Educational Technology

Joe Benfield
SOM
Nothing about teaching and learning – keep this broad for a more general discussion
Where are we where are we going what is working
Instructional apps
Pulling themes out of the intros
User focus
How to get focus on edu/inst tech
Pres talk points to a need for better inst tech – infrastructure
Not much on helping people use it well
Is there a revolution in teaching?
Impact of online education
If stanford has resources they may not feel it but
Itunes u, youtube, what is next?
The two services evolving to packaged courses, bigger player in ClassX (MOOC, cyberlearning initiative), videos, clicker, CTL position
Can have more prominent role – where do you start?
What is the org component that you form the work around? Faculty? Course?
Needs to grow beyond the support of one person or several courses
Needs to be scalable to larger
The need to make it easier for faculty – is it ever going to be that way? It should be
LKC is that way and is (hopefully) designed to scale
Need to make sure the mic is on
Devils advocate – learning is messy: not linear, clean, iterative, teaching is the same way
How not to hedge people in,
Where is th balance between large project and small boutique – scope and bandwidth
Need to be able to try something small in order to learn
Mostly one or mostly the other
What are the things that many people can use? CW, clusters with software, what else
Video is a small slice of ed tech
Website, quizzing, how do you do it well
Situative learning
Designing things that people interact with and learn from (gaming, etc)
What’s next beyond quizzing?
Simulation building, interactions – very hard to scale (completely custom built)
Gsb looking for gaming / simulation platform
iOS course – pitch ideas, get students to build these things
still scalability is a problem
another word for gaming – active simulated learning
serious gamers group on linked in
game engines – having reasonable algorithms for models
casual gaming is back – how to put that in education
single topic vs overall experience : context setting
earth sciences kind of has that but not really
project based
how do we get this done
cultural issue – how to have an impact on the problems
breaking the lecture mold – once you break out of that, then people start using tech
lecture environment doesn’t have room for new ideas
video vignettes – flipped classroom model
not trying to remove the prof as guide and expert
team based learning
screen sharing / small group activities up to a larger group
about 50 students is manageable for one instructor
packaging of course materials – students ask for feeds of course materials: video, slides, notes, etc
webdav can behave like a feed
itunes may have ways to package things
CourseWork looking at ways to modularize, be a platform for web services
Working with dropbox as a model for delivering
Student interacting with instructor? Tools to enable interaction on a scalable way – social network, forum (tightly integrated with course), peer2peer help
Need some adult supervision
Intelligent peer system – ranking system, filtering
Needs critical mass
Streams with collaboration and annotation systems
Anything else?
Many tools available,
CW underutilized
Opportunity for people to talk – ATS list (atss-staff@lists.stanford.edu?)
notes by Ken Romeo