EDUCAUSE Review Articles and Teaching and Learning

Cyberinfrastructure permits a new kind of scholarly inquiry and education, empowering communities to innovate and to revolutionize what they do, how they do it, and who participates.

Learning via computer games: the very idea can seem surreal or outrageous. Yet for the past five years, a movement has been afoot to examine how digital games work as pedagogical devices. Starting with the publication in 2003 of James Paul Gee’s landmark What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, faculty, technologists, and librarians have been exploring how we can learn from and also teach within computer games. This column will survey what this movement has discovered.

Web 2.0 is redefining what and how and with whom we learn. For example, in Wikipedia, “knowledge” is constructed by negotiating compromises among various points of view. This raises numerous questions: How do we in higher education help students understand the differences between facts, opinions, and values—and how do we help them appreciate the interrelationships that create “meaning”?

"The more recent goals -- to internationalize colleges and universities and promote global citizenship for students -- have occurred coincidentally with the realization that U.S. students are becoming less
interested in preparing for careers in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. There is concern that the United States could find itself challenged and perhaps outcompeted by those nations that also understand the strength and dominance of preparing students in the STEM disciplines and that are focusing on capacity-building in the STEM workforce through education."

The action analytics of the future will better assess students’ competencies. Using individualized planning, advising, and best practices from cradle to career, these action analytics solutions will align interventions to facilitate retention and transitions and will fully maximize learners’ success.

The building blocks provided by the Open Educational Resources movement, along with e-Science and e-Humanities and the resources of the Web 2.0, are creating the conditions for the emergence of new kinds of open participatory learning ecosystems that will support active, passion-based learning: Learning 2.0.

Transformational faculty-development efforts must involve systematic, goal-directed, sustained activities that are integral to the daily work of academic community members.

As faculty members confront the expanding impact that technology is having on their scholarship, research, teaching, and students, IT organizations must assess their role in shaping, implementing, and supporting the assimilation of IT into the teaching and learning process.

The author describes the fast paced approach the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland took to change the existing culture of teaching and learning.