TLChallenges09
After four months of spirited discussion, the EDUCAUSE teaching and learning community has voted on the, “Top Teaching and Learning Challenges, 2009.”The final list for 2009, ranked by popularity, includes:
- Creating learning environments that promote active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation.
- Developing 21st-century literacies among students and faculty (information, digital, and visual).
- Reaching and engaging today's learner.
- Encouraging faculty adoption and innovation in teaching and learning with IT.
- Advancing innovation in teaching and learning (with technology) in an era of budget cuts.
The community has spoken. Now it’s time to roll up your sleeves and contribute ideas from your vantage point on campus to build a network of solutions around each challenge. Do you have a reading or a resource to suggest? Would you be willing to interview colleagues on campus providing a snapshot of how your campus is addressing an issue? Would you volunteer your name as a resource for others to contact to learn more about your campus solutions? In the coming weeks, we’ll use individual challenge wikis to begin organizing content under the guidance of volunteer workspace managers.
In the meantime, visit the project homepage to get the background and find your place in the Challenges Ning network. Then, bookmark this wiki to begin adding your voice to the community.
===============================
Flashback: Challenges Brainstorming at the 2008 EDUCAUSE Annual Meeting
Wednesday Brainstorming Session
Key Challenges:
- Raising the profile of teaching and learning in the institution; resources allocation; reward and recognition doesn't always encourage faculty to take risks; not rewarded to innovate.
- Using technology in teaching for e-learning; Getting beyond the identification of issues and implementing solutions. Goes beyond faculty "dont' know what they don't know." How do we get around that? Faculty use LMS for "container" -- how do we know what is best practice? How do we know that what we're doing is actually correct. Getting people to recognize learning theory. How do we accommodate all that so that people integrate theory into teaching.
- Faculty rewards; Could faculty be rewarded for using technology; Be motivated; Be rewarded.
- Assessment. How do you assess new media? Do we have rubrics in place for that? Can we assess the value of technology for learning?
- Faculty Development -- Rewarding of innovation in teaching; Giving ability to experiment; Assessing effectiveness for learning and learning styles; Stretching resources to make it all available, esp. in tough economic times.
- Identifying, managing, and measuring core competencies that instructors need.
- With explosion of Web 2.0 and LMS, concern of how those pieces inter-relate. As students begin to use these technologies, do the pieces tie together so we can do assessment and evaluation in a way that's coherent.
- Mindshare -- student and faculty fluencies, etc. -- how do we keep our agenda on the institutional agenda?
- How do we be nimble in providing innovative solutions, esp. in large institutions where scaling is an issue? How do we provide effective solutions?
- Student participation and engagement -- where did the audience go?
- Rewards and integration of technology in the academy -- trying to make technology a central, integrated feature of what we do; finding ways to reward that.
- Teach transferable skillsets and call that fundamental skills, critical thinking. Given that technology changes so much, teaching the tool becomes obsolete, our responsibility to teach them the fundamentals
===============================================
Thursday Brainstorming Session
- When you try to set priorities, they are all priorities. Depends on the audience. Who says the top challenge? Collaboration across constiuencies; bringing people together to work toward a common goal of students and learning. What works for a specific area? How do we foster innovation?
- The idea of faculty buy-in and support. As technologists, someone comes to you with an idea and then someone comes with another. Goal may be the same but tools or approach different. You have to figure out how to approach them and connect them to support/resources; aligning the things that we're doing -- research, other units with the technology that you are exposed to.
- Issue of effectiveness. Often measure on a qualitative level. Can't take student satisfaction to "bankers." We need data-driven practices and educational research leading to assessment that will survive accreditation.
- Positioning ourselves to be solution-providers to our campuses. Notions around disruptive technologies; technologies may evolve outside university but we need to stay nimble and on top of things.
- Assessment -- feel that we need to work to make assessment more than "teach then test." Assessment needs to be part of instructional context. From objective to authentic and reflective.
- Faculty appreciating the digital work of students; need to know how to assess those works. Assessing technology strategies; need to know the value of new technologies for teaching and learning.
- Education ----> Edutainment.
- Faculty understanding today's students.
- Developing processes for technology integration and training for students and faculty. Having a process and relying on professionals to help with training. Make them part of the team.
- Meaning -- benefits of technology to teaching and learning process. Incentivising experimentation to find meaning. Experimentation often falls through the cracks. Must be more than a conference experience. Collective experimentation and discussion; try to figure out what is likely to work.
Login to post comments 1228 reads