FOTE 11 – future of technology in education

Hello everyone,

We’ll be blogging from London today for the annual FOTE conference – future of technology in education. This is an annual event that attracts 350 elearning experts from around the UK. It is an excellent opportunity to share best practice and learn about what other colleges and universities are doing well, and how we can improve.

As usual, my notes will get taken here, along with a few videos and photos. Please leave comments or feedback.

We’ll also be talking with echo 360 – our lecture capture provider and the driving force behind our 509 room. We’ve now enabled the Moodle interface for lecture recording, so this year we hope to move beyond our one room pilot. Perfecting the technology will be key in doing that. We will be enabling HD recording and viewing lectures by mobile devices (iPad, phones) from the mid term break.

Opening Session

ULCC – Richard Macabee, director ULCC.

ULCC is now hosting over 1 million student users. Also announced a partnership with Echo 360.

jan Martin Lowendhal – the CIO and the future of education

How do you manage the flood of services and make the technology useful for education?

Organisation centricity vs people centricity
- how does the death of distance affect learning technology?
- we have to ask ourselves, who has control of the means of production and distribution?
- obvious connection to marx here – but a different revolution this time.
- “what are the things I shouldn’t fiddle with?” – what software is necessary and what is so general that is should be outsourced?
- email is a good example – google and Microsoft give email away to education for free, so why have it internally?
- if I don’t give a service quickly enough, they’ll go to the cloud and get what they want themselves.

What you have is a situation in which staff can now afford to go buy what they need themselves. Might not be perfect, but there is a chance that the tech savvy can do it faster then you can build it from scratch.

- so what does a CIO do? How can you change the processes of the institution
- there is a role – when microsourcing you reduce the possibility for collaboration – you reduce th possibility for collaboration.

So we have a “hype cycle”
- we hit the peak of expectations
- then we have a crash when it turns out what we have is not perfect.
- bring us to the trough of disillusionment
- and we recover to about 20 percent of our initial goals.

And there are key trends
- communication
- sourcing – cloud
- standards – education, technical

Cloud sourcing for items like email is already more than 50 per cent of all email services at UK education institutions.

Nick Skelton – pervasive media and education

What do games do for us?

Games encourage the behaviour we want. Hence the card game we have today – everyone has a playing card, and the goal I to ask “are you Thursday” – I’ll post a photo of the rules in a bit.

Te point of this game is not to use tech, but to get practitioners work with technologists – to make memories that stay with people.

Education is important, but so are all the other thing that take place. If we get our of our technical bubble and interact with other areas, we an create powerful and meaningful experiences.

Bristol uni is just starting to dabble in this, but there is potential in games, and it creates opportunities for learning through social means.

The best idea in this session was the “send yourself a letter” – you write yourself a letter – something you want to tell yourself in six months, six years, whatever. You swap letter with a partner – they send it. A great way to connect to others.

Cailean Hargrave

How can you use analytics to improve student retention?

The idea is to use data modelling to make feedback available to lecturers – let them identify behaviour and attendance patterns that allow them to direct attention to student that need it. IBM has some background here.

As it happens, these predictive analytics allow you to identify problems in student success and address patterns before you lose the student. We have these systems, but it’s difficult to make sure the right people (teachers) see it.

Edinburgh Telford college.
- visual dashboards
- quick reference for predictive analytics
- highlighting attendance issues to staff and students.

The good news is that Guildford College will have this capability as well. It is now built into Moodle and will be implemented for the end of the year as part of our ILP solution.

Birmingham metropolitan college is working on a similar project in concert with IBM. They are working to predict student failure, and pre-empt it.

What if you could text, or Facebook message and let the student know that we know they are having difficulty and there are resources to help. Why if you could remove that burden from teachers?

What if you could identify who needs help straight away based on regional statistics amongst student coming in?

Call to action – IBM.com/smartplanet/analytics

COFFEE!!!

Ahhhhh….

Flipping naked – 140 seconds to tell us your vision of learning

Andrew Stewart

Technology in education is bleak
1. We don’t yet understand what education is
2. We play constant catchup

Debate this, online at purpose.org.uk

Educational adoption of mobile tech vs mainstream tech adoption.

- this is a bit of a depressing graph
- we never get to systemic adoption

John Bernard – BBC

future of tech is mobile
- BBC learning have noticed growth in UK secondary students accessing bite size elearning service.
- 1.2 million
- 40 percent mobile uptake in sub Saharan Africa
- the rise of mobile learning time and place shifts learning
- becomes bite size, or pocket sized.
- micro learning – can be triggered at any time.
- mobile learning is social. Mobiles are already being used for social purposes.

Michelle Hoyle

Gaming and online activity
- World of Warcraft
- more of an even gender balance than you’d think
- how is it related to HE?
- many of the same social issues, diplomacy, and social interaction.
- useful learning opportunities

Paul Johnson
- mobile device as future of elearning
- repositories for research data
- created an object store for android, iPhone, and iPad

Last session – Janet UK

The future is with the user
- they bring their own device
- they choose what they access or what they do
- financial background also applies – they pay fees, students are customers now.
- Janet provides this service, it should be there and invisible. Much like janet is to 18 million users

Panel discussion

Universities don’t know what students want.

So what do they want?

Best points from the panel:

• why is it we only say we need to provide good services now that students are paying £9000
• didn’t we always have to provide good service?
• it is insanity to have IT security or usage committee that don’t have students on them
• there will never be enough student PCs to satisfy everyone.
• they want to know it works on their device, that there are no problems
• making them aware that using your private device on an education network has implications

What about the students who can’t be bothered to bring the tech with them?
- security issues
- lugging around laptops
- didn’t know they can access materials via the cloud.
- this is a communication issue. Will the student be bothered to come see the IT team?

I ask a question – what about BYODB – bring your own device bias? Should we concentrate on specific majority devices to extract value or be more agnostic and accept a lower common denominator for functionality?

Top tips
- the needs for students need to be embedded in a while bunch of other strategies
- learning and estates strategies
- governance: how change is introduced and managed
- engagement with the student body

afternoon session James Clay

How often do you hear “it’s really nice when the students aren’t here”

- students are dangerous
- they bring in untested devices!
- they may not pay fees!
- they are a health and safety threat!
- they plug in their own devices!
- they unplug computers!

STUDENTS ARE A THREAT!!!

We need to change the culture of our organisation – we still see students as dangerous and a threat.

PEOPLE DO NOT LIKE CHANGE

How can we label students a voice to be heard?

GET RID OF THE LEARNERS

- no Id badges
- no security issues

silos
- political inertia
- little kingdoms
- we’ve always done it this way

September is the busiest time of the year
- it happens every year!
- why do we not change?
BECAUSE OF POLITICS AND INERTIA

do learners know what they need?
- no, if they knew everything, they wouldn’t be learners
- we should listen but they do not necessarily know what they want
-
A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them – Steve Jobs.

Not: what do you want

Try: what do you want to do?

Librarians have a tendency to solve problems by putting up a sign. James put up a sign that said “no swimming” and it’s not been a problem since!

Don’t be led by learners, but be informed.

The key for James is that we often let politics get in the way and forget our students. We forget where our bread and butter comes from.

Emily Nash – student representative, NUS
Charter on technology in higher education

Problems
- cost
- hesitancy in adopting new technologies.

Students want to contribute to the agenda. The demographics of students tend to be changing. The student experience is more central than ever in the face of education reforms.

NUS think that more needs to be invested in communications technology and has been conducing research to find out more.
- hard for students to understand
- students complain a lot about the environment, but the emphasis should not be on them to come up with solutions
- NUS has a charter on technology in higher education.
1. Institutions should have an ICT strategy
2. Institutions should invest in staff development and effective us of technologies should be recognised and shared.
2. Staff and students should be holistically trained. Regular training and support should be available
3. Technology jaws should be accessible to all.
4. Innovative us of digital technology should be supported by the curriculum development process.
5. Administration should be more accessible through the technology
6. Institutions should highlight link between technology and employability
7. Infrastructure needs to be in place

Talk to your academic VP – a good place to start.

Tags: FOTE11, learning technology, moodle