Week 1B - Instructional Technology Overview
The Covid-19 pandemic has changed many aspects of our lives, including education. During this unprecedented time, teaching and learning have been reshaped throughout the use of technology. This has brought many opportunities for educators to reinvent themselves and to create new learning spaces. At the same time, the implementation of technology in daily lessons has brought new challenges for teachers and students.
Last year, educators had to adapt their traditional courses to remote synchronous or asynchronous teaching environments while using different instructional technologies. Collins and Moonen (2002) claim that there is always a "need for an underlying educational model for any change process involving technology" (p.230). Reiser (2018) mentions that the goals of instructional technology expressed in different definitions have shifted over time and that "later definitions indicate the main goal is to improve learning" (p.6). It seems that these definitions were not always present when some educational institutions did not know how to train educators who were already facing problems with technology even before the pandemic. I have talked to colleagues from previous institutions and they were excited to teach, but they did not know how to integrate technology or to use different features from a variety of software in a short period of time. At the same time, some students were struggling with class engagement and did not seem to be prepared enough for remote scenarios.
During the pandemic, peer collaboration has been vital for learning new technologies faster and building a supportive environment between educators and students. According to Reeves and Lin (2020), "Instead of expecting the next 'killer app' or technical innovation to transform education, perhaps we can better transform education by fostering incremental changes through collaborative research and development with practitioners" (p.1999). Clearly, it has been a time of exploring, learning, and growing for many schools and universities. As an educator, I feel that we are more prepared to face different teaching scenarios and to deal better with new upcoming challenges.
Collis, B., & Moonen, J. (2002). Flexible learning in a digital world. Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning, 17(2). 217-230.
Reeves, T.C., & Lin, L. (2020). The research we have is not what we need. Educational Technology Research and Development (ETR&D), 68(4), 1991-2001. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-020-09811-3
Reiser, R. A. (2018). What field did you say you were in? Defining and naming our field. In R. A. Reiser & J. V. Dempsey (Eds.), Trends and issues in instructional design and technology (4th Ed.), (pp. 1-7). New York, NY: Pearson Education.
I’m glad you discussed the problems that surfaced once the Covid-19 pandemic started. In my workplace, we quickly learned that some people who were educators did not know how to use technology such as Zoom to teach others. With social distancing since the beginning of the pandemic, it has required the organization I work at to move to Zoom meetings including new hire orientation. Since the beginning of the pandemic instructional technology has been in higher demand including teaching (as you mentioned) people who are face problems with technology. I like you pointed out from one of our articles how it states that we should focus more on collaboration instead of waiting for the next latest and greatest app to solve all education issues. Yes, an application may be created to assist others to better learn technology, but if we look at the big picture, one can see that we need to work together to solve “new upcoming challenges”.
ReplyDelete-Chris
Hello Claudio,
ReplyDeleteI greatly appreciate your reflection on the attitudes we should hold towards the facilitative technologies. People should never wait for the possibilities in a one-size-fits-all technology, since there won't be one to satisfy the needs/habits of people at every stage with diverse background. "One man's meat is another's poisson." What we should do is to design a collaborative learning environment by means of appropriate technologies.
Chen Zhou
Things sure have changed since Blackboard. Most institutions are working with Canvas. I think since online learning wasn't really truly huge that most had to adapt and yes some did overthink the process, because you have to develop your face-to-face teachings to online. Sometimes, I think we forget about blended learning. Also, I work at a university, and when classes were to be offered online the professors were not that technology savvy. However, most got the training they needed from the campus instructional technology consultants.
ReplyDeleteHi Claudio,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your meaningful post. While reading it, I could relate myself to educators who learned from challenges Covid-19 pandemic taught us.
I fulheatedly agree that researchers and people who can make changes in the system of education should find ways how to help teachers make technology choices and decisions that can support student learning.
This is Dilnoza, but it shows as "unknown".
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