Change and innovation in higher education

Taken from http://enswmu.blogspot.com/2014/06/musings-how-technology-innovation-helps.html

Change and Innovation in Higher Education: A glimpse to what’s been happening

By Prof. Jonathan AcuĂąa-Solano, M. Ed. School of English Faculty of Social Sciences Universidad Latina de Costa Rica Tuesday, March 22, 2016 Post 236

On the verge of common affairs in education today, many great minds of the end of 20th Century and the emerging ones of the 21 st Century conceptualize higher education quite differently if compared to what renowned educational champions and professional -50 years ago- could envision of what education entails today on the second decade of the 21st Century. The new gurus on education now predict and anticipate substantial changes, novelties, permutations, trends, and tendencies in what we understand as higher education and what is to come in our near and far future.

Would we meet those challenges with the actual models of education that we hold on and whose rationale we take for granted?

As a higher education professional, who started taking part in significative changes in how learning can be fostered, I have come to witness, participate in, or

facilitate some of those changes among my students. One of those meaningful changes I came to be part of was linked to hybrid and blended education. The Internet has come to exercise a powerful influence on how learners access information; thus, learning can be mediated by means of data bases accessed via computer, web pages with educational content, documents available to be downloaded, and so on enriching the experience all learners have. The construction of student knowledge is no longer just happening in F2F classroom sessions but in virtual spaces where instructors and learners can interact with one another synchronously or asynchronously. We faculty members cannot shrug our shoulders showing indifference towards these major and dramatic changes in the way our students are learning nowadays.

Another dramatic innovation in higher education I have been witnessing and am willing to facilitate more is learning through flipped classrooms. “The flipped classroom refers to a model of learning that rearranges how time is spent both in and out of class to shift the ownership of learning from the educators to the students” (NMC Horizon Project, 2013). Personally, I have implemented this sort of approach with literature students at Universidad Latina in Costa Rica allowing them to manage the content of the course to suit their studying needs and available time to work on their projects.

“Rather than the teacher using class time to lecture to students and dispense information, that work is done by each student after class, and could take the form of watching video lectures, listening to podcasts, perusing enhanced e-book content, collaborating with their peers in online communities, and more” (NMC Horizon Project, 2013). My literature students are provided with projects (literary analyses) to be developed after class time and that are enhanced with online content to explore, videos, multimedia, and so on. Though it took me around a year to fully implement it and modify course content to become flipped and though I do not want to seem boisterous at my students’ achievements, their results (grades obtained by pupils and learning gained by them) has been more than rewarding.

Back in 2008 I came to witness the introduction of MOOCs for those people who were interested in furthering their learning and education but lacked the resources to pay for tuitions. Udacity.Com was the very first webpage I heard of that offered Massive Open Online Courses for any learner willing to continue working on his/her education. When Sebastian Thrun started Udacity at Stanford University, he wanted to “democratize” education since he believed that “education should be free, accessible for all, everywhere and any time” (VOA Voice of America, 2012). Bearing in mind the my lumpy understanding of MOOCs at that time, I tried to take part of these courses, which originally “were conceptualized as the next evolution of networked learning” (NMC Horizon Project, 2013). MOOCs are now courses that I encourage my students to enroll, especially the ones in ELT, my field of work. Having participated in the Shaping the

Way we Teach MOOCs by the University of Oregon, the adoption of this way for higher education may take less than a year, and a year to start seeing real results. It gives me the creeps just to think of the fact that there are faculty members who cannot still see the value of this change in education and networking.

Sir Ken Robinson, while participating in a series of presentations hosted by Ted Talks (Robinson, 2010), addressed the audience on the need for a revolution in education. Among his most interesting considerations regarding learning, he pointed out that though education systems are being worked on in spite of the fact they are now broken models (Robinson, 2010). If life is no linear but rather organic, education should be thought in the very same way, and that is why a revolution is needed to meet the needs of 21st Century learners. If we do not want these obsolete broken models to mutiny on us and our students, innovation is necessary; “challenging what we take for granted” (Robinson, 2010) nowadays is also a must because our ideas of education “need to meet the circumstances” (Robinson, 2010) of what we are currently facing in higher education.

References NMC Horizon Project. (2013). NMC Horizon Project Short List 2013 Higher Education Edition.

Robinson, K. (2010). Bring on the Learning Revolution. Retrieved from http://www.tedx.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_revolution VOA Voice of America. (2012, March 21). Getting a Free Education, in Huge Online Classes. Retrieved from SlideShare.Com: http://www.slideshare.net/jonacuso/seedmassiveopenonlinecourses