daughter is at the stage…

Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, Student engagement