Five Elements of Exceptional Tech. Enhanced Learning

By Stephen Laster, CIO, Harvard Business School

This is really all about people teaching and people learning
How do we effectively help people teach and learn? Successfully?
Thinking about quality
Why do we care?
We have an obligation to create good models

Sloan Consortium Survey about Online Learning
1) Shows 0nline education is critical to long-term strategy for institutions 58%
We are entering the mainstream!
2) Show enrollments in online courses continue to go up (not counting hybrids)
Student's medium is digital.

Five Elements

• Styles
• Design
• Context
• Community
• Adaptability

NOTE: Technology is assumed to exist and work (most of the time)

Diverse Learning Styles

• Visual - pictures and spatial
  
• Aural - sound and music
  
• Verbal - words, speech, writing
  
• Physical - body, hands, touch
  
• Logical - logic, reasoning, systems
  
• Social - groups, other people
  
• Solitary - alone, self-study

Teaching Styles

• Expert - impart their expertise; sage on the stage; not interested in being challenged
  
• Formal Authority - correct, acceptable answers
  
• Personal Model - believes in teaching by personal example
• Facilitator - guides, directs by asking, exploring, suggesting, encouraging
• Delegator - concerned with developing students' capacity to apply

Characteristics of both sides of the equation should be considered

Design
Without design, you'll probably waste your time. Design is about using your time well.
A well designed course is like a symphony - flow, guided with purpose, invoke action or reflect
Design starts with objectives and outcomes - focused
It's not putting book chapters online or syllabus online

A faculty member starts his course empty. He guides the students to fill-in the course. It ends up different every time!

How much mass customization can we (staff, faculty,organization, etc) support?

Context
Weave course experience into learner's daily life
Dynamic world
Learner centered activities build relevance and context
Freshness of content and delivery

Who should do the assembling of the materials? Faculty or lots of students?!

Community
Learning with and from others
Teams, collective learning models, games and simulations
Leverage collective intelligence (and the network of information we have today)
Distributed around the world

Education is ripe for consolidation!!

Adaptability
Leverage Unplanned opportunities
World events, new communications, new connections, breakthroughs, mistakes, uncharted territory

Encourage feedback regularly
If it is vibrant, fresh -> people are going to learn

Establish a common language
Develop curriculum focused on techniquest
Agree on investment constraints for course design and deliversy
Systematize design and development

Sloan-C Paper on measuring success

• Learning Effectiveness
• Cost Effectiveness
• Faculty satisfaction
• Student satisfaction
• ?One other?