[New post] My spring seminar on educational technology is now live
Bryan Alexander posted: "This month my educational technology seminar started. I wanted to share the class design with you all, to be consistent with my open practice. I'm teaching LDES 702, Studies in Educational Technology, in Georgetown University's excellent Learning, Des" Bryan Alexander
This month my educational technology seminar started. I wanted to share the class design with you all, to be consistent with my open practice.
I'm teaching LDES 702, Studies in Educational Technology, in Georgetown University's excellent Learning, Design, and Technology program. This graduate program brings in a great range of students pursuing careers about, or just interested in, instructional design and related academic fields. My colleagues are amazing and the students terrific. I love teaching in LDT.
My idea behind the class was to immerse students in the ed tech world. We began with discussion and a survey about their ed tech background, so I could adjust the curriculum accordingly, starting where the students are, then taking them further.
Formally, my goals for the class are that, by the end of term, the students should be:
conversant with the major issues in educational technology
familiar with a range of educational technologies, both conceptually and practically
equipped with a strategy for keeping up with, and participating in, the profession
able to create an educational technology assignment for a class
be able to advise an academic institution in technology strategy
Every week hits a different topic, and we engage it through a combination of scholarly and/or professional reading along with hands-on work. I try to have each inform the other. This also helps make the class very meta, as we use technologies we've been studying. For example, we poke around the class LMS instance and explore using various tech for asynchronous communication. Moreover, I try to structure the class in a sequence of increasing tech complexity, with each week building on the next, generally.
Speaking of which: the default mode for the class is HyFlex. We physically meet in a physical classroom, but some of us will participate remotely for live classes. Students might be ill or located elsewhere. I have at least one remote session myself due to travel for other work.
This year I'm bringing in more outside experts. Their areas of professional expertise include accessibility, information literacy, AR/VR/XR, and running a campus IT enterprise. The reason is to bring in more voices, while connecting students with people who work in these domains full time. Plus I wanted the class to see aspects of their university they might not have engaged with.
I think the seminar has the students doing a lot of work. They read a good amount, then have to discuss and apply what they've read in in-class discussion and asynchronous writing in Canvas, the university's LMS. They get to teach each other technologies informally throughout the semester, and formally for one exercise. They have three assignments:
Analyzing one educational technology
Creating a scholarly bibliography for their final project, which is
Either an in-depth analysis of one educational technology, or a project using one as a sample learning experience.
About those readings: we have only one book (print or digital), Neil Selwyn's excellent Education and Technology: Key Issues andDebates, now in its 3rd edition. Otherwise everything is online, either on the open web, in uploaded pdfs, or accessed through the university's licensing structure. I wanted to keep student costs low, while reflecting the range of discussion on ed tech.
As usual, I make the class as democratic as possible. Students co-design our class rules, both for in-person work and online. They generate some topics and share resources (some of which now appear on the syllabus below). Their backgrounds and interests help drive the seminar.
Also as usual, I make the class discussion-based. I will shift to minilecture mode when certain topics come up and the students don't know much about them. So either I'll present, or point to a presentation, on topics like copyright law or the history of the web.
Learning Space Rating System v3 - version 3 adds to the prior LSRS v2 inclusive design with three parts: 7.1 Physical Inclusion and Universal Design, 7.2 Cognitive Inclusion, 7.3 Cultural Inclusion
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