I'm a technologist in Education. This frightens a lot of educators who are pretenders in Academia trying to lead technology development.
Supporting instructors, and instruction directly has been my main area of focus for the past year, in addition to being directly involved in developing online education platforms for the past 20 years in K-12, Academia and Industry.
I'm not sure if you have a tech background, but making sure you have competent technology advisement at all stages is quickly emerging as a key differentiator. If decision makers in academia haven't had technical literacy to make technical decisions, it shouldn't be a surprise if the experiences are not engaging, because they aren't leveraging digital interactions for what they're capable of, and instead only what a limited non-technical academic background can imagine.
Important:
- Not taking the lecture format classroom of the past 100 years and putting it online in video. MOOCs are handicapped before they even begin, quite often. Sure, great instructors who can explain well are good, but they are the exception, and not the norm. Another key problem remains.. god help you if you have to change the video. The key I focus on is how students are experiencing MOOCs as being the main lens. Academic institutions can have a hard time letting the frame go to be student centric instead of instruction-centric. Online education shouldn't be rooted in the practice of distance education (correspondence, textbooks, phone calls)
- The baseline of the student is that they are far more digitally literate and competent than the institutions they are walking to and most often more than their instructors.
- Much of the Academic online education world is designed and anchored in a past of a web browser on a desktop.. by educators who do not have competency in the possibilities or capabilities of tech.
- When it comes to making digitally engaging learning experiences, first you have to consider if academics rarely learn how to teach, let alone digitally.
- I would seriously pay attention to how students are interacting and studying digitally and focus far less on the existing taxonomies and nomenclature as it does not relate well to self-directed learning.
- The Copernican view of curriculum being the sacred cow of Academia is rooted in Math not changing much in a few hundred years, and generally the rate of change in curriculum being slow. In the real world, Academia is quickly reaching a point where they cannot update fast enough to keep pace with the change in the world, and the gap between students and entering a job is increasing.
- Again, see what students are doing to stay relevant - it's not always formal education.
- Learning how to learn is a course I reference early and often to all sides as the key skill being missed.