This statement was written at the beginning of my University of Florida Emerging Learning Technologies (ELT) coursework, Fall 2021.

I am somewhat conservative regarding the adoption of new learning technologies.  Especially as someone who is still relatively new to teaching, I am unlikely to invest the potentially considerable time, effort, or expense involved with learning and integrating new technologies into my classroom unless and until I have been sold on their efficacy.  A good, recent example is HyFlex technology.  They had only just started installing this equipment at the campus where I work, and right away some of my colleagues were ready to start enrolling students in HyFlex classes.  While I understand that this technology has the potential to address some urgent needs that our program is currently experiencing, at the same time, I have never used this equipment; and while I have taught both in-person and online, I have never taught both simultaneously.  I explained that I am more than happy to experiment with the new equipment and pilot the hybrid teaching modality, however, I am not ready to be thrust into a HyFlex classroom environment with my students as the unwitting guinea pigs.

We must start by defining our objectives and evaluating the specific problems we are seeking to address.  Among other objectives, I aim to build relationship with my students, to foster a sense of community in the classroom, and, to the greatest extent possible, to individuate their learning so that they can progress toward their goals at their own pace.  I believe that these conditions support improved student learning, my ultimate goal.  Some of the major barriers to learning that I have identified with the student populations that I teach include transportation, childcare, work conflicts and financial stress, mental and physical health, learning disabilities, as well as past trauma and attendant discomfort with the classroom environment.  So, I am actively interested in learning technologies and techniques which can help me meet these objectives and/or overcome the barriers that my students face.

A good example that I am currently utilizing is a Learning Management System (LMS).  I have only truly adopted this technology since starting my graduate program at UF and the onset of COVID.  I have tried to utilize the LMS in a way that builds connection with and between my students, but by far, its biggest benefits are individuation of student learning and as a repository for useful information (e.g., syllabus, class meeting times and zoom link, recordings of past classes, study guides, practice assignments, etc.).  An LMS has also helped to overcome some of the issues associated with many of my students’ chronic absenteeism, varying learning preferences, and differing personalities (e.g., many of my students prefer to work independently rather than in a group setting).    

But as we discussed in class, LMS is a mature, not emerging, technology.  For that reason, I also felt responsible for getting my students at least somewhat acquainted with LMS, as many of them hope to go on to college after receiving their GED and should be at least familiar with navigating an LMS.  Some more emerging technologies that I think may hold great promise for my field include advances in adaptive learning technologies and advanced analytics for student success.  These are technologies that I was introduced to via Gartner’s Hype Cycles and the annual Horizon Report (Brown, 2020). 

What I hope to see in the future is a growing use of LMS and centrally-designed courseware, such as Lumen Learning’s Waymaker.  Ideally, more and more of these systems will be comprised of open educational resources, as is Waymaker.  If we can combine them with adaptive learning technologies and advanced analytics on a mass scale, we can increasingly create affordable, well-designed and high-quality educational materials that are accessible to a wide diversity of learners.  Speaking for myself, I have faith in my abilities to connect with my students, to adapt my methods to their individual needs, and to act as a coach in supporting their learning.  What I most often lack are high quality instructional materials.  Having access to an open curriculum that is adaptive to the needs of the learner and is being continually analyzed and revised based upon the experiences of a large number of users is very appealing.  Nothing will ever replace the relationship between learner and instructor, but I often consider how much this relationship could be enhanced if the people who facilitated learning experiences were specialists in that specific practice rather than or in addition to having to be specialists in a particular academic field.  With a tested, open curriculum and an adaptive, predictive system in their toolbox, I think that more instructors could be highly effective.

In terms of the specific learning technologies that we will be examining in this class, I am mostly an open book.  I have been a consumer of virtual reality a few times and really enjoyed it, but of the other technologies mentioned, I have little to no experience.  One area that I have given some advance thought to is any tool that I can utilize to help students better visualize three-dimensional objects.  Concepts that I teach in Geometry such as surface area and volume are often challenging for students to grasp given the two-dimensional books and worksheets that we use currently.  My partner, an elementary school Media Specialist, is also very excited about this class and is currently brainstorming ways that we can introduce any of these technologies in her Media Center.  At the center of it all, however, we must remain mindful of our teaching objectives and the problems that we hope to solve.  In any event, I am enthusiastic about the possibilities that we will be exploring this semester and look forward to revisiting this initial ELT personal vision in a few months’ time.

Sources:

• Brown, Malcolm, et al. 2020 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report, Teaching and Learning Edition (Louisville, CO: EDUCAUSE, 2020).

• Lumen Learning. (n.d.). Courseware: Waymaker | Lumen Learning. Retrieved December 10, 2020, from https://lumenlearning.com/what/waymaker/ (Links to an external site.)

By the end of my ELT course, I had a few final thoughts to add to my initial vision statement.

At the outset of this course, I had very little experience with the subject technologies: augmented, mixed, & virtual reality.  At this point, I can say that I have scratched the surface on all three.  Throughout the semester, we created instructional design plans and products for each of these technologies.

My primary concerns related to the current use of ELT's in the classroom include effectiveness as well as their cost and ease of access.  These somewhat broad concerns apply differently to each of the ELT's that we discussed, but they apply to all of them, nonetheless.  

Of the three, augmented reality seemed the most accessible for immediate classroom deployment.  In fact, as detailed on these pages, I ultimately created a product that is now in use in my partner's Media Center.  I think that virtual reality has significant potential, particularly as the costs of implementation decrease with increased functionality of mobile devices.  The jury is still out for me on mixed reality, however.  I see some potential benefits to its use in the classroom, but at this point the barriers to implementation still seem too high.

A primary topic of discussion throughout our course was the dearth of robust research results demonstrating a genuine superiority of any of the ELT's under study and the existence of real barriers to their implementation. Some of these barriers included, as we have seen elsewhere: cost, availability, and training.  Few studies, to my satisfaction at least, demonstrated that the ELT's are more effective than traditional classroom instruction techniques which can be delivered at significantly lower cost and effort.  So, while some of them appear to support novel approaches to learning, costs will need to be lowered, training will need to be made more widely available, and the superiority of these tools will need to be further demonstrated.

 Finally, my biggest takeaway from this class has been the integration of the Instructional Design (ID) process with the choice of learning technology.  Using ID as our starting point, then having to justify our rationale for using a specific technology within the specific context of our ID plan has been very useful for me.  So, for instance, if we can demonstrate that using a particular technology can enhance the options for representation and engagement, then it may be worth it.  However, particularly given the added expense, time, and training with some of these technologies, we have to justify it.  The bottom line is that our choice of technology must be shaped by, rather than shape, the baseline learning objectives and other desired outcomes of our instructional design plans.

Sources:

• Chong S, Pan G-T, Chin J, Show PL, Yang TCK, Huang C-M. (2018). Integration of 3D Printing and Industry 4.0 into Engineering Teaching. Sustainability. 10(11):3960. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10113960. 

• Trust, Torrey & Maloy, Robert W. (2017). Why 3D Print? The 21st-Century Skills Students Develop While Engaging in 3D Printing Projects.  Computers in the Schools, 34(4), 253-266.  https://doi.org/10.1080/07380569.2017.1384684