Education Technologies Issues and Strategies

The following are some links to resources dealing with this topic. If you come across one, please email me the URL (address) of the resource and I will add it to this page. More recent additions are at the top. Last revised January/2001

Teaching at an Internet Distance: the Pedagogy of Online Teaching and Learning The Report of a 1998-1999 University of Illinois Faculty Seminar. In response to faculty concern about the implementation of technology for teaching, a year-long faculty seminar was convened during the 1998-99 academic year at the University of Illinois. The seminar consisted of 16 members from all three University of Illinois campuses (Chicago, Springfield, and Urbana-Champaign) and was evenly split, for the sake of scholarly integrity, between "skeptical" and "converted" faculty.
Article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.: The American Federation of Teachers calls on colleges to adopt standards and collective-bargaining agreements to ensure the quality of distance education.
Other reports produced by the American Foundation of Teachers concerning technology are available here.
Copyright - Who Owns Online Courses And Course Materials. Intellectual Property Polies for a New Learning Environment: Great overview of the confusing issues surrounding copyright of online courses. Web version and a better pdf version available.
(1999) No Significant Difference Phenomenon. 5th ed.: This site provides a database of selected entries from the book. The No Significant Difference Phenomenon, which includes 355 research reports, summaries, and papers on technology for distance education. The companion site Significant Difference
Studies that Make a Difference: Tools for Faculty-Directed Inquiry and Improvement: The most useful and believable studies of courses and academic programs are those that instructors design themselves, focusing on those questions about which they care most. We present two systems that provide such tools to support the scholarship of teaching. First, a general purposes system for collecting information from students at the end of courses, developed by the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to coordinate academy, department and faculty inquiry and curriculum assessment. Second, Flashlight tool kits and training that focus on improving instructional uses of computing, video, and telecommunications.
Restructuring the University for Technological Change: What Kind of University? Bates, A. W.. (1997).
R695: Understanding Systemic Change in Education: Changing educational systems, if unguided by adequate theory of educational systems change, will be haphazard at best. The consequences of mistakes can adversely affect the very lives of students, teachers, administrators and their communities. Without an adequate theory of educational systems change, we will continue to restructure education largely by trial-and-error. It is no wonder that educational practitioners often distrust, resist and undermine the efforts of educational reformers. The stakes are very high. The consequences of mistakes can be devastating -- particularly when changing a whole system of education.
College Canada - The Business of Colleges: Restructuring for Reality: The times in which College Canada finds itself considering its future, and with that future the evolution of its organizational structure, are truly unparalleled in recorded history. All things of interest must be considered on a world scale. Even fo r the so-called "community" college, thoughts of the future must be a context of world affairs, if for no reason other than colleges produce graduates for that world.
Technology and the Changing Academy: As article after article in these pages has made clear, our society and its system of schools, colleges, and universities are undergoing a major transformation. This transformation is inevitable, irreversible, and unpredictable, although we can still influence its direction. The emergence of new information technologies is neither the cause, the purpose, nor the consequence of this transformation. However, we can guide the character of this transformation, in part, by our own thoughtfulness about the role of technology in education.
Information Technology: Additional Cost or Strategic Asset: With demand for IT services rising rapidly, how high should IT be on the University's list of funding priorities? With expenditures accruing across so many different parts of the University, are the benefits of the overall expenditure on IT optimized? Do we have the right balance between central and departmental expenditures? These complex questions will be answered by different observers in different ways. My purpose in this article is to provide a framework -- admittedly from my perspective -- to assist the reader's analysis.
Using Information Technology to Enhance Academic Productivity: Across American higher education the lure of the new information technologies remains as uncertain as it is unsettling. While few doubt that information technology (IT) has the potential to enhance teaching and learning, there is no agreement on how that technology should be used to boost academic productivity--or whether such an increase is in itself a valid goal if its enhancement means substituting technology for the more traditional, labor intensive rhythms of higher education.
Campus of the Future or Future of the Campus?: A Question for the Future CEO
Policy Issues Arising from a Networked Information Environment: The current issues session on "Policy Issues Arising from a Networked Information Environment" was attended by 25 people from the US and Canada. Discussion was often lively, generally informative, and lasted past the session's official end. The participants agreed that a mailing list would be useful to continue discussion, share strategies, and generally assist one another in navigating this ground. A handout (appended below) with some suggested discussion questions and a list of Internet sites with different types of information policy information was provided to the audience. After summarizing the Internet site references, discussion on a number of topics ensued.
Bridging the Chasm: Cooperative Development of Faculty Development Resources: The gap between early adopters of technology and the mainstream faculty population has been described as so wide as to constitute a veritable chasm. But with support agencies understaffed, how can participation rates be increased? What kinds of strategies should be utilized to reach mainstream faculty who appear to have fundamentally different interests and needs than early adopter groups? One approach is to leverage the work of several universities to train and support faculty in their use of technology. This is a summary of the EDUCAUSE '99 session that described a four-institution project aimed at collaborative development of faculty development resources. Working together, a workshop curriculum was designed, guides to effective practices were developed, best practice strategies in faculty development were examined, and new services were initiated to enable each campus to cross the chasm.
CURRENT ISSUES FOR HIGHER EDUCATION: The CAUSE Current Issues Committee is responsible for proposing a list of current or developing issues and trends that are important to the future of information resources management and use in higher education. The following topics have been identified by the committee as key emerging or ongoing issues. We encourage articles for _CAUSE/EFFECT_ on these and related topics.
WHAT INFORMATION RESOURCES MANAGERS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT HIGHER EDUCATION: The purpose of this article is to share what we learned about the higher education issues that we and our staffs need to be aware of, to suggest some necessary skills and expertise that can be learned and practiced, and to encourage you to participate in IEM or similar programs to become a more effective information resources leader on your campus. The areas highlighted below are based on the IEM program content, designed to help us better understand the higher education enterprise in which we work.
INFORMATION RESOURCES AND INSTITUTIONAL EFFECTIVENESS: THE NEED FOR A HOLISTIC APPROACH TO PLANNING AND BUDGETING: Limited financial resources make it more important than ever to develop a coordinated institution-wide process to link academic priorities and expenditures with the technological infrastructure necessary to support the objectives. Trade-offs must be made across the institution, rather than simply within the traditional information resources areas, in order to ensure both a healthy academic program and the requisite information resources.
PROCESS REENGINEERING IN ACADEMIC LIBRARIES: SHIFTING TO CLIENT-CENTERED RESOURCE PROVISION: The emergence of networked information services is challenging traditional forms of academic information delivery. This viewpoint examines the potential of business process reengineering to address this challenge through creation of a new client-centered paradigm for information resource provision that will strengthen the partnerships between all information professionals.
TRENDS AND CHALLENGES FOR ACADEMIC LIBRARIES AND INFORMATION SERVICES: The author believes that that radical changes will be needed to successfully accommodate coming trends in academic information services. He discusses four general principles he has used to anticipate the future impact of emerging technologies, and the factors he believes will influence these changes.
TRANSFORMING HIGHER EDUCATION A Vision for Learning in the 21st Century
Exploiting Information Systems in Higher Education: An Issues Paper: Recent change and growth in higher education has created many new opportunities. Further change is inevitable and there is scope for information systems (IS) to play an increasingly important role in the development of higher education. The sector will continue to be at the forefront in the innovative use of information systems both by building on current facilities, to ensure they are properly exploited, and by continuing to take part in farsighted and imaginative research and development.
TRIAL - OPEN U.: 'Give me a place to stand', said Archimedes, 'and I will move the world'. This is where the student of the future will stand - or sit - in a Virtual Study. Open U.'s look at the future student.
Changes in Education: Educational institutions do not exist in a vacuum. They are influenced by the societal events constantly occurring around them. Recently several developments in the workplace, changes in student demographics, and the economic trends are forcing educational institutions to change.
New directions for educational technology: What UBC is doing -
Everywhere we look, we receive indications that our future is as an information or knowledge-based society rather than as a resource-based society. We also read about the necessity of being lifelong learners and independent learners. We read about commercial companies getting into the business of education, about students in British Columbia being able to take graduate degrees entirely through distance education programs.
Colorado Strategic Technology Plan: Technology in Colorado Education Strategic Plan 1994 - 2004

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