Higher Education Teaching and Learning

Michael Sankey, Learning Futures, Griffith University This article was originally published in Chinese, as a peer reviewed article in the Journal of Distance Education in China. Citation: Sankey, M. (2020). Putting the pedagogic horse in front of the technology cart. Journal of Distance Education in China. 5, pp .46-53. DOI:10.13541/j.cnki.chinade.2020.05.006 Both the original Chinese version and an English…

Reconceptualizing the student experience with a view to the whole person can expand the potential to meet students where they are, foster their sense

Teaching in the 21st century involves trying new ways to engage students, but also a willingness to change innovative practices that didn’t pan out

Intrapreneurs are toiling away in every corner of campus, from the front of the classroom to the depths of the stacks. They are flipping classrooms and entire curricula. They are writing open educational resources to help learners cut down on life-crushing debt. They are linking together tools like Zoom and Padlet to allow learners to collaborate in real time across distance like so many of them do in their professional lives. They are building competency-based education programs, prior learning assessments and stackable microcredentials to recognize learner’s mastery of knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) regardless of where the learning occurs.

If smartphones are harming our ability to focus, how should teachers change their methods to give children the skills they need?

Prior to COVID-19, the faculty at Beijing Jiaotong University (BJTU), Weihai campus, did not teach or offer courses online. But BJTU, Weihai seized th

Successfully meeting the challenges of today’s learning technology landscape requires a more reflective, more critical perspective.

First, pedagogic strategies (the ones instructional designers talk about) are based on general learning theoretical concepts: Behaviorism, Instructivism, Cognitivism, Constructionism, Constructivism, Socio-constructivism, Situated learning, etc.  There’s often an overlap between these theories that explain how people learn and how one could bring people to learn. But I have seen over the years, we often put this under the one catch-all category, or banner of Constructivism, but it’s much more than that. It’s kind of like saying ‘Pedagogy’ when it’s so much more that that.

Second, design of strategies draws a lot from general pedagogical theory, but also from specialized research, such as understanding Heutagogy, Paragogy, Andragogy, etc. And these help us to understand how we will implement different technologies to meet our learning goals.

Third, educational technology has been a driving force to develop new strategies, with the basic assumption that educational technologies can facilitate pedagogical scenarios, but often we have tried to fit the pedagogy in after the fact, not as the reason for adopting a particular tool. It’s been kind of like putting the cart before the horse (please excuse my photoshop skills).

New educational technologies are creating mounting pressures on university educators according to the recent NMC Horizon Report: 2018 Higher Education Edition.

The report – developed with input from 71 experts from around the world – identifies six trends, six challenges, and six developments that may influence the uptake of education technologies in universities and their subsequent impact on teaching and learning.

The authors note that university lecturers have always been expected to structure information into a curriculum and make it interesting for students.