As I am making my way through Christensen’s book I think about how difficult it can be to create these systems to support computer-based learning. Long ago, when I was working in an instructional technology lab at The George Washington University, I was part of a small team that created a Learning Management System called Prometheus, which was later bought by Blackboard. Programming what would be today’s equivalent of Moodle took significant time and effort. Tools like Blackboard and Moodle are really just infrastructure that can aid in building out student-centered learning experiences, but as Christensen notes, it takes time and money to build out these resources.
As I have been reading Christensen, my perspective has been viewed through the Learning Management System, collaborative web conferencing and lecture capture lenses – my background for the past 13 years. But as I have been thinking about this week’s reading I came across this interesting video from McGraw-Hill Connect; they have a partnership with Blackboard where teachers and professors can use entire digital textbooks within an online course or they can select specific topics or chapters. This video from McGraw-Hill may come close to realizing the vision Christensen describes in the book.
Will publishers provided the technology and content to help realize student centered learning? Maybe it is too soon to say yes or no? There will be further disruptive events and technologies that may make student centered learning more local and take it out of the hands of technology and publishing companies.
While focusing on this week’s topics I found two articles from Campus Technology. The first article, Reinventing the College Textbook, describes an interesting project out of Wake Forest University. Two professors received a grant to build a non-linear textbook, which aligns with Christensen’s discussion of focusing on the different way people learn. Quoted from the article: “It has been shown that humans learn best when they can put facts into the order that makes the best sense to them.”
The second article is a little less interesting, but one paragraph stood out to me. eText: Is It Ready? Are We Ready? Discusses how universities are converting texts and reserve materials into digital formats. As the author detailed some ideas for how eText should evolve over time, the second to last recommendation reminded me of student centered learning – where technology could identify deficiencies or opportunities for students:
“Analytics: eReader software platforms must provide analytical capabilities to serve to identify potential student learning deficiencies or opportunities. With eText we will have a means to capture data on student use of the material, areas of concern, attempts/successes/failures of content knowledge transference, time spent on task (i.e., not just online), and so on. This data may be used to offer prescriptive solutions to improve completion, retention, and GPA.”
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