Are We Riding the Wave of the Future?

There are a lot of different ways that technology can influence classrooms, faculty, students, and campuses. In a Fast Company article last week, Michale Karnjanaprakorn presented a useful breakdown of the five buckets of technology innovation in education delivery:

1. Gadgets and blended learning: “Classrooms can be anywhere at anytime.”
2. Social learning and collaboration: “Teachers are using [new] platforms…to share content and lessons with each other online so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel or keep content to themselves anymore.”
3. Open resources and classrooms: “Educational resources, data, and technology are becoming more accessible than ever....”
4. Adaptive, personalized learning: “Teachers are figuring out how to teach each student the way he or she learns best, and assessment is viewed as an ongoing process, since learning is not a constant.”
5. Creative certification: “The more people are culling unassociated resources and experiences to learn specific skills, the more urgent it is for there to be a place for them to record their efforts and success, to study with peers, and to present their learning portfolios to future employers or partners in a meaningful way.”

Often in the higher ed reform world we debate the broad merits of “online education” or “technology use” without really specifying what we’re talking about. Thanks to CCRC research, we are confident that delivering underprepared students a full course through online lectures doesn’t work very well. But we’ve seen in DEI how powerful some uses of technology can be in dev ed. The North Carolina Community College System is collecting best practices in a searchable online innovations database, and a few DEI colleges are using technology to individualize instruction. 

Karnjanaprakorn makes it all seem a little too simple, though. He doesn’t give much space to the major changes in infrastructure, policy, and practice that would be necessary to implement these in our current higher ed sector. (Of course, he may be suggesting a completely different structure for that system….) Still, institutions may be generally supportive of everything in those five buckets, but they must also consider the amount of capital required to do any of it well.  There are also questions about whether (or how) bureaucratic systems can escape the “weight of history”, as Uri Treisman says,  to make space for effective use of technology—and whether they can do it while ensuring equal access to technology for low-income students. Finally, one hopes there will be commitment—and capacity—to gather and make sense of the data required to see if this new technology actually achieves the results expected. 

Since Karnjanaprakorn digresses into a reiteration of the “who needs college?” argument at the end of his article, we have to choice but to follow him there. We think college is the right choice for a lot of people, and we can tell you why in just one chart:

Click Image to Enlarge

Associate’s degree holders make almost $150 dollars more per week than people who don’t go to college, and their unemployment rate is 3 percentage points lower. Whatever means we end up using to deliver it, it’s clear that connecting people to education and credentials remains essential to their economic security.